That feeling when your daughter comes across your old photo album full of family pictures, and wants to look through it to see you as a baby, and you start to show her the pictures and she asks who people are…and inevitably, she points to your mother and asks who that is, and you find yourself saying, “just somebody.”

Just somebody.

Just somebody who carried me in her womb for nine plus months (I was two weeks late, as the story goes). Just somebody who gave birth to me. Just somebody who raised me…albeit not healthily, not well, but raised me nonetheless. Just somebody who I used to talk to every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Just somebody who would be mortified, appalled, crushed, obliterated, by my referring to her that way.

Just somebody who caused me irreparable harm and frequently treated me like collateral damage. Just somebody who racked up thousands of dollars in credit card debt in my name, which I’m still paying off. Just somebody who consistently disrespected and disregarded every boundary I put in place until I had to construct an iron curtain around myself and my loved ones. Just somebody who forced me to choose between holding onto people I loved at the expense of my own well-being, and letting go of them in order to love myself for once in my life. Just somebody who treated my successes like her own, and refused to acknowledge that she had any failings at all. Just somebody who put me at fault for everything. Just somebody who I haven’t talked to in four years.

Just somebody who my daughter will never ever know, if I have anything to say about it. Just somebody who, by keeping her anonymous and meaningless, I will protect my daughter from in the event that she decides to just show up one day. Because if she doesn’t recognize or have any working knowledge of this somebody, she’s less likely to be taken, physically or psychologically, and if G-d forbid that were to happen, it could never be argued there’s any sort of relationship to value or preserve. (Yes, these are the mental gymnastics I go through, ever since my mother tried to threaten suing me for grandparents’ rights. Long story short, she would never win, and it was the final nail in the coffin for me.)

Telling my kid that the woman in the picture was “just somebody” made me feel sick. It made me want to die for a moment when those words left my mouth. But the truth is…she needs to be just somebody, because that perspective is how I get to live.