Should This Person Have Accepted Apology From Mother of Childhood Bully?

For a long time, the subject of bullying was treated like a joke. Something to be survived, something to prove you’d earned your stripes as a kid, or something.

These days students, parents, and educators take it all more seriously, realizing that the scars obtained in childhood, at the hands of mean kids (and sometimes adults) can last a lifetime.

It’s easy to understand, then, why someone who endured h*ll as a kid would want nothing to do with their bully, their family, or anything else that might remind them of that time in their lives.

In this case, the bullying was so severe that OP (original poster) had to change schools in order to escape it.

I (22F) grew up with a guy who had severely bullied me during my elementary & middle school years and it did not stop until I had changed to a different high school (yes, my previous schools somehow managed to do absolutely nothing about the situation despite claiming that they would “look into it.”)

Recently, they ran into the boy’s mother, who tried to apologize for his behavior as a child.

OP didn’t want to hear it.

Recently, I ran into this guy’s mother in public (I still live in the same town) and she said she wanted to personally apologize for what her son did. However, I told her that I refused to accept her apology and that it wasn’t my fault that she had epically failed as a parent.

To OP it just sounded like a bunch of excuses, and no one still wanting to take responsibility for what had happened to them as a result.

I responded like this because during her apology she kept bringing up the fact that her son had family issues at home and was undergoing a lot of stress. However, to me it just sounded like she was trying to excuse her son’s behavior towards me as if it was acceptable for her son to unleash his frustrations onto me and to torment me for years.

Another big reason for why I said what I said to her is because both my family and I had complained about her son’s behavior directly to her as well as through the school. However back then she claimed that her “precious son was incapable of harming other kids” and instead insisted that I had to have been lying about her son.

To make matters worse, during my final year at the school, she went out of her way to place a formal complaint against me to the school based on unfounded claims in what I assume was her attempt at ‘getting back at me.’

Basically it was too little, too late – especially after the mother was kind of a bully herself back then, defending her son all the way to the school’s office.

In my opinion, she had so many years to step up as an adult and to address and correct the problem and situation on her end and yet she didn’t. Instead it took her years of complaints from other parents to supposedly ‘open her eyes.’

On top of this, I still have not heard a word from her son himself so the apology further came off as insincere and instead just the mother’s way to absolve herself of any guilt or whatever her personal reasoning was. Does my reaction make me TA?

He’s worried he was wrong, or too harsh, but what does Reddit think?

Let’s find out!

Apologies are not required to be accepted. If you’re not ready, don’t feel obligated.