Ahead of Mother’s Day, this brave mum has chosen to speak out about domestic violence to the people who matter to her most — her children.

The mother of three, now in her fifties, managed to remove herself from a physically, emotionally, and psychologically abusive relationship more than 10 years ago.

She’s done a lot of healing in the past decade. She’s had operations to fix some of the damage caused by her abusive partner. She’s managed to repair enough psychological damage to find enough confidence to fulfil career goals, and she’s built up relationships with supportive people around her which her husband destroyed and she blocked out.

But there’s one thing Mary hasn’t yet had the courage to be able to do, and that’s to speak to her three adult children openly about the abuse she suffered at the hands of their father, and that they witnessed and were affected by too.

Now after having penned a heartbreaking letter to her daughter and two sons ahead of this Mother’s Day she’s ready to face that last step in coming to terms with what she’s been through.

“It is time for me to have a voice,” she begins the heartfelt note, which Mary plans to share with her kids today.

“From the time that you were born, I felt fiercely protective to you. My life from that moment was about caring for you and looking after you ... However, in our family system, there was a problem.”

In the confronting message, Mary explains how it was “normal practice” when the children were growing up, for her to be “belittled, ridiculed, degraded and undermined” by their father.

“He talked down to me. I was often called an idiot in front of you, and I was made out to be incompetent and second rate,” she writes.

“Eventually, after two decades of being verbally attacked I decided to speak up in my defence. Unfortunately, this enraged your father and he felt entitled to silence me in any way he could. In the last few years of our 20-year marriage, your father was physically abusive, as well as verbally abusive.”

Mary could barely accept she was in an abusive relationship, let alone summon the strength to leave and speak with her kids about it.Source:Supplied

She tells the children how their father hit, kicked, punched and finally hospitalised her, and left her with permanent injuries.

She explains how she regrets that they had to witness some of the abuse, but says after suffering such extreme manipulation and degradation, she herself could hardly recognise what she was enduring, let alone that her children were suffering along with her.

“What I now understand is that what we suffered from was domestic violence,” she writes.

“It is strange how you can be living in an extremely violent household and think that it is normal.

“It has taken over a decade for me to process what happened in our home and to be able to talk to you about it now.”

Speaking with news.com.au, Mary explained why she was compelled to fill this gap in communication with her children, and why she’s chosen to share it with our readers.

“It’s more than 10 years after I left my degrading and abusive husband, and I’m sort of recovered enough to speak up now,” she said.

“It’s really insidious how domestic violence affects you. It sort of creeps up, then it’s a great deal of effort to get out of there. By the time you realise you need to make the effort, you’ve been disempowered by being degraded, you don’t feel like you can.”

Mary said it was impossible while she was in that abusive relationship for her to see the violence for what it was.

“You don’t see it clearly until you’re really safe, and it usually takes many years to see exactly how extreme the abuse was. And mine was extreme,” she said.

Mary said her husband wasn’t only manipulating her, but everyone around her. The couple’s friends, colleagues, even Mary’s own family members and the children’s schoolteachers were led to believe she was the problem — that she was suffering mental issues and was not to be trusted.

Now that she’s been able to process what happened to her, she finds it extraordinary that people didn’t question it.

“Most people just went with his story. It was because of his status (as a respected professional) and because he was the man,” she said.

“He was very good at recruiting even my own children to view me as if I was a totally unworthy person.”

Mary’s children struggle with their mental health as a result of witnessing emotional abuse, she says.

Although she believes they never saw her former partner physically abuse her, she believes there is “some awareness” over what she endured. While she believes she was “almost disenfranchised as a mother” by her former partner, she thinks her children understand she never wanted to be distanced from them.

“I now understand that there has been a shocking impact on you in having to watch the abuse. When a mother is physically, psychologically and emotionally abused in front of her children, it also constitutes psychological and emotional violence of her children,” she writes in her letter.

“Your father deliberately corrupted your view of me, and by discrediting me and devaluing me, he undermined and attacked our mother/child bond.”

“My greatest gift to you, my darlings, was to leave your father. To say no to a life of violence and degradation and to say yes to a life free of abuse.”

Mary believes she wouldn’t have been able to get to the point she is today, to be able to speak up about her experience, if it wasn’t for the assistance she found at BaptistCare, a community agency that works with women in abusive situations and who have come out of them.

The agency’s general manager of community services Rob Ellis said other women, like Mary, often struggle to acknowledge the scope of their own abuse.

“Often over many many years the woman who receives that form of abuse comes to doubt her own self worth, her value, so she comes to believe a lie about herself. This is very real and one of the great challenges for services that work in domestic violence.” he said.

“Another great challenge is that in domestic violence, the voice of the woman, and we know statistically that women are usually the victims, is turned down and the voice of the children is silent — that’s the way it works out. It’s a real priority for us that women’s stories are heard.”

While Mary has only just gained the courage to talk about domestic violence with her family members who it directly affected, she’s pushing all Australians to be open in talking about the issue.

“It must be aired in the public, it must be spoken about, and people must learn to recognise that this is happening and that women need to be believed and listened to and asked if they’re okay,” she said.

*Pseudonym used to protect identity