BLINDSIDED: A RAW ACCOUNT OF A SON’S ESTRANGEMENT
Imagine this. See that innocent mother and adorable son over there? They’re holding hands, swinging lightly, reveling in each other’s company. Oops, he trips and falls. Aw, he scraped his little knee. She is comforting him in her arms, checks out the boo-boo, gives him a healing kiss, tousles his hair. They look at each other endearingly, stand up and once more holding hands continue on their happy way. As I witness their loving exchange, my insides convulse. Weeping hysterically in public is not an option but the anguish distorts my face. Watching them, I morph into a sly Grim Reaper waiting for just the right moment to slam my scythe down on their delicious relationship. Enjoy it now, baby, because you may unwittingly be blindsided by that precious little boy, once grown, whose tender hand you take in yours, happily ignorant of what danger the future may hold. Hate and rejection lurk in that little boy’s heart like a bad seed that will sprout, ready to pounce when he pulls the trigger and rip your relationship to smithereens. And you may never know why, not ever comprehend, but that is what potentially awaits every mother…mourning a living death. Estrangement.
Remember this. There is no job security, be it a CEO, a President, a parent. Yes, your parent credentials are constantly up for review. You can be fired without cause at any moment. There is no HR to appeal to. Appealing to your son or daughter goes unanswered. The silence is excruciating.
Estrangement is not in any parenting book. There are no signs to warn you about the slippery road ahead. Unless a child’s estrangement happens to you, it may seem like some weird thing that happens to others, not to you. You may have heard of cases where grandparents, whose estranged child use the grandchildren as a cudgel and don’t allow their parents to see their grandchildren. Some grandparents sue for visitation rights, a harrowing road of legal maneuvers, days in court, pleading with judges. An ugly way to live.
Everyone’s story of estrangement is unique but no less heart-wrenching. Yes, some parents are drunks, druggies, batterers, crazy, money-sucking bastards who deserve what they get — to be estranged by their children — but just as many parents who are drunks, druggies, batterers, crazy, money-sucking bastards are still loved, watched over and cared for by their children. This is what makes estrangement so insidious…you don’t know if the ground you are walking on is a minefield or just a rocky path. You don’t know until after your fateful misstep.
My story is simple. It’s a story of a thousand oblivious cuts, little things that happened along the way in a parental relationship that crescendoed to an irreparable wound that cannot be healed. My younger son chose to click delete.
I consulted a therapist to see if she could ‘do anything’. I thought she might have some helpful insight but as I was talking to her, telling her my story, I realized I was doing everything I could to cope — read books, blogs, forums on estrangement — all offering useless tips about how to carry on with your life, about letting go, moving on, insisting “You can still be happy!”. One popular book, Done With The Crying: Help and Healing for Mothers of Estranged Adult Children, has an appealing title because who wants to cry their whole life? Sadly, there was just more of the same pathetic advice. I don’t blame the author who has gone through this nightmare herself, it’s just that there is no good information, no answers. What I really wanted to know was how to get my son back. I’d pay anyone any amount of money, I’d walk on glass if they could tell me. No, it’s a completely unrealistic expectation.
The human mind is capable of all sorts of things from believing liars to spinning the truth to accommodating one’s personal vision of the world and how they fit in. Who knows what my son was thinking, is thinking or how he arrived at his decision to erase me from his life. I’m not a psychic.
There are groups on Facebook where parents of estranged children can rant and grieve and question what happened. I go there so I can see that I’m not alone. The posts and comments are gut-wrenching and sickening. Most mothers are in these groups, trying their best to support each other often with “hugs”. Why read this stuff? What am I doing to myself? Sometimes it feels like self-harm, the need to be punished for being a bad mother, a bad person.
Reading comments of desperate parents spill out of them like vomit. It is heart-breaking and then I remember I am one of them. Their grievances are haunting. How could children betray you, how did you raise someone to be so cruel. My son didn’t torture cats or stand over me with a knife while I was sleeping (that I know of). There were no psychopathic traits to prepare me for abandonment and for being so viciously reviled. So vicious that it cuts like a Samurai sword.
There are support groups for children who chose to estrange. I read them sometimes to try and get a handle on their mindset. Why did they choose to do that? Some you understand and some you don’t. Some adult children (is that a misnomer?!) seem petty, narcissistic, entitled and some you clearly understand their decision to get away from controlling, manipulative, toxic parents. I have no idea where I fit into this paradigm of rejection. Apologizing to the aggrieved for your missteps, practically begging for empathy, doesn’t even garner a response. Loving mothers make mistakes but I guess it’s too late for apologies the silence seems to say. Everyone is miserable. The hostility is chilling.
Never-ending self-blame, going over every moment of their lives searching for clues is a thankless pastime. Some things are unknowable. Relationships take two and I take full responsibility for my end; heck, I’ll take ALL the blame for lousy behavior, for misreading situations and acting out aka ‘getting mad’, for not being an ideal mother. The question is, is it better to have an ongoing contentious relationship rather than an estrangement? Is there any benefit to maintain ties when the parties are at odds, to keep the home fires burning just in case there’s a break in the case? My brain is scrambled, feeling helplessly confused.
Does estrangement last forever you may wonder? Sometimes. This article from Psychology Today gives us a few answers and offers insight on how to handle the estrangement: How Long Does Parent-Child Estrangement Usually Last? What parents need to know when adult children cut them off
“Nine years, average. Five-plus years for mothers, seven-plus for fathers. Less than five years, in most cases. All of these timelines have appeared in various research studies on estrangement between parents and adult children. None is definitive.” This last statement is the kicker — none is definitive. The author writes: “I’ve heard of estrangements finally ending after more than 30 years. Time can work miracles.” Good to know.
When estrangement happens, you investigate every angle, like a hungry sleuth, for information. And grief is a big angle. Grief engulfs your whole mind and body. Every cell of it. You don’t know what to do with yourself. The 8 Types of Grief and How to Overcome Them was informative.
“Grief reactions are individual and unique. There are no stages of grief, as there are in facing death and dying. This is a common confusion. Many people think that there are stages of grief, as outlined by Elizabeth Kubler Ross’s study of dying and death. The stages of coping with death and dying and death are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Grief, on the other hand, cannot be neatly be categorized into stages and is not linear. Grief can be highly cyclical and affects different people in different ways. The only thing it has in common among everyone is that it is natural and affects all human beings.”
Self-diagnosing my type of grief, I fell into this category:
2. NORMAL OR COMMON GRIEF
“When going through normal or common grief, people are able to function and continue with basic daily activities. Although they may find that daily life is more difficult, they are still able to continue working, cleaning, and completing the other routine tasks.
Normal grief includes emotional reactions ranging from numbness, shock, and disbelief. Powerful feelings of separation anxiety are felt by people going through normal grief. People suffer from painful feelings of yearning, visions of their loved one’s death, and other preoccupations with their loved one while undergoing normal grief.
Normal grief is typically expressed through crying, sighing, and having dreams of the deceased. You may seek relief from these feelings by taking refuge in things or places associated with the passed individual. When suffering from normal grief, physical symptoms include insomnia, lack of appetite, fatigue, and trouble concentrating.
Usually, normal grief comes with intense pangs of distress that last between 20 to 30 minutes. During these episodes, bursts of crying and emotions may make any functioning impossible. These can occur completely unexpectedly.
As time moves on, these bursts become less frequent, less intense, and shorter. Following the loss of a loved one, normal grief generally diminishes in six to 24 months, after which people overcome their grief and re-contextualize the loss of their loved one. Although the normal grief experience is painful, most people are able to cope fairly well and may even experience personal growth from the experience.”
I have to disagree with the six to 24-month timeline…they are talking about real death. This is a living death…an entirely different kind of death. This death has no closure. It goes on until there is a reconciliation, but that is not without its treachery, or until the mother dies. As I am going on year four, only in the last few months has managed the loss and grief come a little easier. But there is always the lurking ‘trigger’ that can set you back to square one in an instant. And that makes me a bit angry because I don’t want to go tra-la-la-ing along only to be blindsided with a trigger. A trigger lies in wait for when you think you’ve conquered the pain to a point that you might feel like whistling a happy tune when BAM, a sudden pall descends so rapidly you don’t know what hit you. It was a trigger. A trigger can be anything that reminds of the person you once knew and lost. I read today that you can control your emotions and decisions if you just count backward from 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. The 5-second lapse is supposed to recalibrate your brain and give you a quick respite in which to reconsider your decision or get ahold of your emotions. Not working because mostly I forget to do it...
I am writing about this for as Maya Angelou said, “There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
So please bear with me while I write about my agony. I’ve written notes to myself over the years — yes, it’s been, what two, three, four years? — about how I was feeling or reacting to some unexpected trigger. It’s hard to absorb the enormity of it. Years and years slip by without your child. It’s incomprehensible. One woman kept her son’s red sports car in her driveway for when she knew he would eventually come back. It’s been twenty-three years, bless her. Waiting for Godot.
Some mothers have two, three, four estranged children. You can’t help but wonder what happened in that household. But it did happen and that’s all that matters and they are heartbroken. It’s hard to imagine how one functions with a hole in your heart after a tornado rips through it. Sometimes we don’t function. Days can be spent looking off into a void, while confusion about what to do next renders us immobile. There is no cardiologist who can repair this kind of broken heart.
Estrangement by children is a preposterous puzzle. Trying to fit the pieces of the past together to make sense of why a child decides to excommunicate parents is dismaying and dispiriting…and crazy-making. Aside from the grief of loss, combing through every interaction you had with your child or children to find the culprits of this unbelievable ending will make you crazy. If ever there were a time machine, this would be the time to use it. Alas, we are left with our memories.
Speaking of which, memories are the loaded arsenal of the aggrieved who are 110% sure that their memory of events is totally accurate, their point of view is the correct one. There is no room for nuance or for what they are sure is your contrived recollection. We know memories are influenced by perspective but what is so subversive is how we perceive and process events. How can there be such a disconnect?
Salvador Dali famously said: “The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant.”
Joshua Coleman, a San Francisco psychologist who is an expert on parental estrangement: “After all…parents and children have very different perspectives. It’s possible for a parent to feel like they were doing something out of love,” he said, “but it didn’t feel like love to that child.”
Another study found that difference in values between mother and child is a factor in estrangement. For my son and I that couldn’t be further from the truth…even down to our politics.
Then there is the girlfriend or boyfriend who arrives into the mix, who come with their own set of values and probable disdain for their own family and reinterprets, for the benefit of their loved one, how horrible their partner’s parents have been! “They did what?! They said that?” Who knows what the hell these people say or how they manipulate your unsuspecting child because of their own insecurities. All I know is, in my case, I noticed how my son slowly kept away from family events while he was in a relationship with his college girlfriend of five years. She was an only child of older parents and noticeably anti-social. We all felt tension in the solar plexus when she was around but never said anything. Well, we probably lied about how nice she was cause she was beautiful. I feel like she planted a weed that thrived long after she was out of the picture. I’m sure he would strongly disagree if he ever read about this. Of course, this is conjecture because we have nothing but a vacuum to go on and WE NEED ANSWERS.
There are other dangerous plants in these relationships like in-laws, wives, husbands who don’t want, under any circumstances, their partner to have a relationship with their spouses’ parents because maybe it threatens their tenuous, manipulative relationship. Seriously, who the fuck knows. I just know my son lives while I’m dying in grief.
Is it American culture that breeds disdain for age, experience and one’s parents? Americans are known for generously giving people second chances but not if you’ve been relegated to the NO CONTACT zone as though you had leprosy or were convicted of first-degree murder with no chance of parole. NO CONTACT is the equivalent to ‘dead and buried’ because your EC won’t contact you under any circumstances. You’re deathly ill? Fuhgeddaboudit. NO CONTACT has the finality of being sucked into the vortex of a black hole down into nothingness. Other cultures seem to have reverence for elders, would never think of dismissing one’s mother. Who does that? Who does that?
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Following are some of the notes I wrote and continue to write to memorialize my thoughts, feelings, and emotions. I toss them into a big envelope and have accumulated so many over the years(!) Here are but a few. Maybe by putting them down, a tiny part of my pain is released like the steam in a pressure cooker. They are in no particular order. They’re all agonizing.
July 20, 2016
Did a bullet just rip through my gut, my lungs? I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. Am I shot? Was I unwittingly in the line of a driveby? I double over in convulsive sobs. I’m having a particularly hard day today for some reason. I wipe away the fog of tears, crying as I write this. The idea that my son is only 200 miles away doesn’t make him any more accessible. He hates me and doesn’t want to ever see or speak to me again. My son. My 10 ½ lb baby! This doesn’t make any sense. He won’t tell me what broke us apart. He keeps his secret weapon close, a silent torture, just to make sure I get the message and that the message keeps on giving. Will I ever know what I did?
Whoever thought something like this would happen? That your child would divorce you…not only divorce you but wipe his history clean as though he were never born of me but hatched from a pod.
My face is contorted with anguish, the muscles tight, unnatural. He’s a successful businessman so I find out about him and his life from google alerts. Is that any way to live?
What are the chances of reconciliation? Not good I fear.
You imagine your grown-up kids will embrace you for the crazy, wonderful and loving person that you were and are still. That they will hug you with warmth and love that connects the divide between child and parent. They are adults, after all, who have unknowingly made stupid mistakes in their panoply of human relationships. We expect people to have empathy.
July 22, 2016
Some days are better than others. After my angst-fueled day a couple of days ago, sometimes it feels like the misery just drains out of me and calm is restored until the hurt builds up and explodes to rack my body with pain. How can a child — who is truly, physically a part of me — deny access? It’s not a question of ownership. People don’t own people…as much as people have tried. We most certainly don’t own our children but being that my son is a physical part of me…it just feels like limbs have been amputated.
August 16, 2016
His 33rd birthday. This is a brutal day. I was so happy 33 years ago, so in love with my baby boy. He was such a joyous child with a mop of hair the color of straw, always joyful. We were close when he was in high school and then he went away to college and there were miles between us. But that doesn’t necessarily mean people have riven apart…lots of kids go off to school and stay close with their families.
I sent him a handwritten birthday card: “Dear Son, Have an excellent birthday! ~ your Adoring mother.” Not very affectionate but I made a decision not to make a big deal out of his birthday, not to send him the special bottle of whiskey I found that I thought he would like. No, I’ve read so much about estranged adult children and the consensus seems to be that gifts often breed resentment and he’s resentful enough. I’m not texting or calling because I know I wouldn’t get an answer and it would probably just annoy him. And I can’t get his last vile email out of my mind. Why would I send a gift to a person who reviles me? Let him wonder why I didn’t send him a gift. Or not. I have no control over this situation. Imagine, I can’t share his birthday with him. I suppose I should be thankful for the internet or he would be completely gone. I’m heartsick.
10/1/17
How does one separate the love for a son from the new person he has become? If he were a friend, I would sever our relationship. Maybe that’s how he sees me.
10/18/17
Thinking about Presidents’ consoling letters to parents of fallen soldiers. No one considers the loss of a living son to have as much import as a dead son. How wrong they are. We also live with the grief of our loss. Does it make a difference if we know our son is alive? A dead son is never coming back while a living son is at least alive. Living with that knowledge only compounds the grief and hopelessness. I don’t know if he’ll ever come back or if I’ll ever see him again but I do know things will never be the same. This anxiety is not like the anxiety you have if you have money problems or anxiety about finding your next hit.
The rhythm of mourning, as per a death-death, has an arc with the pain reaching an apex and, as times goes by, the arc descends as one comes to terms with that death. But with a living death like estrangement, the arc never starts its descent but remains a flat line of grief at the apex and remains there till a mother dies. There is no coming to terms with it.
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2/2/18
I’m watching the film Moonlight. Chiron embraces his drug-addled mother and I can’t stop crying. And my son won’t even acknowledge my existence. How does it feel to be invisible to your own son? He’s delusional and I can’t decide how to deal with him as he infects my every cell. He is like a disease I can’t shake. Maybe I’ll send his pictures and remembrances back to him. I don’t think it’s healthy to keep them around. I want to wipe him out of my life so maybe it will stop hurting.
I need to purge him.
The realization your own child hates you, hates you so much that his world would be shattered if he had you in his life. There is no place in his day for you, no time for you. You would be so intrusive in his life that he doesn’t want to share one second with you. His disgust is so deep and so is the pain I have caused him. I have no way of knowing what exactly it was — probably a bunch of things — he won’t say. Does this qualify as gaslighting? I am reviled by my son and my pain is as deep as his so I guess we share something.
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3/30/18
I just heard Louie Anderson on NPR talking about his book “Hi, Mom”. I will never have an homage written about me by my son nor even a kind word. Maybe he’ll write about what a shit I’ve been, you know that kind of homage, spill his guts with bile because…actually, I don’t know exactly why. Why do kids hate their parents? How did we let them down?
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Not sure where this came from. It was on a scrap of paper:
When we lose someone we love dearly, the resulting enormous vacuum exerts actual pressure that threatens to splinter our hearts into shards. It is as if their physical essence is reversed into an imploding emptiness that suctions out our own energy. We are bereft, our broken selves attempting to reconfigure to accommodate the person we can’t let go of, as we incorporate their souls into our very own so they are not completely and forever lost. The grief process is the relocation of our loved one from their body into ours, as we absorb their spirit into our go-forward existence.
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4/28/18
When did you start hating me, my son?
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5/3/18
I texted my own son to ask if he would see me in the coming days. It’s almost too much to bear…asking my own child for permission to see him. Some days are just so hard. A pall of sorrow hovers over my head like a cloud of tears that will rain down on my soul.
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5/518
There are only so many funny videos of comedians you can watch. As soon as I’m done watching, the hollowness return.
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3/31/19
After watching 60 Minutes about the parents of school shooting massacre victims, I question my right to feel so grief-stricken…but we each have our own private hell.
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4/15/19
Sometimes the tears just trickle out of my eyes like something squeezed my soul that was overflowing with sadness and there were too many tears to hold in so they had to come out of my eyes unexpectedly. It isn’t like crying. It’s the spontaneous combustion of sadness leaking out. Like a sadness machine.
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People say you should ‘get over it’ whatever ‘it’ is — but trauma is a scar that never heals. We remember it until our last breath. For example, in the tv show, Street Food Osaka, when the Japanese chef was asked about his upbringing, his happy face dissolved into a visage of sadness and despair, throwing off his mask of glee. He’s reliving his miserable childhood. Shit never leaves us.
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“Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. “ ~ Elizabeth Stone
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I wanted to pack up all his things I have around — the photos, the pottery made in middle school, everything — but I didn’t. Keeping them as memories of a person I knew long ago.
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I can’t tell you how diminished I feel — shrunken to inconsequence. A comma is more respected.
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Where is your humanity? You seemed surprised when I said you had a heart of stone the very last time we communicated.
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Do you know how it feels to cry in your sleep?
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This has led me to examine how I treated my own parents, especially my mother, connecting the dots from her to me. I feel such remorse even though she let me down in so many ways. I could have been more gentle with her even though she was just ill-equipped to handle my psychotic sister’s and my relationship.
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Should I be glad it’s ‘only this’ and he’s not a drug addict…
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I’ve been in therapy. I believe in therapy. But what would therapy do for me now? Reassure me that’s it’s a phase? I crossed lines I was unaware of, I asked for forgiveness…
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I look like a normal person but looks deceive. I’m good at hiding myself. Even to myself. Self-deception is a matter of survival. I’m becoming a different person, a stranger to myself. Parts of me being swallowed into an open, festering wound. How do you live with such a wound? Who will want to be near you? No one. Can you blame them? You are no longer the person they knew. This new person is a depressing bore.
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I imagine scenarios where I unexpectedly bump into him. I see him everywhere — sandy hair, 6’, clothes like any millennial. I panic: what if it is him? I actually don’t think I could handle it.
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Why can’t we all just get along?
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A lot of people in the ‘estrangement community’ feel intense shame and find talking about the estrangement of one’s own children almost impossible. It’s not like blabbing about your own nasty divorce that’s killing you. That’s acceptable. Nobody knows where to look or how to process the information when you talk about your estranged son who hasn’t talked to you in at least five years and who, by the way, they thought you had a great relationship with. It makes people quite uncomfortable. It’s probably one of the last taboos. At this point in time, it’s easier to talk about your seven-year old declaring he’s in the wrong body.
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The family estrangement of in-laws, siblings, treacherous relationships…I came to the conclusion, long ago, that the cliche “blood is thicker than water” was made up by a sadist. Only family treats family like shit. They would never, usually never, treat their friends this way. But why do we expect more from family — they’re just people. And people suck.
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I am so very proud of my son’s success but I’m not allowed to enjoy it. I’m excommunicated.
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“There is sacredness in tears. They are not a mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love.” ~ Washington Irving
Good to know because I have spent, oh, most of the last two or three years crying every day feeling absolutely helpless. I’ve decided I can’t do it anymore so to stop myself from crying and falling into a miserable, heartrending funk, I scream DON’T DON’T DON’T till I get control of myself and go about my day. Til the next surprise grips my soul and I go through the ritual all over again. I can go a day, a week even and I’m ‘fine’ forgetting there is a cruel monster lurking to catch me unaware. Numbness is an ok way to cope.
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Is the pain of romantic loss as bad as the pain of child-love loss? Gordon Lightfoot lyrics I mashed together: “when you reach the part where the heartache comes the ending’s just too hard to take”
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Neither drinking nor drugs are an option for me. They don’t suit my constitution. Anyway, there is no remedy for this pain, just containment, and management.
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There is such beauty everywhere…a whisper of a breeze blows the roses in the supermarket parking lot. I see it. Register it. But it does nothing to mitigate my heartache.
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Can you purge someone from your mind? Is he annoyed if I creep into his consciousness when he sees something that reminds him of me (wishful thinking) or something that we liked or something that we did together? Does he bat away my presence? Does he allow himself a spontaneous smile but quickly catches himself.
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This makes me question everything I did as a mother. For instance, my older son (not estranged) told me his years in karate, which I thought were so much fun and a great experience didn’t mean anything to him. How come I didn’t know he didn’t enjoy it when he seemed to? Was I that clueless? What else did I miss?
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“Grief is for serious matters, important losses.” ~ Alice Munro
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To be despised by another human is tolerable. To be despised by your son is unimaginable. Am I a monster?
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I have such vivid dreams of him. They feel like visitations. Somewhat satisfying. Dream on then.
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What is the worst trauma? Fleeing gangs in your home country? Losing everything in a fire? Being a boat person? How do you measure these traumas? Is it even fair to compare? Where does the loss of a child fit in? People say losing a child is the very worst that can happen to you. How do I process this against horrific personal events?
I have a home, food, friends…
You know what they say, “Anything is possible.” You got that right.
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I’ve reached a place of reluctant acceptance. I had the pleasure and honor of raising and being in a ‘normal’ relationship with my son for about 28 years — longer than most marriages — and now I control myself by remembering that. That and what would be even worse would be to lose a child to a school shooting. Hearing the stories on the news I suddenly realize how ‘lucky’ I am to only lose him by estrangement! Think about getting to that place where the best way to cope is to compare unthinkable acts. Dark.
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You, the general public, know what it’s like to lose a beloved pet, a faithful dog, an adored cat. Calculate that sadness by a 1000 and you’ll come close to what it feels like to lose an alive child.
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Thinking about all the people I pass on the street. Everyone in their own world of troubles. So many estranged…it’s an epidemic that no one really wants to talk about. Many are ashamed, don’t know how to talk to their friends about it, fearing friends will distance themselves thinking it might be contagious. They’ve got their own problems.
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Sometimes I look out into the bright sunlight but, for me, the light has dimmed as though all the bulbs illuminating the day have been changed to 40w. The sheen of the day has been dulled. I am not being dramatic. Don’t judge, don’t comment until you’ve been there. And I hope you never are.
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I wonder about the toll it takes on the person who lives with the loathing and repudiation of a mother. If they don’t feel anything or think about it, doesn’t that mean they have no empathy and are sociopaths?
I’m surprised there aren’t a ton of parental suicides but it’s possible the best prevention is the waiting (illogical) for the EC to reconcile. No point offing yourself to miss their epic return. Also, you want to stay alive for other children and grandchildren. I say my granddaughter saved my life. I deeply feel for those grandparents who are denied relationships with their grandchildren.
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You know, I’ve tried thinking of something humorous to write about this situation, to lighten things up a bit, but there is NOTHING fucking funny about it.
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Estrangement is the same impulse as committing murder which is to get someone out of your life permanently. I know. I’ve felt that same impulse, if not to murder my emotionally abusive sister, but to wish she were dead.
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I get home from a fun night out with friends, the front door closes and I feel defeated. How do you describe a void? It’s more than empty space because you’re aware of a presence that isn’t there. There is no (name). It even hurts to write his name.
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How can it be that one minute I’m a hero, emotions under control. I got this! The next minute dissolves in a rush of tears and grief. How is that possible?
It’s a struggle to keep your head above water, to keep from drowning in grief. I can physically feel the onset of a wave of impossible sadness creep like a slow-moving hurricane. I am unable to staunch it. I try. I read somewhere all you have to do is fake smile and your blue mood will dissolve like saccharin in coffee.
Let me clear. Sadness is not depression. I understand that everyone wants me to be okay, not dwell on my loss. They mean well I suppose when they suggest therapy will help me. They mean well when they advise not to let this loss define me and to get on with my life. I forge ahead but in fits and starts, trudging onward without enthusiasm.
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In the book, The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O’Brien, a novel about Bosnia during the trial of the monster, Ratko Mladić at The Hague, the narrator asks the interpreter to ask the Mothers of Srebrenica, “What brings peace?” One spoke, “A bone.” To find the smallest bone of one of her children. How dare I relate to those Mothers whose children were tortured, executed, ripped from their arms. My child is still alive and thriving! Only not to me. To me he is dead, flesh blood and bones I cannot hold, cannot touch. This grief has a stranglehold on my heart and soul.
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Debunking Myths About Estrangement — NY Times — Dec. 20, 2017, By Catherine Saint Louis
“Estrangement is a “continual process,” Dr. Scharp said. “In our culture, there’s a ton of guilt around not forgiving your family,” she explained. So “achieving distance is hard, but maintaining distance is harder.”
I have spent many, many hours reading estrangement stories and comments both from parents’ perspective and children’s perspective. They are all heartbreaking. There are many reasons the experts say why families estrange. There are as many reasons as there are people: mental illness, sexual and emotional abuse, drug addiction, neglect, unreasonable expectations, divorce, traumatic event, not respecting boundaries, the influence of daughter or son-in-law, in-laws (no surprise there) or even just getting on someone’s nerves.
Even with awful circumstances notwithstanding, some choose to stay connected while others choose estrangement. What is the difference that makes one person scornful and another one sympathetic instead of hateful? That is the $64,000 question about this nightmare but, sadly, I don’t have an answer and neither do the experts. Here is a good article that covers a lot of it: A Breakdown of Family Estrangement: Survey Reveals Causes, Results of Family Conflicts
Caveat: It is ok, in my estimation, to estrange toxic people. Determining who is toxic and who is just a pain-in-the-ass is an individual assessment.
Full disclosure: My sister who was eight years older had it in for me the minute I emerged from the womb. Her relentless emotional abuse has taken its toll. She was (she’s dead) absolutely toxic to most everyone around her. I chose to estrange myself from her when I was an adult in my forties. I didn’t talk to her for two years but my mother, who was incapable of dealing with her, begged me so many times to re-establish a relationship that I eventually relented, to my great regret, but my mother was miserable enough and I didn’t want to make it worse.
I’d heard about estrangement but didn’t even think of it like that when I didn’t speak to my sister for two years. I just thought I was distancing myself from someone toxic as self-preservation. I don’t think I even used the word during that time. But never in a million trillion years would I have thought this horror would have insinuated itself into my life.
To belong to these estrangement groups requires adopting a different language, a language of acronyms that took me a minute to decipher. I hope you never have to use them: ES Estranged Son, ED Estranged Daughter, EC Estranged Child or Children, EG Estranged Grandchildren (their parent’s choice, not the grandparents’), DIL Toxic Daughter-in-Law, SIL Toxic Son-in-Law, IL Toxic In-laws and so on.
Many parents attribute estrangement to genetics as multiple people in a person’s family are estranged from each other over the course of generations. You grow up observing relatives bad-mouthing and estranging one another, seemingly flippantly, like there’s an expectation for siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents to not talk to each other. It’s a way of life. No biggie.
Others attribute narcissism as the cause of the estrangement. One person who is on both sides of estrangement — estranged from her mother and her own children — has participated in both estrangement online groups and she wrote that many of the kids who chose estrangement were narcissistic brats, whining about having to watch their younger siblings after school, setting the table. Stuff like that. Those kids felt so put-upon, they never forgot those perceived injustices. “Fuck you, Parents, I don’t need you to tell me what to do.”
Then there is the false memories idea. It is true people remember the exact same things totally differently which is fascinating.
So, on parental love, is it possible for a mother to not love her child? It is possible to love and not love at the same time. Some grief-stricken parents say, “I love her no matter what…” What does that mean?
It means there are different kinds of love. Love is not a one-note samba.
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FIRSTHAND ACCOUNTS FROM THEIR HEARTS
You can read tons of articles explaining the whys of estrangement but to read the raw firsthand accounts of the pain suffered by parents and grandparents and children on either side of estrangement is to see the human toll this takes. Reading other people’s stories is my version of cutting. It’s comforting to know you are a member of a horrible club and have other members whose pain and psychological toll is as deep as yours. I am a different person. I’m not who I was. I look normal but my insides are hollow.
Here are some of their stories, no names, no places, no judgments.
* A son who chose to estrange wrote on FB: “I don’t know how to be something you miss.” A friend’s comment to the mother: “So sorry. It must hurt like crazy. xxx” Mother: “Actually, I am at peace. I just want to see him before I die. But who knows.”
* A mother: “I had a bad dream, made me think of all this “stuff”. I’ve said a zillion times, “We’ve lost our son” but we can’t have a funeral, can’t have people comfort us… I feel guilty even writing about it because I know some of you have it much worse with your kids being in drugs… But for this momma, it’s been brutal for 12 years. I have good days and then something happens. A memory, a thought, something and it’s fresh all over again. Heavy on my heart and mind. My son, I miss him so much. And grandkids, I can’t even go there.”
* This is from a quote box posted on the group site:
“I gave birth to you, but you came with no instructions. All I knew was that I loved you long before I saw you. I know I made some mistakes and for that, I am sorry, but I was doing the best I could with what I knew. Everything I did for you, I did from love. You are my child, my life, my dreams for tomorrow. I will always LOVE you and there is nothing that could ever destroy my love for you.”
Responses posted to the above:
- “I love this! It's so very true for me and mostly what I told my ES. I hope someday he can really understand this.”
- “I could not ever send this to my ES. I don’t love him as he is now. I don’t love how he treats me now. I still love who he was before he chose to ignore me. But even that love has dimmed, sad to admit. The hurt is too deep, and after 2 years of this, I could not imagine how it could be healed. Sorry, but these sweet sentiments don’t really resonate with me.”
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* “Thank you for having me in this group. It is bittersweet. I am thankful to know that I am not alone but reading your stories makes my heart hurt so much. I have sons 25, 23 and 16. My 25 yo hasn’t spoken to me in 7 years. The last time I saw him he told me he wished I were dead and he hoped he never had to see me or talk to me again. We lived in X and I moved to X to take care of aging grandparents. A friend of my ex-husband’s who still talks to him says that he is angry at me because he had to watch his younger brother after school for 30 minutes-1 hour before my husband got home from work. They would have been 14 and 12 and the youngest was at daycare. This makes no sense to me. I try not to think of the estrangement most days because the emotional pain of facing it is so unbearable. I don’t want it to be this way. I don’t understand why. I loved these kids more than life itself and would do anything to make them happy. I wish I had been what he needed as a mom. I want to apologize to him for not being what he needed but I have no way to reach him. It is nice to have a place to share because other people would not understand the mourning of the death of this relationship. Other people wouldn’t understand the shame. I hate that I feel like such a failure. I hope I don’t let my other two down. I am so afraid of messing things up with them too. I worry that something could happen to me and that he would have this hanging over his head. I worry that something will happen to him and I will never have a resolution. I worry that there will never be a resolution. I worry that he will be estranged and hate me for the rest of my life. I am not doing a very good job of accepting this. Thinking on it I can lose an entire day to tears, heartache and grief. I am just heartbroken and devastated to the core. I bury the raw emotions of it all but the loss of this child is brutal. My heart breaks for each of you.”
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* My child (49) for as long as she lives will never remember me. She hates me that much. I’ll never know why…😢
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William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
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It has been a struggle to finish this because, if I finish, it means the door is shut tight forever. My fate is sealed whatever it might be.
I’ll end with this from a wise dad because there isn’t much to say that he didn’t say:
“Hi Everybody…
Just some Dad here, and I just finished reading a new study, in which medical professionals have confirmed what some people have known all along, which is that eggs are dangerous to your health.
Well, not eggs specifically, but eggshells. You see, after years of scientific research it has been determined that in fact, walking on eggshells is bad for your health, and in some cases can kill you. So, much like smoking, if you knew something was bad for you, why would you continue to do it? That’s a question we all need to ask ourselves and get straight with at one point or another in this journey. I literally can’t bear it anymore.
I can’t listen to one more beautiful, big-hearted parent questioning their self-worth, self-respect and dignity while they gingerly tiptoe around anything that might cause “friction” between themselves and the child that has cruelly, voluntarily chosen to abandon the person who loved and raised them.
“I don’t want to do anything that would disrespect my estranged child’s wishes”.
“I don’t want to push too hard for fear that they may never speak to me again”.
“Should I send a gift? What if I don’t? Maybe they won’t love me anymore…”
“ I don’t want to do anything that might lead to me taking my personal power back or remembering that I am a valuable human being because my voluntarily estranged child might see my strength and reject me.”
Ugh.
Look. I know this is uncomfortable, but it’s truth time. The truth is, estrangement is gut-wrenchingly painful. It can affect your health, wealth, happiness and everything associated with it. Some days it is difficult to bear. In some cases it can be fixed, and in some cases it can’t. And no matter what, in all cases, none of us as parents asked for this. But whether you have been going through this process for six months or six years, there is something that all of us had better come to grips with sooner or later if we want to survive…which is this…
Life isn’t fair… but your legacy depends on how you chose to deal with it. It doesn’t matter what you do, or don’t do. Sadly, you are not in control of the estrangement situation. You can only control yourself. This is a game that was invented by someone else and you are either a willing, or an unwilling participant. You are playing by someone else’s rules and that dungeon master is free to change the rules whenever they wish at your expense. Unfair? Yes. Having heard that, are you a little angry about it? I sure hope so.
Once you acknowledge this fact though, the only question is… are you going to be a victim? Or are you going to be a survivor? Are you going to continue to play a game where the rules are designed so you cannot win, or are you strong enough to leave the game?
Are you going to continue to play by the rules every time your adult child throws the dice and draws a card that says “Walk on eggshells… obey me and take 10 steps backward”? Do you hear the crunching beneath your feet? Feel it biting into your heels? A steady diet of eggshells can lead to fatigue, depression, heart problems, diabetes, low-self esteem, and in some cases, even death.
Is that what your legacy will be?
I have said this several times, and I am going to say it again for the sake of clarity and because sometimes I think we forget. The pain of estrangement is enormous. It can control us. Sometimes it is so painful it feels like our children have died.
But our children are not dead. There is a big difference. There are plenty of people out there who have lost a child. Those kids will not get a chance to make a positive impact on the world, bring their parents flowers, or go to high school dances. They will not get the opportunity to make a difference in people’s lives or leave a beautiful legacy of their own. They won’t get a chance to be a force for good in the world. But our adult children have that chance… and they are completely responsible for what they do with it. No, our children are not dead. Our kids are either completely self-absorbed and oblivious to anything but their own cruel agenda or are willfully, and consciously making a choice to cause pain and suffering. I’m not sure which is worse, and I refuse to play this painful game anymore. My self-respect has simply become too bright. I can’t see the game board anymore.
In the end, believe it or not, estrangement is not a story about our kids. This is a story about us, and our ability as valuable people to adapt and overcome… our ability to be either a victim, or a survivor in the face of cruelty. The question now is, which path are you going to choose? Are you going to sacrifice yourself on the altar of your child’s self-absorption? Or are you going to forge a new trail with compassion love and dignity? You can even leave a trail of breadcrumbs… so that if they ever change, they can find their way back home.
Compassion, strength and dignity. That’s what you want to feast on. Healthy. Good for the heart.
Watch that steady diet of eggshells. It leads to nothing but complications.
With Love, Just Some Dad”
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P.S. There is a whole trove of thoughts I didn’t include but I think you get the idea. Final thoughts — but they are never final.
Me (the author): Only my granddaughter can make me smile spontaneously, a spark of joy lights me like a sudden shock. My face smiles like when I listen to music…she soothes my soul and makes me happy. My deepest hope and concern is that she never estranges her parents.
If Ram Dass doesn’t have an answer for the lost love of a son, there isn’t one.
Don’t be an estranger.
I want him back.
RESOURCES
The truth about family estrangement
One US study of more than 2,000 mother-child pairs found that 10% of mothers were currently estranged from at least one adult child. And one US study found that more than 40% of participants had experienced family estrangement at some point — suggesting that in certain groups, such as US college students, estrangement may be almost as common as divorce.
Though examples of estrangement can be found around the globe, it’s more common in some societies than others.
