If you found this post, most likely you already know estrangement is fucking hard. My 35 year old daughter has cut me out of her life for over ten years. I take responsibility for the things I know about that have hurt her and hope one day to understand the things I don’t know yet.
Recently she has taken her no contact to a level I haven’t seen since her great great Aunts and great grandmother launched an awful shunning of my father. I don’t know the length of time that ridiculousness lasted and it revolved around money as so many terrible family things do, but I got first hand experience of their cruelty when I traveled from Texas to Illinois for my grandfather’s memorial service (I lived in Texas for 32 years, most of my extended family lived in the Midwest) and one aunt simply looked through me, ignoring me. I was surprised. I knew something was going on between all of them but didn’t expect to be collateral in it. I was pregnant and looking forward to sharing some of that with a group of people I am blood related to but do not know well. I looked at her and said “Seriously? You can’t even give me a hug?” I didn’t know what else to do but it all felt so mean toward my dad, and I had no understanding of the depth of a shit legacy these women, my dad, my mom and the overall silence of a deeply dysfunctional family tree going back generations, was handing me. She kind of snapped out of her shitty approach and hugged me. Nothing changed in my relationship with the elders.
So much irony in all of this. One irony is I definitely did not teach Daughter not do this shit. I have blindly used this stupid tactic a lot of my life and it took me into my late fifties to figure out it hurt me the most. It hurt my kids too.
Daughter has an almost three year old son, he’ll be three in August. For a while I got to see him fairly regularly even though Daughter still kept me at a concrete arm’s length. He responds well to me, and asked to call me pretty often. The thing is, life will not stop at all and things, good and bad, will happen in the silence of estrangement. When Daughter had her baby shower, she did not tell me when or where it would be. I was invited by her mother in law who was having it for her over zoom because Covid. When Grandson was born, I was not invited to meet him.
One huge thing that happened in this silence was at two years old, Grandson was assaulted by his baby sitter or his baby sitter’s husband in what looked like an enormous cigarette burn. Daughter called me to tell me, it was both a surreal experience talking to her about something so deeply difficult and simply talking to her. Daughter and SonInLaw took amazing and hard steps to call in all authorities possible, and as far as I know, unfortunately there will not be charges against either of the couple. It’s heart wrenching in so many ways, and I am no longer in any loop on how things have gone for them personally or Grandson’s healing mentally or physically. Weirdly, prior to a recent visit, SonInLaw sent a text to everyone except Daughter telling us not to talk about Grandson’s assault. I’ve heard nothing since and don’t feel welcome to ask about it. Estrangement is fucking hard.
I ask every few weeks to FaceTime with Grandson, and am met with a simple no, wrapped in a “maybe in a few weeks” or “we have a busy few weeks, I’ll reach out when I’m ready to make that happen.” The times I reach out to ask to talk to her, I get “now is not the time.”
Another irony is I sit in a space where I understand not feeling warm toward Mother. I had a neutral, often negative relationship with my mom. I did not feel safe with her. She and my dad of course did what we call their best. They were generally kind people who had lives of struggle themselves. There is a combination of real memory and told stories I hold about both of them, now dead. Neither of them chose to improve themselves or their lives. I think that might be what Daughter has decided about me. Irony.
And in this silence, with my own lived experience of not being in touch with my parents, but never cutting them out of my life (I didn’t know that could happen by choice until I chose it with my children’s other parent) all while understanding Daughter needs to figure out who she is and heal from her own pain, I have respected every obstacle she has laid out. She put communication rules in place where I am not allowed to contact her without including someone else on the text. I am not allowed to call her. I am not allowed to email her. In all these years I have respected those boundaries.
So how do these things end? These traumas passed from one generation to another? It’s like that meme of the matches all in a row and one is not in line so the flame cannot catch on to the others. I think that’s how. And it’s not easy. It’s fucking hard. It may take my whole lifetime to shift the shitty behaviors I absorbed and painted onto my kids. I hope to make those changes in enough time. It may be too late for Daughter and I to have a close relationship. It will be devastating if Grandson and I only get to know one another when he is old enough to choose on his own. I don’t know yet. Those chapters are not written yet.
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