Opinion | Review | Poetry | Essays | Fiction | Art
Today I’m writing to you if you’re among the many estranged parents who feel blindsided by the estrangement and I’m sending you three things to consider in your situation. These may be spot on, they may be a bit relatable, they might be so outside your experience you cannot tell if they apply to your situation. So all I ask is for you to consider whether any of these three things might be part of the reasons your child has chosen to estrange from you.
Yet I hope. For reconciliation. For a new, better way of relating to one another. For a genuine knowing of one another. Yes. Even in this very very dark time of estrangement.
This alienated grandparent’s guide to living well holds three things to tuck into your tool belt for the holidays and, well, every day. These suggestions for you are going to sound simplistic and you might just roll your eyes but hang in with me through this important activity.
I don’t expect my kids to respect me simply because I am their mom. I do expect them to be civil with me because we are human beings and adults. And don’t get me wrong, I love a well placed curse. In conversation, heated or not. LOVE them. The harm comes when it turns into “you’re a”. Those are the non reversible stabs in need of emergency stitching but often left to bleed out.
Everything from how to have healthy fights, manage stress, resolve conflict and preserve relationships may have been lacking in the childhood or environment of parents of adult estranged children. Without learning those crucial skills, we brought them into our relationships and painted them on our kids.
I’m mourning collectively with half the country and am terrified for the people who now have to make plans of custody for their own children adopted or birthed and loved families who may become targets, or those who may have to plan for the deportation of their family members who have been here for ages and have grown families and communities, or make a safety plan while they figure out if their coworker or own family member will betray them to the homophobic american version of the nazi special commission the orange monster has in mind, and for the millions of girls, women and people with uteruses who will be assaulted with words weapons and denial of care. The echoes of nazi germany being denied by the other half of the country.
As the title of my essay reflects, this is, or was supposed to be, about estrangement and conflicting values. And it is. Mostly. It’s also about how the failures of white mothers like me have impacted this really really sick country.
And to many who will read this, you will say (rightly so) that I am centering myself. I am. In services to the message I hope to convey.
So, it’s true. I’m like my dad. I have a really insatiable feeling of wanderlust, a weird and sometimes inappropriate sense of humor, a belief that most anything is possible, have no idea how to get to those things most of the time and maintain a solid mix of skepticism mixed with unreasonable optimism. I will keep trying all the things to see where I land and in this latest chapter of my life, am determined to find the pleasure I have missed so much during my dark decade. And like him, I’m prone to long, deep bouts of depression.
…the not joke of women choosing a bear to be caught in the woods with over a man isn’t a stretch when the men who are culturally trained to be vile abusers then painted as something harmless are turned loose on us in every generation
Parenting is hard. Motherhood is extraordinarily hard when a whole culture is contorting itself to prove over and over and over again how little it cares about birthing people, will not fight for them and allows our basic rights to evaporate. And there’s so much you don’t see behind a social media post: