I have to start somewhere.
And it’s not at the beginning.
The beginning is shock.
My children’s decision to estrange from me came out of nowhere. It was a shock like nothing I’ve ever experienced in my life.
My son, who’d just turned 22, brought his girlfriend home to surprise me for Mother’s Day weekend in 2021.
Three weeks later, he and I had an argument about that girlfriend on the phone. While in the past my son and I quickly repaired after any disagreement—we have similar arguing styles, blow up and then let it go—this time, he decided to go no contact.
Three days later, my daughter who’d just turned 19, with whom I texted and spoke nearly every day, did the same.
Both of my kids cited their mental health as the reason for their decisions to go “NC,” which I quickly learned from social media means “no contact.” My daughter reported that her therapist had suggested estrangement.
Before those atrocious days in June 2021, I’d never heard the term “parental estrangement.”
I’ve experienced shock before, but nothing like this. When I got the call that my big brother and only sibling had died at 34, I remember it. I remember falling to my knees in shock.
Estrangement, for me, was far worse than that phone call. I can’t remember anything from the days following my kids’ estrangement—the shock caused my brain to cease all function.
My first memory is from late June, when I walked around like a zombie, feeling like I was in the Twilight Zone. Nothing made sense.
Worse, nobody could help me make sense of it. My tight community of lifelong friends were as shocked and confused as I was. We’d raised our kids together. Most of the women were, like me, professional women who’d chosen to be stay-at-home mothers and wives, and we were daily witnesses to each other’s families.
I was the kind of stay-at-home mom who baked sourdough and offered homemade spaghetti bolognese as an after-school snack. Every day. Unless my kids preferred to order pizza or get drive-through, which meant burgers from In-n-Out and then a second drive-through at McDonald’s, where the fries are better. You get the picture.
My kids’ estrangement didn’t make any more sense to my friends than it did to me.
Perhaps even more confusing was my kids’ decision to estrange from me, but not their father, my husband of over 25 years.
Alone in my personal definition of hell, I mobilized, scrambling to find information about what was happening to me.
In 2021, there was only one “expert” in the field of parental estrangement, Joshua Coleman. His book “The Rules of Estrangement: Why Adult Children Cut Ties & How to Heal the Conflict” was, and continues to be, the main resource for estranged parents.
I read all 366 pages in one sitting and stayed up all night writing what Coleman calls “amends letters” to each of my kids, in which I followed his advice to the letter: take full responsibility for your child’s decision to estrange, apologize for your failure as a parent, take accountability for every grievance and ask your child how you can be the parent your child needs going forward.
None of my amends letters elicited a response.
Now, my daughter is going to be twenty-three, my son twenty-six. I missed my daughter’s twenty-first birthday party, because I wasn’t invited. Missed my son’s wedding for the same reason.
I am estranged.
If you are experiencing estrangement too, I invite you to share your story by clicking the “share” button above.
Estrangement is agony.
It hurts.
Estrangement is a singular agony.
It is agony to face the truth that every day, your own child chooses that his or her life is better without you in it.
Worse, it is shameful.
Over the past ten years, the numbers of families affected by estrangement has doubled, and the numbers continue to rise. Estrangement is an epidemic, but it’s a silent one. Shame keeps us silent.
For years, I only disclosed my circumstances to trusted friends. With this forum, however, I’ve decided to come out of the shadows and talk about this epidemic.
And not just anonymously. Now, I dare to disclose my circumstances to people I meet. I’ve found there are only two responses to hearing that my children don’t speak to me.
First is the visible recoil coupled with the question (whether verbalized or not), “What did you do?”
The second is a sigh and three words spoken aloud, albeit quietly: “Mine don’t either.”
I can’t decide which response is worse. Both are heartbreaking. Estrangement is the definition of heartbreaking. It breaks your heart in ways you didn’t know your heart could be broken.
The shock, shame, self-reproach, and self-blame only add to the agony of knowing the atrocious truth that every day, your child is choosing to exclude you from their lives because their lives are better without you in it.
We’ve lost a child. But unlike parents who lose a child to death, estranged parents are not universally pitied, cared for, and consoled. We can’t grieve openly, and there are no rituals and few resources for us to even begin to heal from our loss.
Even professionals are untrained in how to help estranged parents. One licensed therapist I consulted actually told me that what I was experiencing “wasn’t grief.”
This is grief. The worse kind of grief there is, a never-ending grief. Grief that hammers you every single day that you sit with the agony of knowing that your child is consciously choosing to cut you out of their lives. Grief with no stages and no path to resolution. It is a form of “unresolved grief,” another term that the licensed therapist I turned to for help probably doesn’t know.
Estranged parents are alone in their grief, ashamed, and feared.
Why? Because as much as parents want to deny it, the truth is that estrangement could happen to anyone.
That’s right: estrangement could happen to anyone, and it’s time to stop being ashamed and started talking about estrangement.
If you’re ready to start talking about it, please send me an email by clicking the “share” button above.
Estrangement—unlike most of the terrible things that can happen to us—is still a largely closeted problem.
— Joshua Coleman
This is grief. One of grief’s stages is denial. I wish I could deny this, but I can’t.
After four years of being estranged from my kids, I believe that the simplest and best solution to estrangement is to forget them.
Forget them and give up. Give up any hope of reconnecting. Let go and move on. Pretend your child is just some lover who’s broken up with you, even though this is nothing like that. Ignore that estrangement is nothing like a lover’s breakup. Ignore that the relationship with your child is the most basic, fundamental, and important relationship you will ever know. Ignore it and move on. Forget them.
Forget the nine months you gestated their bodies inside your own body. Forget eating strawberries for their brain development, forget being the designated driver of your drunken husband for nine months, forget the pulling over every morning to vomit out the car window, forget the scale teetering at 190 pounds, forget the amniocentesis needles, forget not eating soft cheese or sushi or deli meats, forget losing yourself in service to their survival from the moment they exited your body. While you’re at it, forget childbirth entirely, when your own life in danger every second and all that mattered to you was the health of your baby.
Forget it all. Forget the bleeding nipples and the reek of lanolin on your cracked and bleeding nipples. Forget the scalpel slicing the episiotomy, forget the blood soaking the hospital bed, and forget the stitches trailing from your cunt to your asshole. Forget the irreversible change to your vagina, feet, legs, arms, breasts, brain, heart, soul, mind, and entire fucking world.
Forget that you gave them life. Forget what you gave to give them life.
Forget the nights at the ER with 105 fevers. Forget the vomit down the back of your shirt from your daughter in the kid-toting backpack. Forget all the nights you didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t take a shower, and didn’t take a shit without a kid on your knee. Forget that you would have given your life for those kids at any moment for any reason in the world.
Forget how much you ache to know who they are now, what they do with their lives, how they feel about anything and everything in the world. Forget how much you want to touch their hands and hold them in your arms. Forget how much time you’ve already lost. Forget the days, weeks, months, and years that you have lost and can never be regained. Forget the absence of the most important relationship you will ever know. Forget that you don’t know who your own child is anymore. Forget it and forget them.
Think about it as a survival strategy. You’ve given your life to them already a thousand times squared, but they don’t want you in their lives now. Take it on the chin. Accept it, move on, and forget them. You don’t have to give your life for them now. You deserve to live too. If you can forget them, I encourage you to do it. I applaud you, in fact. If you can manage to forget them, I say do it now. Stop reading this. Let go and move on.
Because if you can’t, you’re stuck on this journey with me, and estrangement is a road I would never wish anyone to travel. Estrangement is not a lover’s breakup. Estrangement goes against every law of human nature, evolution, and survival.
If there is a fate worse than death, I think this is it. I struggle to survive it every day. I can’t forget my kids, just as I can’t ignore the reality that every single day, my kids make the intentional and conscious choice to be estranged from me. I’ve never been able to deny this reality, and even after four years, I can’t find a way to live in denial. It’s what is.
But I still have hope. Maybe not for reconciliation, but hope for survival.
My heart is beyond broken, but I can still feel it. It’s still there. In my chest. I’m alive. I can feel my heart beating right now, reminding me that I am surviving.
I still have hope that I can find a way to make peace with what is.
This is not a journey I ever would have chosen to take, but I don’t have any choice. Even if there’s no resolution to the grief of estrangement, I’m going to survive it. I’m going to survive and make peace with what is.
If you have any suggestions for how to begin, please send me an email by clicking the “share” button above.