I have to start somewhere.
And it’s not at the beginning. It’s here, nearly four years into the estrangement from my kids, that I can finally begin to make sense of what has happened to my family—destruction.
Married over twenty-five years. And happily, I thought back then. Two kids. First a son, and three years and two days later, my daughter. 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.
In families that resemble that picture, parental estrangement is an epidemic. In upper-middle class and educated families localized in North America and Western Europe, estrangement is on the rise every year.
But it’s a silent epidemic. Shame keeps parents quiet. Over the past few years, I’ve ventured to disclose my circumstances, and I’ve found there are two distinct responses to hearing that my children don’t speak to me. One is the visible recoil, masked horror, and the question (whether verbalized or not), “What did you do?” The second is slumped shoulders, a deflation of the body, and three words spoken with eyes averted: “Mine don’t either.”
Four years ago this June, my children made the decision to remove me from their lives. From my perspective, it came without warning. Out of the blue. Out of nowhere. The blindsides of all blindsides. 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.
At first, it came as a shock to me that I could purchase the domain name “parentalestrangement.com” for ninety-nine cents because it had never been claimed. But just as quickly, I realized it wasn’t shocking at all, because shame keeps us quiet. The estranged are muted. We mute ourselves, rather than expose our predicaments for the world to judge. It’s hard enough living every moment of every day swallowing the reality that your child is consciously deciding, every moment of every day, to exclude you from their lives, let alone absorb the shame that the world casts on you for that reality.
Back in June 2021, I couldn’t begin to understand what was happening, let alone metabolize my childrens’ decisions to estrange from me. It’s taken nearly four years for me to even begin to make sense of the experience of parental estrangement, but I’m ready to begin.
This is the beginning.
We need a community. We can’t do this alone.
It’s a particular pain, and it’s personal.
It hurts.
Sometimes it hurts more than at other times, but it always hurts. You can’t run away from the truth that your own child chooses, every day, that his or her life is better without you in it.
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. Not hope for reconciliation—those glimmers of hope have broken my heart in ways I didn’t know hearts could break—but hope for survival. My heart is beyond broken. Yet I can still feel it. It’s still there, in my chest, alive. I can feel it 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. I’m going to survive and make peace with life.
I have a glimmer of hope.
Not hope from my kids, who have not replied to me for months, but from the inside.
My inside. The heart inside my chest cavity.
My heart is screaming at me to listen:
BODHICHITTA.
I’m wondering if our salvation is in the Buddhist concept called BODHICHITTA.
It could be the answer to all of this.
Bodhichitta.
Let’s fucking see. Hear. Listen. Try.