Parental Estrangement
I was on a book tour, talking about my new novel, How the Light Gets In. In the Uber on my way to the Dallas Airport, headed back to the East coast, I got to talking with my driver, Christopher—a young man who looked to be in his early thirties.
The conversation got around to Dallas. It turned out Christopher had only recently moved to this city from his hometown of Atlanta.
“What brought about the move?” I asked.
“I had to get away from my family,” he told me. His mother in particular.
I could only see the back of Christopher’s head, but I guessed him to be in his thirties. A few years younger than my two sons, probably, he had a nice voice, a thoughtful way of speaking. I had to ask him more about what he’d just told me.
“So…you don’t see your mother?” I asked.
“I had to cut her off,” he said. “I blocked her. It’s her birthday in a few days. I don’t want to call her. Maybe I’ll send a text. I’m thinking about it. But she’s a toxic narcissist.”
A felt a stone land on my heart.
Earlier in our conversation, when Christopher had asked what brought me to Dallas, I’d told him I was a writer on a book tour. Now I said more.
“The novel I was talking about here last night is about a family,” I told him. “The mother in my book has a daughter who’s estranged from her.”
I sat there in the back seat for a moment. Christian music playing. This nice young man at the wheel. Friendly, well spoken, curious.
“I am such a parent myself,” I told him. “Of a son I love a lot who doesn’t call on my birthday.” Or any other day.
He asked the reason for this. What does a person say to a person she just met, on a twenty-minute Uber ride to the airport, about an experience that could easily have broken her heart if she’d let it?
For a moment, I imagined my son sitting in the back seat of this Uber, instead of me. I tried to imagine what he would say, if he were the one having this conversation, and Christopher had asked him the question: Why isn’t your mother in your life?”
“I made plenty of mistakes as a parent,” I told Christopher.
I could have said more but didn’t. After my divorce 35 years ago, I spent a lot of years being angry at my children’s father. I used to cry a lot, and sometimes I did crazy things like pouring a glass of wine over my head when I was upset, or stuffing a cake I’d just baked into the garbage. I always took care of everyone, always got to the games and drove everybody where they needed to go and helped with science fair projects and paid the bills, but looking back on those days, I’m sure my children worried about me more than a child should have to worry about his mother.
No doubt my son has his reasons to feel hurt by me. I can’t argue with a person’s feelings or assess what constitutes irredeemable trauma.
In the front seat of the Uber, Christopher kept his eyes on the road, but I could feel him thinking about all of this. My failures as a mother. Those of his mother.
"Maybe you need to look at yourself," this young man said to me. Well, yes. I’ve done a fair amount of that over the years. It’s an ongoing process.
I could have said more of course, about the therapy I’ve done, on my own and with my son. Letters, apologies for the many ways I clearly disappointed him over the years--failures, mistakes, ways I must have hurt him. And still he believes—and there is no changing this—that I am an unsafe person in his life, and in the life of his children.
“Finally, I had to accept the situation and carry on with my life,” I said. “I have so many things to be grateful for every day. I focus on those.”
“You sound pretty disconnected,” Christopher said. I heard no unkindness in his voice. Just honesty. “Like you’re talking from your brain not your heart.”
My heart.
Oh, my heart feels plenty. But I don’t cry in Ubers. Or anywhere, much, any more. It took a long time getting to this place, but I made the decision a while back that I could not let grief crush me. I’d celebrate my joys—of which there are many: my other children, my youngest granddaughter, whom I get to visit often, and the two I don't see, who are out there leading their lives. My sister.
Art, music, the outdoor world, the community I am part of in Guatemala, my writing students, birds, swimming, sharing good meals for people I love.
And my friends. I take huge joy from work, and readers like the ones I got to talk with the night before--to whom I always say, when asked about my novel, that the part dealing with my main character’s estrangement from one of her children—a daughter she adores—is a part of the story I have lived.
That morning I’d shared breakfast with friends who’d driven all the way from Houston to attend my book event the night before. My friends are the parents of three deeply-loved children, estranged from two of the three. I know this couple well, know this story, and what they have done to try and repair the ruptured relationships with their two children. One hour before this my friend—the estranged mother—had been telling me that the grief she feels over the loss of her adult children from her life is so great that sometimes she wants to die.
I don’t feel that way myself, any more. But like my friends, I too suffer the absence, from my life, of a son I greatly love, and his young children. It’s a sorrow that doesn’t ever go away.
It hit me stronger now, in the Uber with Christopher, hearing him speak of his decision to cut off ties from his mother, a wave of sadness overtook me. I did not know the mother of this young man, or what she did that caused him to refer to her as a dangerous person. (Of course one always wonders. What terrible thing must that mother have done, so egregious that her child cut her out of his life?” She looked like such a nice person…”)
Parental estrangement is a story few people talk about. I know, from the hundreds of women I’ve worked with in my memoir workshops, the vast, and growing, number of parents of millennial children, and the next generation down from those, who suffer this experience. Mostly in silence, with immeasurable sadness and shame. You can easily find, on social media, proponents of a whole brand of therapy supporting the choice of an adult child to sever contact with a problematic parent.
I’ll call this an epidemic.
I also know, from having been entrusted with the stories of well over a thousand women over the years, about their lives, that there are circumstances, in a person’s relationship with a parent or family member, when nothing short of total severing of contact is justified. Over the past thirty years I have heard stories from women who told of grave neglect, abandonment, unspeakable abuse—emotional, physical, sexual. Oddly enough (or maybe not so oddly) it has been my observation that the women who experienced these kinds of abuse seldom estrange from the abusive parent. They keep trying to connect.
As for me: You may call me a shameless over-sharer. (Many have.) But I made the choice a long time ago that I would speak of the difficult experiences in my life, as well as the easy or triumphant ones.
You wonder why I named this new novel of mine How the Light Gets In?
Here’s the whole of that lyric from a Leonard Cohen song: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”
What that line says to me is that it’s our failures and losses that hold the greatest lessons and possibly the most profound revelation. It’s our sorrows and losses that connect us with our fellow members of the human race—because they suffer their own sorrows and losses too.
Talking about it may not make the grief go away, but it reminds others who suffer that same grief—or some other brand of grief—that they are not alone. I write these words now knowing that there will be other parents of adult estranged children reading them, who walk this particular lonely road.
I’m OK. I call myself a lucky woman, because in so many ways, I am one.
As I got out of the Uber at the Dallas airport, I reached out to shake Christopher’s hand. “I hope you call your mother on her birthday,” I told him. Who knows what she did that this decent young man moved all the way from Atlanta to Dallas to get away from her. Something unforgivable, maybe. I don’t presume to know that a conversation between her son and her might prove productive, and not damaging.
I only know that whenever possible, these days, I make it a point to practice forgiveness, and embrace the many aspects in my life and my relationships for which I feel the most profound gratitude. That’s a theme of the novel I’m traveling around the country talking about at the moment. It’s a practice I wasn’t all that good at, when I was in my thirties and forties.
It's not always easy, being 70. But age brings certain gifts. This is one.
So the Uber pulled up at the terminal. There at the curb, Christopher and I wished each other luck. But it’s not luck exactly that I wish for. Luck is out of our control. I wish for understanding. I wish for compassion. Wish for love.