Estrangement.

Is the family over?

Mothers and Daughters, a series of portraits by photographer Julie Fullerton-Batten

I’ve been pretty open that my mother and I were estranged when she died during the pandemic. David reminded me the other night that he didn’t consider us estranged at all.

You called her everyday, he said.

He’s not wrong. I called. We visited a few times a year. I sent her groceries so she didn’t have to leave the house. I listened to her complain about the other ladies at the residence, grateful when she wasn’t complaining about me. I didn’t tell her any news about our lives, where we went, what was important to us. She used to get so angry about us travelling with David for his work, that I stopped telling her when we traveled. I’d call her from Sydney or Edinburgh or Amsterdam, she didn’t know we were gone. This seems like a metaphor for our relationship.

Did she know I was gone?

Did she know we no longer had a relationship? Did she think we were close? What did she say to other people about us?

I don’t know. We are smiling in photos, arms around each other. Does that count?

I would never have kept the grandkids from her. I wanted her to adore my kids the way her mother adored me. I could live with her raging at me, while she went all in, deeply embedded in her love for our kids. But she could never get a handle on them either.

She wanted to babysit Lucy and Edie when they were 4 and 5. David and I were desperate for a night out. She made a big deal out of it with the girls. They had sleepover plans. She bought cupcakes and made popcorn. It was sweet watching them prepare. My mom could make times like this so special. We left, everyone was excited.

But we got a call in the middle of dinner. Lucy, a stubborn child who needed to be finessed more than told what to do, wasn’t following mom’s requests. And Edie, sensitive and still babyish, got scared and cried, when mom showed her teeth. I felt sad for all of them. They needed a grandma and she really needed them. We cut the evening short and rescued them.

My olive branches didn’t work. I spent countless hours strategizing with my therapist and David, how to find a way to bridge us. Every conversation was shut down with her anger and righteousness. My mother was the untreated child of generations of alcoholics, and as I learned healthier ways of being in the world - most notably, I stopped lying, a family trait that plagued how we interacted with each other - I left her in the dust.

I looked back and saw her getting smaller and smaller to me in my rearview. A few times, I pulled over and with hope, let her hop in the back, but mostly, she couldn’t ride. My mom was a dot on the horizon. Far away from me, but always there in my aching for the best parts of her.

I checked in on her daily, in the same way I brush my teeth or wipe my shoes on the door mat. Mostly, my foot was on the gas.

“Fulerton-Batten uses real mother-daughter pairs in their own environments.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as the concepts of estrangement have hit a cultural nexus with super-celebs like Oprah and podcast hosts, Mel Robbins weighing in with her popular Let Them Theory. I’ve also read thousands of comments in #NoContact groups and threads over years, from grown children who have left their families, and the families who have been left.

The Oprah podcast frames family estrangement as a trend. That feels not entirely right. Estrangement is, in fact, as old as families themselves. The prodigal son was estranged. He squandered his inheritance and left the family house. He comes back to the fold after the world chewed him up. Elizabeth Barrett Browning was cut off by her father after she married fellow poet, Robert Browning. The two moved to Italy. She never spoke to her father again. Edgar Allen Poe was forced to pursue his writing without family support after his foster mother died and his foster father kicked him out. Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abe, had his mother committed to an asylum after his father’s assassination. She was eventually deemed competent, but she never spoke to her son again.

The world has changed in the last 100 years. Families in history weren’t bound together by love and affirmation, and psychological support, as much as they were by resources, namely the pursuit of land, property and inheritances. It was common to forgo family allegances in the pursuit of power or simple stability. Cleopatra had her sister executed to solidify her power. Constantine the Great ordered the assassinations of his first-born son, his wife Fausta, her father and her brother, as well as his nephew, as a way to stay in power.

For low income families, estrangement is often hidden because it looks like yet another failure, something else that needs to be fixed in the family. Estrangement weakens the group, makes everyone more vulnerable to discrimination, bigotry and scarcity. For the Hatfields and McCoys, civil war discontents and land disputes went incendiary when Roseanna McCoy and Johnse Hatfield fell in love. Roseanna was estranged from both her family and also her husbands.

Now, we are required to have skills in our relationships. We are trying to be happy and feel safe. We want a lack of toxicity and chaos. We have therapists who want us to confront and work through psychological complexities. Most estrangements now happen between a parent and an adult child, initiated by the child. One study, out of the University of Cambridge looked at mothers between the ages of 65 -75. They found 11% were completely estranged, but a whopping 62% had contact less than once a month.

Apparently, I wasn’t estranged from my mother, as much as I was just quiet quitting her. And it seems I’m not alone.

“For most of history, family relationships were based on mutual obligations rather than on mutual understanding,” Historian Stephanie Coontz, was quoted in the Atlantic. “Parents or children might reproach the other for failing to honor/acknowledge their duty, but the idea that a relative could be faulted for failing to honor/acknowledge one’s ‘identity’ would have been incomprehensible.”

Estrangement isn’t a trend. It’s just in view in the modern lens. Specific to our times and our culture. Particular to our technology and how we relate as humans. The internet amplifies it, and provides spaces where people gather to discuss it. And here is where we can see the riffs so clearly.

“I only needed to orchestrate the sitters moderately to show the essence of their emotional bond.”

People have never been more committed to good parenting than they are now and in the last 60 years. Parents sacrifice themselves for the success of their kids. They go all in on raising them, advantaging them with tutors, competitive sports experiences and elaborate family vacations. There is a lot riding on how our kids turn out, and because we are so involved, their personhood, their value in the world can often be reflected back on us. There is a lot riding on the success of these relationships.

Even first generation immigrants, known for their strong family traditions and connection to integral cultural legacies have experienced the shift with more children relocating to different geographic areas, more disavowing traditons, and more disconnection between generations.

Parents estranged by their children can feel blind-sided. They often have no idea why the fracture has ocurred, or realize that their kids have tried to make all kinds of in-roads to repair the damage. The parents are left to fill in the blanks.

My daughter-in-law is behind this, one woman wrote in a chat group, Ever since she has been around, my son has changed.

In fact this might be an astute observation. Often a relaionship outside the family can help us see where their might’ve been toxicity in our growing up.

Right after David and I got serious, he noticed that I sometimes spoke badly of people when they weren’t around. Mean-spirited gossping, essentially. My mom and I often bonded over this kind of talk. He suggested we institute something he called The Family Talk because he didn’t want our kids to grow up around the negativity. The Family Talk was an exercise in only saying kind or neutral things about people. What it did for me, was show me how toxic that part of my upbringing was. I wouldn’t have changed my behavior without David showing it to me. I relearned how to interact in healthy ways and the difference between venting and being mean. So, yes, partners can absolutely shift the dynamic in ways that can be frustrating for parents used to lots of access, dominance and control over the family.

“They created their own small world together, at the same time, through the staging of the scene, reviving my memories of my own family’s relationships.”

If you read on the internet under the hashtag #NoContact or head into the family estrangment groups that populate Facebook, you’ll find both fanatical support and impenetrable protection. Advocates of going no contact often say: No one who has been harmed by their toxic family and has PTSD should be made to be in contact with them. Once you label someone toxic, experts have said, it feels hard-wired into them. It’s who they are at the core. It feels permanent. And there is no way back from permanently toxic.

The idea of no way back is a strong one for these adults who cut ties.

There is little space for reconciliation because by the time they get to a place of leaving, they have tried all the strategies and they are done. This is called Blocked Care, when a person is so stressed by a relationship with another person that they have trouble showing any love or compassion. Even the mention of reconcilliation from Oprah and Robbins causes a backlash of palpable hurt. Mel Robbins and Oprah are both out here advocating for abused children to reconcile with their parents, one Threads user wrote, because Medicaid cuts are coming and they want you to be on the hook for caring for your wretched parents when their benefits fall through.

But we know that going #nocontact is much more complicated than this. The process of cutting off family is not something that is easy, quick or even heartless. It is the opposite. Someone explained it this way on Threads: What actually happens is grief. Anguish. Years of trying, praying, extending grace, and hoping the relationship can be healed. No contact is almost never the first response; it’s the last boundary available when every effort at peace has been rejected.

“It is a never-ending cycle of complex connections that evolve over time.”

The abandoned parents, collectively, have a different experience.

They remember loving their children, the fun times, and giving them everything they could. In these groups, we read things like this: My adult son has been estranged from me for 7 years. My heart is broken as he has no contact with me. I haven’t seen my grandchildren and am forced to live in this unbearable situation. It never gets easier.

There is a rigidity in these groups. They feel this estrangement has been done TO them, and they have no role in it.

It’s been the most difficult thing we’ve ever had to face and finally accept! A Facebook support group member wrote, The worst is not any reason being given. I started out begging, pleading, asking forgiveness (for only they know what for). We finally refused to live the remainder of our lives that way. They won’t answer phone calls, won’t respond to texts. They take our gifts for the grandkids to Goodwill- it’s ALL too much…

The estranged parents often seem unwilling to look at themselves at all. They becone defensive when a problem is raised, and then never seem to be able to turn that conversation into self-analysis. What have I done to contribute to this? What can I do differently? What small thing could I do to show my kid I want to make this work? Instead, there is a generational expectation that the family will stay together, even if there isn’t any real connection or work on the relationships. Even if the relationships make people feel bad.

You see this lack of self-analysis over and over in comments:

I have twin grandbabies that just turned 1 and I have never seen them even once. It’s like I’m floating in space suffocating.

Every year I put up the family decorations, some from generations ago, to have my sons and my grandson ignore me. It’s so very sad to me, like a punch to my stomach and ripping out my heart. I almost can’t make it through the season with so much sadness, as if they’d died. We ask ourselves, “Why are we chasing them so hard?”

I created this narcissistic monster by telling her she was the most important person in the world while she was growing up.

It is not easy to be humbled by your child showing you something you did that you shouldn’t have done or wildly failed at. But these parents are not at all curious about their role. And they are missing the power in that.

Tara Westover underscores this with a line in her memoir, Educated, where she writes about her relationship with her mother: I know only this: that when my mother told me she had not been the mother to me that she wished she’d been, she became that mother for the first time.

The babe-in-arms is fully dependent on the mother, but at the other end of the age sale, the mother often becomes dependent on her daughter to satisfy her emotional needs.”

The more I read about estrangment, the more I was searching for nuance. And I found it in Katie Roiphe’s excellent Personal Space column in the Wall Street Journal. The Burden of Being Estranged From a Parent, is a column Roiphe wrote about her husband’s estrangement from his father. I love how she writes about how their estrangement impacted her, too, which says a lot about how people on the outside view estrangement. Roiphe writes:

I still occasionally find myself plotting a reconciliation between my husband and his father. I can’t help wanting to undo the harm. When I mention a rapprochement, my husband has an almost animal reaction, a near physical panic. I can see on his face his fear of a fresh rejection, a feeling that he is a failure to his father, that he can never do anything worthy of respect.

There is this belief, from the outside, particularly with people from families who can address conflict, that everything can be fixed if people just pull together. And maybe they could, but the problem is essentially that inability to pull together, to lessen the self and maximize the collective. If estranged parents think the separations are just a rewriting of childhood history, and estranged children think they are being gaslit because their folks aren’t acknowledging their pain, there is probably little hope for a path to coming together again.

“The project was inspired by the memories of Fullerton-Batten and her two sisters’ own relationship with her mother, as well as their mother’s relationship with her mother.”

What we have is the ultimate generation gap. For older folks, there is a longer-held sense of duty to the family, to stay even in dysfunction. For younger people, figuring out who to keep in and who to kick out, can be an important step in being happy and healthy in everyday life.

This reminds me of Friendsgiving, a tradition born out of gay culture, when families excluded, ignored or maligned their children for being LGBTQ+. The Friendsgiving tradition used to sit right next to the larger holiday, they co-existed, one on a Saturday, the other on a Thursday, for example. Estrangment is the next step. It skips the holiday altogether, so that the important gathering is the one made up of people we choose. It is revolutionary in some ways - that we can finally let go of blood as the only important indicator of family.

But still we have to ask: What does this mean for the future of the family?

I know what it means for me personally. I cannot salvage my relationship with my mother. She is gone now. But I also know that shutting her out, was part of a long generational legacy of people mistreating and abandoning each other inside our family. I believe that by abandoning her, I was reinforcing that legacy, not righting it, although I did save myself and my mental health in the process.

The true test of whether I have beat this generational legacy is how David and I show up for our adult kids, and our soon-to-be-adult kids, when they come to us with their feelings of discontent. Will we see them? Validate them? Listen to them even when we don’t see it their way? Will we be able to move past feeling defensive? Will we be able to apologize genuinely for pain we have caused even though we never once meant to do anything but love them deeply and profoundly? Can we let go of being their parents, stuck in hierarchies of dominance, and see them as adults, individuals, equals, who need our support more than our critiques?

We are at our best when we think of ourselves as works in-progress, both as individuals and as a family. To be in-progress is to still have hope for grace and healing, whether reconcilliation comes or not.

Thank you, as always, for reading. xo Kim