Was I really right? It's a question that has been poking its ugly head up in my mind for over a year now. Was I really right to leave and cut off all ties with my mother? Can I really still justify doing so now that there is no way to ever reconcile, even if I want to? Parental estrangement isn't something I ever wanted to find myself on either side of. It just kind of happened. On the 1st of March last year, my mother passed away, almost 14 years to the day when I last saw her. What I have struggled with since is… Well, it's complicated.
There is regret. There is grief. There is an almost tangible sense of something missing at the core of me. But there is also still anger. There is frustration too.
There is frustration with the way that death often whitewashes everything in favor of the departed. There are no two sides to I and my mother’s estrangement anymore. There is just the story of that woman whose useless-at-everything son disappeared for over a decade, then didn’t even show for her funeral.
Parental Estrangement Can Happen Simply Because of Hurt
When we think of parental estrangement, we often think of adult or younger children cutting all parental ties because of abuse or neglect. However, estrangement doesn’t have to be dependent on purposefully inflicted physical or emotional trauma. In fact, estrangement manifests in many cases simply because of hurt. Hurt which becomes impossible to tolerate.
I became estranged from my father first.
My parents separated when I was two years old. However, from two to twelve, my father would pick me up every Friday after school, and we would spend some quite spectacular weekends together. He was a doting Dad. We’d jump in the car and play crazy golf at Whitby, explore local fossil shops, and not go home until we had fish chips to take home for supper with my Grandmother. These were precious times to me.
The problem was, that it all suddenly stopped. My father remarried and while our adventures continued for a while, I seemed to realize that I was being deposited most weekends with my Grandma, while my Dad disappeared to do other things. Then I found out that my father had bought a house in which there wasn’t a bedroom for me. However, if I wanted, I could take a bus every Thursday after school and visit for dinner.
Those Dinners Destroyed Me
“They say you’ve got to put salt in the pasta water, but I don’t,” said my Dad one evening, cooking in front of me in the house where I was only ever a guest for a few hours each week.
As I watched him, a knock came at the door and a woman who looked like Deirdre Barlow out of Coronation Street walked in. Immediately, it was obvious that she was shocked by my presence.
“Who’s this?”
The question was asked like the woman asking it expected me to be some teenage miscreant from one of the local housing estates, who had either broken in or was up to some other mischief.
Even my dad didn’t say who I was. It was my stepmother who eventually clarified that I was, “Julie’s kid.”
And it hurt. It hurt too when I would arrive on a Thursday, to be updated on how well my father’s other children were doing at school and sports… Specifically, with that football thing I’d never been any good at. Finally, one day, I couldn’t take the hurt anymore.
My father and my stepmother had hired a whole community center to have one of my step-siblings’ birthday parties in. I asked if I could go too, and it unraveled like a kind of emotional horror movie.
First, there was my cousin Joanne who I thought should have been on my side, spinning my sister Anna around in the air. Why was she invited? Why did I have to ask to come? Then there were the gazes of “who’s he? Has he just walked in here?” Cast by my father’s friends whom obviously had no idea who I was.
What I decided then, was simple. I would not go to my father’s house ever again unless I was invited. I would not make a scene. I just couldn’t handle the weekly emotional trauma anymore.
And I didn’t. And my Father never called me again, ever.
We did meet a few times in passing at my Grandmother’s house where I would still visit and would always feel welcome. However, if this were to happen, there were always awkward silences and, of course, more trauma in the form of tales of recent vacations. This and news of how well my stepsister Anna was doing in… Everything.
One Mother – Too Many Life Crises
I don’t really know where to start when it comes to why I made a decision to estrange myself from my mother. However, when I think of her, even now, I think of her screaming. There was always something wrong. Every day there was a new calamity to scream about.
I remember once getting an almost pristine school report and my mother being ecstatic. Then, a few hours after dinner, my bedroom door flew open. Apparently, my report wasn’t as pristine as I thought. Apparently, I wasn’t applying myself as well as one of my teachers thought I might be able to in Art.
It wasn’t just me who would suffer my mother’s rages. The latest stepfather or interim lover was usually who my mother’s psychological target practice would start with. He, just like my sisters and I, would then try to deflect her rage onto whoever else was in the room.
My House Was Not a Place For School Friends
Very quickly as a child, I learned never to invite a friend to my house. I would go to friends’ houses and witness a completely different family normal. There was never a time bomb mother ticking in the kitchen. There were snacks, nice questions like, “Do you want something to eat, love?” And “What’s with this bloody new art teacher? What’s her problem?”
Conversely, if I ever took friends home, my mother might act for a while like a normal parent. She knew the script of offering snacks and making small talk. But the minute any friends were gone, kindly personas fell away to become, “Do you think I’m made of money? Look at my carpet in the kitchen! Bloody dirty boots trampling in everywhere!”
There were also times when my mother would switch from being a welcoming, nice lady, to a hate-filled “you’ve destroyed my day by bringing people here,” woman, before any friends I took home were actually off the premises. This resulted in what friends I had knowing that I had a bat-shit crazy mother.
There Were Also Vampires
Was it abuse? I don’t know. However, I remember one stepfather, Gary, and I remember being terrified of him. The routine was always the same. My mother would go out, and Gary would call me into the kitchen. There, I would sit down at the table with him, and he would tell me how really he was a vampire and was going to eat me. Eventually, he would get so convincingly ravenous that I would flee.
Ideally, I would try to make it to the bathroom where there was a lock on the door, and Gary could bang against it for hours if he wanted to. Often, though, I could only make it to the lounge, where I would have to use all my strength to hold the handle on the door to stop him getting in. However, sometimes he’d stop trying to get in, and then I’d have to rush to the patio doors to make sure they were locked to stop him getting in from the garden.
“You’ve got such an imagination,” my mother used to say.
Estrangement
In the end, I was 18 when I reached my limit. For several years at that point, my mother had been with a man called Richard. I knew, though, that in recent months she had embarked on an affair. Then the day after Christmas happened.
For context, my mother never worked. She lived off government benefits, and whatever man was living with us at any time was officially just a lodger. That said, in the weeks before Christmas, my mother, my two sisters, and Richard had all enjoyed an all-inclusive Caribbean cruise. For Christmas, Richard had also bought my sisters a new computer and several other lavish gifts. What I didn’t, therefore, expect was to arrive home the evening after Christmas Day, to discover that my mother had thrown him out.
“I just don’t love him, and you can’t live like that.”
That, though, was only her side of the story.
Just two weeks later, there was a new man sat beside my mother on the sofa in the lounge. My sisters and I didn’t really know how to act. There were, therefore, whole days of awkward silences, which my mother would attempt to break by snapping and screaming, “You know what? You are all so ignorant!”
It was like my mother couldn’t compute how neither I nor my younger sisters were able to play happy families. Things were made worse by the fact that my mother’s new lover was lacking absolutely everything in the way of charisma. In fact, it often felt like he didn’t want to be in our house either.
Then it became apparent that this new man, “Derek,” was not only the owner of the company where my mother’s former lover once went to work every day (naturally, he left upon learning about his boss’s affair with his fiancée). As well as this humiliation, my mother’s lover was also the father of one of my former school bullies.
On weekends, while working at a local petrol station, it subsequently became normal for a car full of former non-school friends to pull onto the petrol station forecourt. “Yer mam’s a slag!” Someone would then shout, before laughing and speeding off.
Eventually, the humiliation, continuing crises at home, and having nowhere to escape got too much, and so I left.
Was I Right to Estrange My Mother?
As the years without having any contact with my mother began to pass, I became ever more sure that our estrangement was 100% justifiable. My mother never had the stress of having to work to pay the bills. She even bought her first house in cash after being left a sizable inheritance by her mother. On several occasions, I’ve therefore found it impossible to justify why she was so angry all day, almost every day.
Likewise, on weekdays, my sisters and I would be at school for most of the day, and for most of the weekends when I was growing up, my sisters and I would be in the care of our respective fathers every weekend. This being the case, what was it that made my mother so venomously bitter when we were together?
According to my sisters, my mother began to mellow a few years ago after meeting and marrying a man who looks like a BBC weatherman. By this time, though, I was living and working overseas. I was also largely happy. Going home to reconcile was a possibility. However, such a venture would have been prohibitively expensive.
There was also the fact that my mother knew exactly where to find me for the past several years. However, despite being told that she suffered hurt and embarrassment over our lack of ties, she never made any attempt to seek me out.
Estrangement Isn’t Ever Right But It Is Sometimes Necessary
Now that my mother has passed, I do wish that I had made some kind of attempt at reconciliation. However, I will never regret leaving a world behind me, where every day was one of hurt, stress, and humiliation. It was absolutely necessary for me to cut ties for the sake of my sanity. I’m sorry if people like my siblings don’t see it that way, but it was. That said, parental estrangement is something that must never be taken lightly.
If you feel like estrangment might be something that is necessary for you, it must always be the nuclear option, not something that happens after a one-off argument, or a single family-altering event. When you choose parental estrangement, it must also be done under the understanding that estrangement really only swaps one form of hurt for another.
You can’t simply forget your parents. For however long estrangment lasts, you will miss them.
Even if in your heart, you know it was never going to be possible, you will also miss depending on your parents like others do, when life throws you a curve ball or two. Feelings like this, as well as several other forms of complex hurt, will assail you from time to time. Moreover, if death occurs during parental estragment, all these complex feelings can start to amplify uncontrollably, eventually accumulating in the question that can haunt us forever if we’re not certain that we were right, right from the start of estrangement. Namely, “was I right?”
I’m pretty sure I was. I’m also pretty sure that anyone who is estranged from a parent needs to be, if they hope to be able to move on after a parent passes. This being the case, if you’re not so sure, and its still not too late, it’s probably time to make a quick phone call.