It’s finally the end of the year, that dark time (literally dark in upstate NY) of year when everyone reflects on the past year and where the future might take them. There has been much buzz on social media lately about whether or not people going ‘no-contact’ with their families is a generational trend, with apparently Oprah and Mel Robbins weighing in, telling people who have done this to ‘make up’ with their families before it’s ‘too late.’ This is no different than those well-meaning family members that all who have gone no-contact have who told us “well that’s your mother” or “you’ll regret this one day,” once again putting the blame and responsibility for reconciliation squarely on the child’s shoulders, thereby expiating the parents’ responsibility in causing the desire to go no-contact in the first place.
Here’s the thing: people have been estranged from their families since humans have existed. Siblings have gone off to make their way in the world, women have run off and gotten married to escape home; people have left enmeshed families to strike out on their own. Maybe not everyone in these situations has become completely estranged, maybe they’ve maintained an illusion of contact with their families, sending letters or making occasional calls, but still never bodily returning to visit once they’ve left. This is not a ‘trend’ or a ‘Gen-X’ thing, it’s part of life for many. We are just hearing about it more now because of social media and widespread therapy.
Personally, I don’t think adhering to the nuclear or extended family well into adulthood is healthy or natural. Animals don’t do this, and what are we but animals? Your parents are supposed to nuture you into adulthood, to give you that unconditional love and security you need to become a resposible adult and member of society. If you’re like my husband, and you were lucky enough to have good parents who did this more or less successfully, you grow up and move out and build your own family. It’s the circle of life. There are no perfect parents; there is instead a job to be done, and ‘doing right’ by your kids really is nothing more than nuturing, putting the kids first by making them feel loved and cared for, so that they can develop identities of their own and eventually seek their own way in the world. Healthy parents have a sense of their own identify and individuality, and want the same for their kids.
It is when parents abdicate this responsibility–whether because of their own developmental issues or a personality disorder–parents who jealously hold onto their kids and try to dominate and control every aspect of their lives, and in extreme cases, abuse them–that, if they’re lucky, the children eventually grow tired of this and break away from the parents in order to live. There are those of us who had a ‘failure to launch’ situation where our needs weren’t properly met as kids, so we keep trying to please our parents well past the expiration date.
I went no-contact in May 2023 when I moved out of Louisiana and back to New York with my husband and daughter, without saying a formal goodbye to my birth family. They knew we were leaving, they didn’t know when exactly, but they knew. I’d informed my mother and sister that we were leaving the previous June. The for-sale sign went up in our yard in April, the POD was outside of our home for 30 days, then we closed on May 23rd and started driving to New York immediately afterwards. I was 47 years old when I left ‘home’ again for the second and final time. I haven’t spoken to anyone in my family since. It was finally an end to what I now see was a lifelong effort to gain my mother’s love and acceptance. Time and reflection have shown me that she likely never loved me, and that is not an easy thing to admit to yourself, that you weren’t loved by your parent. I had plenty of other family (now dead) who did love me, but for my mother, I think that I was something that happened to her (pregnant at 18), not someone she loved.
Why did I move back to Louisiana after 15 years away? I still beat myself up over this life-altering and nearly marriage-ending decision. All I can say is, such is the power that a withholding parent’s approval can wield over a child who has always been seeking that approval, I guess. The even bigger mystery is how quickly my mother’s desire for me to move home evaporated once I got there. Her best friend told me once off-handedly that, before we moved back, my mother used to wax on about how us moving back would make her ‘so happy.’ A couple of months of me and my 4-year old living with her (the situation was supposed to be temporary until my husband came down to join us after selling the house), that quickly turned into selfish rage and cruelty, directed at me.
My sweet four-year old daughter, who would gleefully run out to greet her grandmother as she arrived home from work every day, and me, contributing to the household groceries and cleaning, we were suddenly a burden to my mother, something to complain about. She absolutely would not help me with my daughter, would never even give her a bath, and had no sympathy for the fact that I was missing my husband and partner, while also working a new job and taking my daughter to and from daycare daily. I rarely went out, and I remember her watching my daughter exactly once when I had a company Christmas party to attend. (It became such an ordeal to get her to watch her own granddaughter that I just stopped asking.) I gave my mother a pass for a long time about her changed attitude towards us being there, ascribing it to her being stressed about having too many people in her house. Other than the two of us there was my grandmother with Alzheimer’s, plus my younger sister going through a separation that often landed her on my mom’s couch during that time. It wasn’t until a few years later, after my mother breezily said to me, TWICE, to make sure I didn’t miss it, “Well I guess I’m not close to your daughter because I didn’t really know her as a baby,” deftly blaming me for her lack of relationship with my daughter because we lived in New York, I finally saw more clearly than ever that my mother was never going to change. Not only was she not going to change, she was in fact going to perpetrate her disdain for me into the next generation with my daughter, that’s when the scales fell off my eyes and I knew I had made the wrong decision to move back to Louisiana. That decision will haunt me for the rest of my life.
These things are on my mind again this time of year. I have made a clean break at this point, and I no longer have any feelings of guilt about it. Taking my sister’s lead, I no longer send Christmas presents to my nieces; why do I need to keep up the pretense if she’s not? So for someone like Oprah (who apparently was estranged from her own family) to tell people they need to suck it up and make amends with their families, it’s really a slap in the face. The cycle was never going to break for me, and at some point, you have to choose yourself and your own family, if for no other reason than simple self-preservation. I see now that I internalized a lot of things growing up as being ‘my fault’ when I shouldn’t have. My mom wasn’t all bad, I wasn’t physically abused (except for those few years when she let her boyfriend beat the shit out of me with a belt as a kid–a story for another time), but that doesn’t mean I owe her a relationship after all of the hurt she has caused me, intentional or not. She will never change, will never accept responsibility for her actions. She doesn’t think she has done anything wrong, ever. I am 100% sure she has made all of this my fault in how she explains it to my extended family back home. The nasty words she spoke to me back in September 2022 still sometimes haunt me: “No one cares what you think.” Ok then, I’m out. And this time, I mean it.
Chicken Stew 