My Parents Haven't Spoken to Me in 13 Years
This past fall, I sang the National Anthem at a major sporting event. It was a proud moment; I'd dreamt of becoming a professional singer one day, and now here I was performing in front of more than 70,000 people. Later, I was at a party when a friend came over and congratulated me. She told me how she had her husband, who’d missed the performance, listen to a recording - but she wouldn’t just let him listen on his phone. She had him wear headphones to get the full experience. I flashed back to my childhood, when I loved putting on headphones and immersing myself in the melodies of my favorite artists. My mom, who also liked to sing and was a member of our church choir, would say things like, “You have a good voice, but it’s never going to be good enough that someone would listen to you with headphones on.” Without knowing it, my friend had just proved my mother wrong: I might not be good enough to be my mother's daughter, but I was a good enough singer.
The ironic thing about my estrangement story is that my mom used to be my best friend. Some of my favorite memories of our time together involve these big shopping trips - we’d get dressed up and drive over to the mall, where we'd hit the makeup counter first thing. My mom didn't speak her love often, but she’d shower me with attention and makeup and clothes on those days and it felt good. Without question, her Love Language was gifts.
Outside the safe haven of the mall, however, I felt consumed by her nit-picking. Some days it was my singing, other days it was the piano. During one recital I messed up, as kids sometimes do. Mortified, I ran off stage. When my mom found me, she didn’t offer comfort or encourage me to get back out there. She said, “I can’t believe you messed up, that was so embarrassing.”
It was a million little comments like that over the course of my life that made me feel like, no matter what I did, I’d never live up to her standards. If I wrote something for class and showed it to her, she insisted on rewriting it. If I forgot to unload the dishwasher, she flew into a rage. Afterward, she’d act as if nothing had happened. Being around her was like walking through a landmine - you never knew what would set her off or how bad the damage would be.
A Downward Spiral
Shortly after I turned 16, something between us broke beyond repair. Part of it was me being a teenager and trying to assert my independence. Religion also played a role. In high school, I started to question my faith. When I told my mom I didn’t want to go to church as much, she was irate. I tried talking to my dad about it, but he said it was my own fault that she was acting this way. I shouldn’t have provoked her and made her so angry.
She was also grappling with her own demons. In the late '90s, my dad's job relocated our family. No one in the family wanted to go, but my mom took it particularly hard. It meant she had to leave her custom-built dream house in our current town. Whereas I started looking at it as a chance to reinvent myself, my mom fell into a deep sadness.
In our new town, I made tons of friends and was finding acceptance and love outside of my family for the first time. This just made Mom tighten the reins. Any time I asked her if I could go do something, like visit a local water park or see a movie, she piled on tasks I had to complete first. As time wore on, we grew increasingly unhappy in each other’s company.
Not until I went away to college did I begin to understand how dysfunctional my relationship with my mother really was. While my friends spoke to their families often - in quick bursts of 10- to 15-minute check-ins - my Sundays involved marathon discussions with my mother, which were always negative and emotionally draining. She constantly asked about church, where I was going, with whom, and how often. Once, when she found out I’d gone to see an R-rated movie, she was furious at me for weeks. Another time I shared with her that I had stayed out late playing cards with some new friends I’d met at church. I remember her saying, “What did people think when you were coming in like that so early in the morning? You should be worried about your image, people might think you were out doing other things all night.” Still, every week I’d suffer through these calls because I wanted a relationship with my mom, even if it made me unhappy at times.
Eventually during my sophomore year of college, I decided to seek out the free counseling services on campus. I so badly wanted my mother to love me that I sought out professional help to help me identify and "fix" whatever it was that was wrong with me. For my first session, I brought binders full of the emails my mom and I had exchanged to give him a sense of our dynamic. He looked them over and then he said something that shocked me: He said I wasn’t the problem. Obviously, he couldn’t diagnose my mom without seeing her, but he said it seemed like she had some issues that had nothing to do with me.
That was a game-changer. My therapist helped me see that whatever I did, it would never be enough. My mom had to be willing to meet me halfway. The one thing I could do, my counselor suggested, was ask her to get help. I tried broaching the topic with my dad once; I told him there was the possibility that mom was sick, and that she could get help. But he wasn’t open to talking to her about it, and that was that.
Instead, things continued getting worse: In 2001, the summer before my junior year, my parents cut me off financially. When I learned I needed to have my wisdom teeth removed and needed my parent’s signature in order for their insurance to cover it, they refused. In pushing them to sign, they took me off their insurance and I almost lost my in-state tuition as well. My church ended up paying the $2,000 for me to have dental surgery, and my pastor and counselor wrote letters to my school, ensuring I could keep a lower tuition rate.
Making the Call
When I graduated in 2003, I joined the Navy. A few years into my service, having not spoken to my parents since the insurance incident, I decided to make one last attempt to re-build my relationship with them. The day I called happened to be the day of my younger sister Laura*'s high school graduation - I didn’t even know, that’s how out of the loop I was by then - so they said they’d call me back. When we finally spoke about a week later, they made it clear I had some “wrongs” to make up for if I wanted to be back in their good graces. Like when I left for college, I had taken some VHS tapes of a children's series that had been really important to me growing up. Now, 8 years later, they wanted them back. To make amends, I gifted them the entire series on DVD, but they dismissed the gesture as frivolous and wasteful with my money. They were also selling their house and I had heard houses show better with fresh flowers, so I surprised them by having two arrangements delivered. In response, I got a lecture about how I’d chosen roses, which die too fast.
The final straw came a few weeks later. I was talking to my dad on the phone and he was complaining about having to pack up all of my old stuff before their move. I said he could leave it all with me. But he said no, that I hadn’t been around so I didn’t deserve to have those things. I was supporting myself and serving my country, but that still didn’t make me good enough. I was fed up.
“You know what? Leave it on the side of the road or donate it, no one is making you keep it," I said. And it must've hit a nerve.
"We will be changing our numbers and we have decided not to give you our new address," he responded. "You are a poison to this family and we no longer want to communicate with you."
I couldn’t even feel sad. That conversation had been such a long time in the making that I was honestly relieved to have a resolution, even if it wasn't the one I wanted.
It’s been more than 12 years since that phone call, and we haven’t spoken since. In that time, I married my husband and we had a son. After 10 years working as the music director for our church, I left to start my own business. My biological parents weren’t there for any of this, but that's okay because my chosen family was. When I was in college, I started spending time with my best friend's family and her parents have since informally adopted me as one of their own. Today, I call my best friend's mother "mom" and my son calls her by a cute nickname for grandma.
One thing that was especially hard about being estranged from my family was losing touch with my siblings. I really missed my little sister, Laura. I thought about her often over the years, wondering what she must think of me, knowing that our parents likely hadn’t said kind things. I was shocked when, in 2011, I received a letter from her. In it she sought to reconnect, and I was so happy to hear from her. Up to that point, a part of me had wondered if my family really had been better off without me. But speaking with Laura over the phone and in person, and realizing through our conversations that we’d grown up with similar unpleasant memories and feelings, made me feel more validated.
Amazingly, it never felt awkward. We just accepted that we had this big gap and picked up where we’d left off.
When I tell people I’m estranged from my parents, they always want an explanation. The assumption is that something really big must have happened to have caused this, but the truth is it was just a lot of little things that accumulated over time. I’m very involved with my church and a lot of times in religious settings, because it’s believed that your original mom and dad are chosen for you by God, people think if you’re not still in a relationship with them, that’s wrong. People will say things like “I’m praying for you to get back in good graces with your birth mom and dad.” Sometimes people get it and sometimes people don’t, and that’s just part of life. So I always put it in this context: You wouldn’t encourage me to return to any other abusive relationship, so why is encouraging this okay?
Today, I feel very at peace without having my biological parents in my life. Having my son did help me understand my mom a little better. Even though my in-laws and adopted family and friends all chipped in to help us during those first few blurry months as new parents, there were still moments when I thought I couldn’t make it another day. That’s when I thought about what motherhood must have been like for my own mom. She didn’t have any family nearby to help her, and I can see how that could make you could resent your child or else form an unhealthy bond with them. After all, it’s hard for any parent to let go when their child grows up and starts making decisions for themselves as adults. But when you’ve made that child your whole life, the only piece of your life, that transition can be devastating. I think this is the core of what went wrong between my mom and me; I had to grow up and she can’t forgive me for becoming my own person.
Knowing that my chosen family is there for me, no matter what, has allowed all those little nicks and cuts from my biological parents to heal. The scars that my family estrangement caused may still show occasionally, but know I know I am stronger for them.
*Names have been changed.
('You Might Also Like',)
