When I look back on our family’s journey, it feels like a series of events that spiraled out of control, leading to a permanent estrangement that is both heartbreaking and deeply painful.
When my daughter was 12, I had to let her live with her father for two years while I consulted on the road in an attempt to stabilize our family during the economic hardships of 2000-2001. I promised to have a place for her within two years, which I accomplished. But she “didn’t like” where I was living and rejected me, returning to live with her father.
Even though I did everything in my power to provide for her and ensure she had a stable home, she rejected me. This decision had profound consequences for both of us. As a result, my daughter fell into some very tough situations, including playing on the streets and being abused and nearly trafficked, getting involved with drugs, and ultimately prostituting herself for material goods and working as a stripper before eventually restoring her life and graduating sum cum laude, spending a spot of time in the professional arena, going back for her MFT, and now working on hours requirements in California.
While I applaud her ability to pull herself out of the circumstances that her choices delivered her into, I do not and will not hold responsibility for her poor choices. Had she rejoined me as intended, none of that would have occurred. Had she a better father, none of that would have occurred.
But, to this day, she blames me for ‘leaving her’ and refuses to accept that I kept my promises and that a two year, planned parting was not ‘abandonment’… if anything, she abandoned me.
She consistently refuses to own her choices around rejecting me repeatedly from 2003 to 2023.
She consistently refuses to acknowledge that I was there for her anytime she would permit it (i.e., surgeries, emergencies that she bothered to tell me about).
She consistently acts like the decisions to reject me until/unless she needed me were not her own, enacted and insisted upon.
A complicating factor that she has never accepted, processed, or understood (and which I have only had the last three years to work upon myself) is that I was an undiagnosed autistic until age 57. I feel this to be a hidden and major factor in many of our conflicts and misunderstandings:
I am not emotionally expressive. She took this to mean I did not care for or love her.
I am not emotionally reactive. She took this to mean her feelings and thoughts held no meaning to me.
I am a blunt communicator. She took this to mean I was ‘abusive’ and ‘mean’ to her.
I feel that she does not realize or wish to understand these things, nor allow them to adjust her perspective; rather, she has punished me for over 21 years for things I cannot change about myself and to this day, maintains a false narrative that both mischaracterize and malign me as a mother and a human being.
Finally, in late 2023, I gave up. I no longer have any trust that she will fulfill any promise she makes, and while I’ve spent the last 21 years trying and then taking breaks from the hurt and stress of trying, she has done very little, let alone worked at trying to reclaim our relation and family.
She actually told me once that ’email, phone, and distance’ feel ‘normal’ to her as that was all she had… completely failing to acknowledge or understand that was by her own choice and edicts for over 20 years. So yes, this severance is permanent without her active efforts (which I do not estimate she will ever attempt, history to date evidencing this as the case).
I’m sure she thinks I will “try again,” but in reality, she is going to have to come to her own realizations and reach out to engage family therapy and repair this relationship if she wants me back in her life. The damage has been too deep, the trust is broken, and she needs to understand that her actions are directly responsible for the outcome of our estrangement – I have done everything I can and she has largely done nothing but reject and rebuke my efforts while fabricating untruths about our shared history and myself that are categorically and empirically untrue.
I am broke, ill, and tired. I literally have no more energy to give to this without active reciprocation from her… and it is safe to say at this point that she simply doesn’t give a damn about me nor the reality that I’ve spent nearly two and a half decades doing this on my own, clearly.
I still write and think about it because it doesn’t just go away once I make a decision. I suppose I’ll do this until I get it all out and can finally just move on. What a relief it will be to no longer care for someone who obviously has no care of or for me.
Maybe I’ll manage it before I die, but it seems unlikely. That said, I’ll tackle this work just like the rest and the further I move through it, the less it will impact my day to day, which is good because I’m tired of crying over what I lost because, in truth, I never had it at all, it seems. Perspective correction, this, and I will manage it.
That she cuts me off from my grandchildren? Par for the course. Active vindictiveness from someone who always preaches ‘unconditional love’…. also par for this course.
#done