“Because our relationship has been mainly long-distance since my adolescence (I know it was not by your choice, no judgment), it’s what I grew comfortable with and feels natural to me.”
– my daughter, 2023
What she fails to mention is that she was with me for twelve years, only ‘long-distance’ for two, and chose, because of those two, to cut me out of her life except by ‘long-distance’.
Now she acts like that was something she had no responsibility for, and despite the parenthetical, the statement itself IS judging as to reason and cause, and heavily implies that reason and cause are other than her own choice.
Over decades, she has systematically cut me out of every aspect of her life, and all of it is communicated in phrases like the above.
It hurts and she does not seem to care that it does. Certainly, she has no interest in a relationship with me. She used to continuously talk about ‘building trust’ as if she didn’t spend years (21 of them!) promising things only to recant the next day, ignoring me entirely until/unless she needed something, and of course, making it so very clear that in her world/thinking, all responsibility rests with me, as a parent, and none at all with her, as a child.
“I was a child! You can’t blame me for that.” (She told me this to explain how/why she rejected returning to me at the end of the two years I promised would be the longest we would need to be apart. I met my promise. I had to leave her in Georgia in 2003, and in 2005, I was ready to have her return to me in my stable location in New Jersey. She didn’t like the look of the place, so she didn’t even bother to stay the weekend. She arrived on a Friday and left that night and broke my heart in the doing.)
I have tried everything I could think of between then and 2013 to reunite us. She finally moved into my Seattle home (basement apartment) in June of that year, but with a month, was moved out to be with her boyfriend and later, husband.
They eloped because she didn’t want me at her wedding.
They ‘forgot’ to tell me when she went into labor with her first child.
They refused to allow me to visit and after two hours of waiting without any update, I gave up.
They didn’t tell me at all about her second pregnancy or birth. I learned about it on Facebook.
I have yet to have spent more than an hour with my first grand-daughter, and no time whatever with my second.
When they moved to San Marco, CA in 2017, they did not give me the address until I begged for it.
If you ask my daughter, she couches everything in language that makes it clear that I’m not supposed to have any desires or wants that she should have to consider, and that asking for that consideration is unreasonable (given her preference for long-distance relationship).
I gave up on her on November 11, 2023, after she basically told me she’s willing to see me homeless than to help me when I was in crisis. I told her I am tired of having ‘non-belonging’ from her all the time and that I reject the crumb she is willing to give because it costs the constant invalidation of my being and needs.
I am angry, hurt, and weary. But I suppose I could say that this is the last abandonment/neglect I will experience from family in this life.
Small blessings? I guess. Moving on.