My children and I are estranged and have been for some time. My son, now age 43, since he was 11 and very unlikely to ever be resolved/reconciled. I allowed his step-mother to adopt him in 1993 as it was the only way I knew they would stop manipulating him and stressing him over his visitations with me.
My daughter, now age 36, was more on and off again until roughly 2023, when it became clear that she only wants to be involved with me by phone or email, and being more than willing to insisting upon saying harmful, hurtful, and untrue things about both myself and our shared past.
The dirt has settled on the grave of my son’s loss, but I continue to struggle over losing my daughter and ever having any connection to my grand-daughters. I know I am choosing to let them go, but I also know I would never choose this were I not constantly feeling attacked, mischaracterized, and misunderstood.
Also, it has become clear over the last ten years that her husband has successfully engaged an isolation campaign; equally so that she chooses to remain in that box, and to re-write her own story, re-framing herself as abused (she wasn’t) and myself as the abuser. No amount of referral to known facts can shift this as, apparently, she needs to believe this new ‘truth’.
She became quick to proclaim ‘being hurt’ by something I said and, most frequently, it was simply pointing out how hurtful she was being toward me. Apparently, she’s allowed to claim and say any manner of untruth and I’m supposed to hold space for it as truth, even when there are third parties who clearly refute it and glaring attribution errors in this new narrative.
To be clear, our lives were hard at the best of times, and I know that she didn’t get what she needed from me emotionally. Being (until 2023) an un-diagnosed autistic human, I’m coming to learn and coming to terms with how and why this was the case. Despite this, I have always been open and overt in my support of/for her as well as my love for her (even if I do not have the capacity to be neurotypically performative in the ways she prefers)… but now that she has a new narrative to support her, she doesn’t want ‘actual me’ at all; she prefers the caricature she’s created, as she has often stated in past, “It’s what I’ve become used to, so it is my preference.” (paraphrased)
The reality that what she “has become used to” is precisely what her husband and now, she, have fabricated to substitute for actually coming to the table and hashing things out? Ignored, of course.
It is hard not to slide into anger. No one likes to have their character assassinated, their actual being rejected and replaced with a denigrating and dismissive daguerreotype made up of only the errors along the way.
I remember very clearly that the first thing her (then) boyfriend said to me on meeting over dinner was, “Man, she is really loved.” He then promptly did everything in his power to isolate her from me. And succeeded. I don’t even think she knows that this kind of manipulation is common in men. I do know she can never actually hear this from me. And so it goes… and did go.
The hard part for me is that I know she needs me, but I can’t take how she blithely continues to mischaracterize me; there’s a constant thread in all her communication and language that asserts negative traits to me, of me, alongside an ultimatum that I must always accept and agree with them… or else I lose access. In some ways, my choice to let go is largely due to this. I have never required some ‘sunshine and lollipop’ version of our history. But I also will not allow clear falsehoods about me, my intentions, motivations, and actions; particularly when she refuses to actually discuss any of it. She knows this and, I think, has been using it against me. It has become the new par for this course.
I had hoped she was serious in her offer of family therapy, but it never materialized; I do not think she understands the loss of trust that has occurred for all the broken promises by her, over decades. She once apologized for it, but seems to think that the words magically healed the wounds. I think of the analogy of the broken plate – does saying ‘I’m sorry’ magically restore the plate to its prior, unbroken state?
I have tried to have conversations with her about our history and she never wants to talk about it. Says she doesn’t need to… Then she says something to me in that ‘accept this as our shared truth or else’ way and I cut communications again, because I know she means that and I also know that’s not how healthy relationships work.
I know this because I now understand how healthy relationships work in ways I did not previously. I’ve done that work and I get why she’s not interested in it – it’s hard and it means taking on perspective that will unravel less nuanced ones. It’s how I came to understand that she’s trying to protect herself by avoiding it all. But she’s also insisting I do the same, and I just can’t. It hurts too much to be so persistently negated in every way. To be cut out, left out, and told that my perspective is invalid, told that I deserve this.
In the end, I must accept she needs me to be as she has reconstituted me until such time as her own perspective can evolve enough to find the nuance in herself. There’s nothing I can do to nurture that nuance, as she has decided that all such attempts are nothing more than me, attempting to sop my own ego, pride, et al. The perfect catch-22, it seems; only it is destroying and eroding the one relationship that actually lasted through it all, even if she cannot permit herself to see and understand it as such.
I hope she’s really getting what she needs out of it. As I recently told my husband, if that actually works for her, I’m making my own peace with it, slowly, over this distance and silence and time. But I will never believe, feel, or think that this is, could be, or should be an binary outcome. After all, what I want most for her is to be happy. It is not wrong to have wished or wanted to be part of that happiness, too.
She wants nothing from me, she says. So I have told her I intend to respect that and have ended my communication with her and asked her to respect that. It’s what she wants, purportedly, and I have given it to her in the only way she’s ever been willing to allow – without reservation.
If she wants this relationship, she’s going to need to break her own perspective long enough to recognize and understand those words are the only ones she would accept, and to change them, she must first break her own inflexibility and this time, make the move, reach out, and do more than pretend that her own perspective is the only one that matters when the context is a relationship.
Had she ever bothered to work with me on this, she would understand I’ve been doing this work all along. But I cannot do it alone, and I’m tired of trying to shoulder it all by myself, or pretending it’s possible to reconcile with an unwilling perspective.
So be it.