“I would love reconciliation with my family… life is precious,” said Prince Harry in the extraordinary interview he gave to the BBC on Friday. The Duke of Sussex has become the poster child for family estrangements. While it’s a role he’d undoubtedly prefer not to fill, his conversation highlighted the complexity of fragmented families, with all of the layered emotions, complicated dynamics and shifting perspectives that they bring.
Becoming estranged from a parent isn’t something that anyone hopes for. Most children don’t look up to the night sky and wish upon a star for a fragmented family. Nobody dreams that they will shut out a sibling or lose contact with a father, but, for many, that’s where the path of life has led us. According to Stand Alone, a now-defunct charity that did robust research into the subject, one in five families is affected by estrangement – a large figure by any proportion, and a topic that’s had more airtime in recent years.
The lead-up to my own estrangement with my mother was long and drawn out – punctuated by periods of crescendoing drama, followed by spells of calm. I’ve found that there’s a certain taboo about estrangement.
People won’t be openly hostile, but I’ll sometimes feel a quiet judgement that I should have tried harder, or tolerated more; that I’ve somehow failed as a family member and should have weathered the storm. It’s an opinion that’s shifting, and perhaps not as pervasive as it used to be, but one that still lingers in society, dismissing people as “snowflakes” for removing themselves from untenable situations.
Reasons for estrangement greatly vary – from differing cultural values to separation due to divorce, or, in my case, the result of a volatile relationship. For me, the last straw was overhearing a conversation my mother was having about me last March.
Hearing her speak poorly of me is something I’ve been used to since I was a child. Every now and again, as I got older, I’d stop talking to her for periods of time – sometimes months, sometimes a year – and that would usually reset the relationship. She’d be more careful with her words – but, inevitably, something trivial would set her off and the cycle would start again.
All my life, I absorbed her words, assuming them to be correct and assimilating them into my being. But now, as an adult with a family of my own, I don’t want to take on the burden of these slurs. I no longer accept my mother’s words as unquestionably true.
When I asked psychotherapist Amy Bojanowski-Bubb about estrangements, she highlighted that “sometimes the most compassionate choice for yourself is to step away.” Which was, for me, exactly what my decision came down to. I blocked her number without any desire to communicate my reasons why. But, when she started trying to communicate with me via my husband, I knew that I owed it to everyone to clarify the situation, and sent her an email explaining how I felt.
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My family remains in contact with my mother, but they respect and understand my decision. Given that – like Harry and his father – we now live in different countries, it’s easy for everyone to work around the situation, and less taxing to navigate than you might expect. Perhaps the only collateral damage of the circumstance is that my children don’t have a grandmother, something I’m in two minds about.
On the one hand, I feel like it’s unfair of me to stand in the way of a familial relationship, preventing the formation of a bond that I so enjoyed as a child. But, on the other hand, I don’t see any benefit in my children spending time with someone who ostensibly loathes me and has caused me so much pain over the years. Ultimately, however, it’s out of my hands – physical distance has dictated the impossibility of casual meet-ups. Even if I wanted to, it’s illegal to send a couple of toddlers on a flight to America without supervision.
I often wonder how other people with estrangements feel – I know a few in my situation, but we aren’t close enough to get into the weeds of our dysfunctional families. I often find it strange to be alone in my estrangement – I don’t really know what I’m supposed to think in my circumstances, and sometimes I feel guilty about the fact that I don’t really miss my mother. For me, the painful and overwhelming part of the whole ordeal was the years and decades that it took to get to this point; now, in the aftermath, it’s a relief.
When we stopped talking, it was as though a shadowy presence was evicted from my headspace, kicked out by the authorities and forced to find another brain to squat in. It was something that I didn’t even know was there until it was gone; so inextricably linked with my thoughts and emotions – always making me second-guess myself and question my own motives. Now, in its absence, there’s nothing. A wonderful, liberating, glorious nothing that leaves me alone and allows me to live my life in peace.
While I’d like there to be a neat ending to this story – some kind of Hollywood resolution in an airport with a teary reunion and warm embrace, I don’t think that’ll be the outcome of this tale. It took a long time and many tears, for me to get to a point where I could even fathom a separation from my mother, and now that I’m here – with all of the calmness it brings, it is incomprehensible to want to disturb that.
Unless my mother changes, or I have a radical shift in perspective, I don’t think that there’s a chance we’ll find our way back to each other. Which is ok, in a kind of not-ok way. It’s not ideal that I don’t speak to my mother, and I’m left with an empty chair at birthday parties and gatherings where the woman who brought me into the world should be. Estrangement, for me, means a perpetual hum in the background – an endless yearning never far away, wishing that she were a different mother, or I were a different daughter. An unsatisfied desire for things to have turned out another way while accepting that things haven’t.
But, despite this, I never feel regret about what I’ve chosen to do or where I am now, in a quieter place, a little enclave of respite and healing. Perhaps it’s a different kind of happy ending from the romcoms and fairytales, but, for me, it’s a form of one nonetheless.
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