Rubber Bands and Chewing Gum

I read the other day that estrangement between parents and their adult children is becoming an increasingly common phenomenon – especially amongst millennials (my generation). I don’t think estrangement has suddenly become ‘fashionable’. It isn’t all about the ‘snowflake’ kids punishing their loved ones for absolutely no reason. But if my current social media feed is an accurate reflection of the landscape out there then that seems to be the current direction of travel. It’s currently front-page news that Brooklyn Beckham is estranged from his parents.

Of course, we can only speculate what has gone on in other people’s families and we are not party to the full story – indeed, I actually haven’t followed the Beckham story at all other than I saw that Victoria has just got her first solo number 1 in the UK singles chart off the back of what I can only assume is the general public siding with her over whatever has come out in the news recently.

I started writing this post almost immediately after my last post about ‘The Ache Of Estrangement’ and found that I still had more to say, but this (6000 words – eek) has been sitting languishing in my open tabs for about a month and I just haven’t been able to finish it because…my life went down toilet as I (once again) predicted. More on that next time/soon.

So, ignoring the current celebrity estrangement story I’ll go back to talking about a bog-standard person’s experience – i.e mine, because that’s really all I know about.

There are loads of reasons why people choose to put distance between themselves and their family of origin or even choose to go completely no contact.  I think society and ideas around parenting have changed A LOT in the last twenty years and maybe these days we are encouraged to do ‘self’ work- and whether we like it or not you can’t really do that without delving into your childhood and realising that the environment you grew up in shapes you…for good or ill.

I don’t think going no contact necessarily comes from a place of ‘blaming’ our parents for our problems and then cutting them off – although I think it is often framed that way. It’s way more complex than that. Fundamentally, it is about relationship and rupture and damage that feels irreparable and making a conscious choice to step away from the pain even if it hurts to do so. Let’s be real, most of us want to be loved by our families and will do (and have done) almost anything to try and make the smallest breadcrumb of ‘love’ be enough… it really is the last straw when we can’t take it anymore and walk away. And whilst you might think that would feel a relief, actually it just opens up a whole load of extra grief about ‘what wasn’t but should have been’.

There have always been good (or ‘good enough’) and bad parents over the generations – it can’t be that there’s just been this massive uptick in crap parenting in the last forty or so years, can it?! I mean I guess it is possible, but I suspect maybe we are just more aware now than ever that people are opting out of toxic familial situations because we see it talked about more because of things like social media.

I wonder if the move towards ‘divorcing our parents’ (!) has come about partly because people are getting better at extricating themselves from all kinds of toxic relationships these days?

We are less likely to stick in crappy jobs with crappy bosses. And I think women, especially, are less inclined to stay in shitty marriages because they don’t need to fear the consequence and stigma around divorce anymore. The shaming and blaming of women in the 70s and 80s is gone (ish). Women can support themselves now in well-paid jobs, they can be financially independent – get credit cards, loans, and have bank accounts without a male cosignatory (only since 1975 though!!!) and aren’t so forced into staying in abusive set ups because they physically can’t leave which I am sure was the case in the past – that’s not to say that some people aren’t desperately trapped still. But, perhaps this greater freedom to leave bad situations is now leaking out into how we deal with our wider families too? I don’t know.

I definitely think the ‘blood is thicker than water’ narrative that we’ve been sold is total bullshit, though, and many of us now realise that biology doesn’t mean anything, that we don’t need to “shut up” and “suck it up” when we are treated poorly by our parents or siblings or wider relations (although that is generally what we have been told)… and we are so grateful for our chosen families who really show us what it is to be loved and cared for and valued. Or at least I am.

When you are born into an environment that has volatile and hostile members in it and a family system that not only expects, but demands, compliance we quickly learn as kids how to behave. My hypervigilance has been there for as long as I can remember and I am in no doubt that it was developed as a survival tool. Kids learn how to adapt to the environment they are in and I feel like I have always been a shapeshifter in my life. I see myself as a bit of a chameleon…and until I started therapy, I didn’t understand that my ability to ‘fit in’ anywhere came from my needing to be quickly able to read a room and work out how I needed to behave in order to stay safe.

Not only do I have chameleon skills, I also have mastered the art of wearing an invisibility cloak, being able to hide and make myself smaller to not been seen, heard, and seemingly not have any needs at all. Whilst it was undoubtedly useful to be able to do this as a child, it has meant that I have often failed to take up space in my adult life a lot of the time. I was the perfect people pleaser. I think this can be especially seen in how my relationship with Em played out. I was so used to trying to appease my mother and be how she needed me to be that for years and years I replayed that dynamic with Em in therapy until I simply couldn’t do it anymore…and then it all went bang this time six years ago and caused me all sorts of pain. I honestly don’t think I’ll ever recover from being called a “tick”.

I think that ending things with Em, even though it was incredibly painful to stand up for myself and challenge her when she was so bloody awful to me, started to pave the way towards me being able to step away from my mum. The maternal attachment to Em was so powerful that it felt like annihilation when it was over. The loss of Em felt like a bereavement and I had already lost my dad in a real-life death and so it felt enormous. I was getting used to losing people I loved.

And then of course everything ended with Anita and that completely broke my heart again. It was different with Anita though, because Em had always been just like my mum, cold, withdrawn, blaming, shaming and so it was familiar and part of me believed her treatment was all that I deserved, but with Anita it had been so loving and holding and caring. She gave me an experience of nurturing that I had never had before. And although it has hurt like holy hell not seeing her and I have felt so abandoned…I have survived it. So why shouldn’t I survive losing a mother that I had never really had in the first place? Like I lost someone who told me and showed me that they really loved me…what did I have to lose now?

Elle has done a lot for building my sense of self up. She has invited me to take up space in my world and to see that I don’t have to be the bottom of the pile or be done to. She has also been very willing to enter into the deep stuff with me. We have had a few ruptures but the repairs we have made have felt really good. I genuinely feel like Elle really gets me and that the relationship we have built matters. As I have got more in touch with my needs, I have also been more able express myself. I used to fear being rejected or abandoned soooo much that it would stop me from speaking up. These days I still fear rejection and abandonment – I don’t think that will ever change – but I am not willing to stay quiet and ultimately reject and abandon myself in order to keep the peace or maintain a relationship that does nothing for me.

Back to my mum, though…It’s not easy going no contact with a parent. I think this is where the media misrepresents estrangement between adult children and parents. For many of us it is not a snap decision to cut ties and never look back. For me, at least, it took years and years of being repeatedly hurt before I made the decision – last year – to put the no contact boundary with my mother in place. And I know it is absolutely the right decision for me and my kids, but I still feel sad and grieve the loss of ‘a mother’ (not ‘my mother’) every single day.

I said in my last post that I had been feeling really hurt over Christmas and then angry recently about the situation with my mother. I think the holiday season brings this stuff into super sharp focus – everywhere you look families are smiling and happy and Hallmark movies shove it even deeper down your throat. You might think I would be feeling angry AT my mum but it’s not that at all. I am actually angry with myself for allowing myself to be treated the way I have over the years and to have kept accepting it or coming back for more…like why did it take me so long to protect myself and look after the young parts of me?

I guess I always hoped that one day my mum would change, that one day she’d actually want me…or if not me…her grandkids… but the reality is she’s been how she is my whole life and just isn’t mother material. I don’t need a perfect mother – and when you read psychology theory the bar for ‘good enough’ is really quite low. Like if it were a pass mark on an exam it’s like scraping 40% and your kids still turn out ok so it’s pretty devastating to know that my mum essentially didn’t even bother to turn up and sit the paper. Why would she when she doesn’t like kids and never wanted to be a parent?

I read something the other day by a therapist who said often the people in therapy aren’t the ones that actually need to be in therapy – it’s the people who refuse to see that there is anything wrong and think therapy is a waste of time that really need to be in the room. A lot of us in therapy are hurt and have spent a lifetime trying to make a difficult person see us and respond to us in a way that we need. We believe there is something fundamentally wrong with us, we’re “too much” or “not enough” and go into the therapeutic relationship hoping to fix ourselves so we do better in the outside world.

Therapy is a place where we can practise relationships and a lot of our healing comes through rupture and repair.

Ah brill. Repair! Let’s go for that!

After years of staying quiet to keep the peace, sacrificing our needs, and shrinking ourselves we reach a point where we start to think, “if we don’t let people know how we feel they can’t really be blamed for carrying on as they are and hurting us can they?” – So, we religiously turn up and do ‘the work’ in therapy with our therapists. We learn to recognise our own needs and how to advocate for ourselves and eventually we feel brave enough to bring our long-standing hurts to our parents (or whoever else) and be vulnerable enough to enter into that painful place with them…and…you know, say our bit and then they say their bit and we repair…and hey presto we’re fixed!

But shit!!!… here’s a problem we weren’t expecting (although let’s be real – we probably were, we just hoped it wouldn’t pan out that way)!… the ‘crap parents’ just can’t meet us in it. They turn it all round on us, play the victim, get angry, avoid, make it all about them…all sorts of familiar shit gets flung…and true to form, they can never apologise.

Fuck.

And that is so hard to manage because we’ve done our bit right?

This isn’t what they show us in the movies is it?!

Usually, there’s some heart-to-heart moment and then the big hug and the ‘sorry’ and then everything runs along the ‘happily ever after’ road and the past is left behind.

Yeah, that didn’t happen for me.

And I am not stupid. I am in no doubt that my mum did the best she could with the tools she had available to her at the time, but that doesn’t mean what happened was right, and I have no idea why “I am so sorry that I hurt you and didn’t get it right sometimes but I am so very glad you have brought this to me now, and I really do want to understand and repair this with you” is so hard to say. But then, look at therapists…look how many of us play out similar conversations in the room with someone who is trained to deal with this very dynamic and still we get attacked and shamed and blamed and terminated as a result of challenging their behaviour. I brought my pain to Em, explained how the relationship was hurting me (didn’t blame her for it) explained what I needed to move forward…and instead she called me a “tick” …

Anyway, it is what it is, but back to the original point….which is…errr…. Lately I have been angry with myself for not rescuing myself from the situation with my mum (and Em and even Anita) sooner. I was thinking about some of the things that have happened and can’t really believe I didn’t go – “that’s the line, right there…that’s enough…NO MORE OF THIS!”

As a child I couldn’t leave the abusive situation I was in, and actually when I was living in it didn’t always know it was abusive (!). I remember sitting down with Em for the first time and her asking about my childhood and my distinctly saying two things in reply, “I don’t really have many memories before I am about seven but my childhood was fine” which I now know is really normal for kids who experienced a lot of ongoing trauma.

I think you can get so used to being in unsafe and volatile situations, where you witness violence and aggression, that being verbally put down or ignored, or shouted at, or whatever else seems completely normal and fine as it’s just the culture of the family – even if it doesn’t feel great. Growing up I was so used to my mum screaming and being violent towards my dad that it seemed reasonably peaceful when I only had to endure her disdain and verbal threats…and she only hit me once as a teen and so part of me feels like I did ok – even if it was a completely unprovoked attack. (I do know how nuts that sounds btw!)

I’ve spoken before here about the time my mum went wild at me over the phone and wouldn’t let me come home after visiting a friend for a week and I had to go stay with another friend, and the time she wouldn’t let me home to collect my GCSE results having been at my dad’s because she was ‘sick of me’, or the time she dragged me out of bed and threw me out the house wearing only a PJ t-shirt that barely covered my backside, no underwear, no shoes, no phone all because I was drying some laundry on my bedroom radiator. I had to walk half a mile to my friend’s house and pray she was in when I was barely seventeen. Like there was always something. I could never get it right. And I was never able to feel safe in my home environment or with my mum.

There are so many incidents of just ‘not very nice things’ that have been said and done over the years that it was just ‘how it was’ – the steady drip drip of being undermined and made to feel not good enough but also a right royal pain in the ass. Some of my childhood friends who witnessed some of my mum’s outbursts even now, thirty years later, go “Do you remember the time your mum did X…she was really fucking scary that day”. We laugh about it now, but part of me also wants to say, “If she was prepared to be like that in front of you, can you imagine what it was like when there was no one around?”

Sometimes the memories come at me in rapid fire, almost of nowhere, with no obvious trigger (which is really fun!) –the memories themselves aren’t even really all that painful to remember, that stuff is just part of the narrative – a narrative that I have recounted so many times over the years in therapy but in a largely detached way. Cognitively I know things weren’t right but I still really struggle to feel deep into well of the pain that I know is in there. Instead, it’s like all my exiled parts carry the pain in their own landscape so that I don’t have to, and it’s only when I drop into a particular part that I realise how overwhelmingly awful it all is because I feel like I might die. It’s no wonder I dissociated that away out of my conscious brain.

It’s usually been my therapists’ reactions to what I tell them that has made me realise that stuff was bad, or at the very least, not normal. It’s weird feeling little to no emotion about something in the immediate telling of it – I used to joke that there was a block of concrete between my head and heart and no emotions could get out… but seeing a therapist tear up, or wince, or actually say something validating about what a shitshow things were has meant  I have started to get in touch with feelings. Even Em, the ice queen was not immune to the things I told her…and so that’s when I knew it was bad!

These days, I am not completely insulated from the impact of what happened to me. As I say, I think this all started to change when I became aware of my system of structurally dissociated parts. Lordy, those couple of years were really rough because suddenly I FELT EVERYTHING that ALL MY PARTS experienced ALL AT ONCE. I mean that was trauma overload! The distress of my baby part, the 19-month-old, the four-year-old, the seven- and eleven-year-old parts, the fourteen-year-old, the seventeen-year-old…and of course the Critic were all very vocal and my god it was A LOT.

I am much more able to listen to and soothe my system now that I understand it, but that isn’t always the case and sometimes I still get completely hijacked and it is such a somatic response – there’s no running away from it, all I can do is try and let the feelings come.

What the parts ‘remembering’ does to my body is … ouch. Not wanting to go all Bessel van der Kolk on you here, but the body really does keep the score! The impact of recalling events from the past sees my body clench up tight, almost bracing for what comes next. I feel small. I feel frozen. I get a tightness in my chest and tension in my throat as well. I feel completely alone – isolated. Sometimes I feel like I am falling through black space and like I don’t have any structural integrity at all…I feel the pain on my insides acutely but I feel almost like a human-sized mass of unset jelly and as though I will spill out everywhere in a soggy mess. I guess what that really means is that I feel completely uncontained.

Gosh this is hard.

The fallout of childhood trauma is big. And so many of us spend years trying so hard to navigate a way through a life which feels chronically unsafe because our nervous systems have been wired to experience the world that way because of what we endured as kids. Therapists talk a lot about aiming for a ‘felt sense of safety’ but my god that’s an elusive little fucker isn’t it?

I feel like I am perpetually trying to coil a spring in a way that it just doesn’t know how to go. Even when I think I am being reasonably successful, something will happen and it ALWAYS flips back to its original patterning. It’s gutting really.

I wish that I could factory restore myself, or wipe parts of my memory because the fallout of what happened when I was growing up has really impacted my life. I’ve spent more time trying to recover from the first eighteen years of my life than I did actually living them. And even when I was living them, I tried so hard to make what was on offer ‘enough’ that I have basically spent my entire life trying to make a difficult person love me and then when that didn’t work trying to deal with why I couldn’t make that happen.

It’s devastating really. I am so sad that no matter what I did, or how hard I tried, I wasn’t able to elicit the kind of love and care I needed from the person who should have loved me unconditionally. Like we are biologically programmed to care for our babies and yet somehow that just hasn’t activated in my mother. As I said, I didn’t need a gushing ‘super mum’, I didn’t need my mum to be my ‘best friend’. I just needed someone who loved me, saw me, and created a safe enough relationship to grow up with in order mature and individuate at the right time… I do wonder if I will ever get over the damage done to me as a kid.

Still, I can’t be mad, and am not mad at the young person who had no choice but the endure what was in front of her and do what was needed to survive (become a ghost of myself and develop an inner critic that was so harsh that even my mother had nothing on it). In fact, I have nothing but compassion for my young selves. I am mad, furious in fact, with my adult self who after university tried to rebuild a relationship with her and let her back in. I feel mad that in doing so I basically let down my young parts who never deserved what happened in their childhood, and I basically allowed the abuse to continue on…only I guess I didn’t necessarily recognise it because it had taken on a different form.

Of course, as an adult who had moved out of home my mum no longer verbally abused me, and she had no power to physically scare me, or dictate my life because I didn’t live with her. Our relationship, therefore, was the best it had ever been – on the surface at least. But then I think when care has been scarce or completely absent, we literally accept ANYTHING and try and make it enough.

So, what’s been bugging me on my dog walks to make me mad? – ha.

Well, the rapid fire of ‘what in the actual fuck happened there?’ the other day was:

My wife and I had tried several rounds of IVF in order to start our family. None of it had worked and we had exhausted all our savings in the process. I got really depressed following that because I may never have known what I wanted to do as a career when I grew up (I still don’t!) but I have always known that I have wanted to be a mum. I tried to ease the ache of the reality that motherhood wasn’t for me with a puppy but it just wasn’t enough.

When the laws changed in this country around donor conception and parental responsibility, we were able to look at finding a known donor and conceive without the clinic as my wife would automatically be listed on the birth certificate as second parent and the donor could have no come back for parental rights down the line. I had no fertility issues, only a lack of sperm. So, when we found our donor, it was really exciting for us and miraculously, we conceived our daughter on the first attempt. My wife is a dab hand with a syringe! Lol.

I was soooooo happy to discover I was pregnant. Like I think it was probably the happiest moment of my life to date. We went and got an early scan to check on the little one and when we saw her little self growing inside me wanted to share the news with my mum… because…that’s what you do, right?…fucking Hallmark films have such a lot to answer for!

So, we invited my mum and her husband over for lunch and just before we were going to eat, I handed my mum the scan pictures. She knew we had been through IVF so it was no secret that we desperately wanted to start a family. My mum took one look at the picture and said nothing. Not a word. She didn’t smile. She didn’t hug me. She just put the photo down and gave me the silent treatment. I had been here so many times before, her disapproval or whatever it is was familiar,  but I honestly had not considered for one second that this would be the way she would receive the news. Even if she was feeling negatively about it most people can spit out a “congratulations”.

I went into the kitchen to breathe because whilst I was so hurt and shocked… I was also really fucking angry that once again something in my life that should be celebrated and special was shat on by the woman that birthed me. My mum’s husband came to find me after a few minutes and said that they were going home. Bearing in mind the food was in the oven and we hadn’t eaten yet… like who does that? Really?

I didn’t then hear from my mum for the next four months.

Radio silence.

No calls or texts with, “how are you?” or “how’s the baby growing?” or “do you know what you’re having yet?” or better yet, “RB I am so sorry for my reaction when you told me you were pregnant and I am sorry I haven’t been there for you. I had some complex feelings when you told me and I have worked through them and I am sorry I was a dick how can I make it up to you?”…

But no.

None of that. Like always, everything was about her. When she finally did make contact, she acted as though nothing at all weird had happened and she had no problem telling me that she felt “too young to be a grandparent” and didn’t want to be called “grandma”. I was twenty-nine at the time so this was hardly a teen pregnancy but this shows the kind of vanity my mum has. It’s insane.

But, I let it go…because I hate conflict, and to be honest this was my mum being exactly who she is and I wasn’t even really surprised that she would make my pregnancy about her.

Ever the optimist, though, at least part of me hoped that when she met the baby she’d have some kind of epiphany and maybe see it as an opportunity to make up for what went so wrong with me as a child and she would want to build something meaningful with my kid. What an idiot! Sometimes I wish I could kick my hopeful idealist self into the sea.

Surely, I should have known that things weren’t going to change (and maybe another part of me did). Why would a woman who proudly states that she “hates kids” feel any differently about my children when she couldn’t even love her own?

We ambled along for a couple of years after the birth of my daughter and whilst it wasn’t great it wasn’t too bad either – we’d meet occasionally for lunch but that was about it. There wasn’t ever any move towards more contact or any real interest in me or my daughter. She was as good as she is capable of being but my having a child didn’t improve the bond between me and my mum or forge one…if anything ‘exactly what I didn’t have’ was thrown into ever sharper focus when friends from my antenatal group shared their experiences of their parents helping with childcare, going family holidays, help with items for the babies like prams, but mostly they were just very actively involved with their new grandchildren. Ha. Lucky them.

I knew my mum would never be a hands-on grandparent but I didn’t imagine that when the shit was absolutely hitting the fan that she wouldn’t muster some kind of care but I guess nothing should have surprised me given how I was treated as a kid.  

The first massive kicker and realisation of “wow, she really is a selfish cunt!” was when my little boy was three months old and shortly before I got diagnosed with cancer. My son developed a non-blanching rash all over his legs and we were whisked into hospital and put on the high dependency unit where the hospital began treating him for potential meningitis. It was proper emergency. My wife stayed at home with my daughter who was almost three because someone needed to look after her and I called my mum in a panic having left for the hospital with just a changing bag. I explained what was going on…and she said “we leave for our coach trip today” (a coach trip round the UK that cost £200) and said to text when I had more news.

Now, if I was on the receiving end of that call from one of my kids the first words out of my mouth would be “What do you need? And what can I do?” I would drop everything and do whatever was necessary in that moment, whether that be to take over care of the grandchild at home to release my son/daughter in-law to go be with my child and their baby or to bring supplies to my child…like literally, tell me what you need and I will do it. I wouldn’t have gone on the ‘discount trip’ knowing my grandchild might actually die. But she did.

I should have drawn the line then.

The week-long stay in hospital with my son was awful. My poor tiny boy was hooked up to machines and tubes, and having to hold him on an operating table whilst they performed a lumbar puncture will stay with me forever. I was so stressed that my breast milk pretty much dried up overnight and it fell to friends to help us. It was my best friend that turned up to hospital with clothes, and toiletries and supplies for my baby and watched him so I was able to have a shower and then did tag team with my wife and looked after our daughter…and I am so grateful but it should never have fallen to a friend to do the running around when my mum lives twenty minutes away. But sure, it makes sense to go on a coach trip.

There’ve been so many more shit times where my mum just completely missed the mark – like when I had cancer (no financial help when I was not able to work but the offer for her to pay to have my eyebrows tattooed on…) and all sorts of stuff where I have edged towards explaining something that I was struggling about and it falling of completely deaf ears. I am used to that, though.

What I find most difficult and hurtful is when there is a distinct lack of care for my kids. The meningitis scare was awful…but like so many other occasions I have just sort of dumped it as ‘something that happened’ and moved on…but the cumulative effect of it all catches up with you in the end.

A couple of years ago in (Sept 2023) my son fell off his bike and the handle bars went into his belly button. We rushed him to hospital and he passed out in the A&E waiting room as we got to the desk. The crash team were called and the area was cleared as we were rushed into resus. Like that was really fucking scary… another BIG DEAL. I text my mum from the resus room to tell her what had happened and that thankfully he was conscious and no evidence of internal bleeding and her reply was “Nightmare! Glad he’s ok” and then heard nothing else.

She didn’t contact us at Christmas with even a text and the next I heard from her was March 2024… like really?

I sent messages, and of course birthday and Christmas and Mother’s Day gifts…but there’s been minimal reply and certainly no reciprocation…and again I don’t need or expect anything … but what about the kids?

Then in August 2024 my son got really sick, like really ill, and I text her to let her know that finally after a couple of months of being fobbed off by the hospital he had finally had some tests and was moving really fast through the system. Basically, the day we saw a consultant paediatrician everything went into over drive. My son was chronically underweight and his blood markers were off the chart.

I told my mum that we had been seen and that the consultant had scheduled an emergency MRI for the next day (my son’s tenth birthday).

Once again, no offer of help, or interest.

After the MRI we were sent to the specialist children’s hospital in another city and had my son had to have several procedures.

Radio silence from my mum throughout.

I was telling Elle all this stuff last week and she said, “If there was a nobel prize for cuntery it would go to your mum” and she’s so right. I think reeling of the list of “and then and then and then…” gave an insight into mine and my mum’s (lack of) relationship that she hadn’t been party to before. She, of course, knows quite a lot from my childhood, but nothing really from the last fifteen years or so, other than the fact that I decided to go no contact last February when I shared the message I had sent to my mum with her and Elle was so validating.

So yeah… it’s been a lifetime of endless fucking disappointments alongside neglect and abuse and no end of traumas…and that’s why I went no contact with my mum. It was the last resort and I could not take it anymore.

x