How I Became The Super-Villain In My Adult Child’s Story, And Why I Finally Stopped Defending Myself
J Walters | ShutterstockYou ever write a piece because you feel compelled to, not because you want to? Yes? Then I hope you’ll give me grace for my story. Not pity. Not agreement. Just a pinch of understanding. That’s all I’m asking of you.
If you’re an estranged parent, or an adult child who has gone no contact with a parent, you already know how sensitive, divisive, and vulnerable these conversations can be. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of parents, adult children, and families across America are impacted by estrangement.
People are hurting on both sides of the divide. Since I wrote about my daughter drifting out of my life two years ago, much has changed. I have been moving through the five stages of grief that estranged parents experience. At times, it has been brutal.
I have only one child. She was wanted. Immensely. In 2021, after I’d moved abroad, I came face to face with the truth about our relationship:
After I’d moved abroad, I came face to face with the truth about our relationship: I was not a priority in my daughter’s life
When I called, she was busy. Promises to call me back were often broken. In 2020, she told me why our relationship lacked depth and vulnerability. I had been “self-absorbed” while raising her, she said matter-of-factly. That, she explained, was why she never came to me with her problems.
Shame, sadness, and shock washed over me. Why? I had failed my beloved, and what’s worse, I hadn’t even known I’d been so emotionally neglectful until that moment.
This isn’t an excuse. It’s a reason. A legitimate one. I was still healing from the abuse, abandonment, and emotional neglect that I’d suffered as a child.
The five stages estranged parents go through
fizkes | Shutterstock
I spent years in shock, the first stage of grief. Admittedly, it never occurred to me to permanently cut my parents out of my life.
From the time I was born until my mid-twenties, my minister father was either abusive or emotionally absent. I was certain he hated me. Still, when I recognized his bids for connection, I allowed him back into my life. Six years later, he was killed in a car accident. I never regretted offering him forgiveness.
My mother, a Christian, was stoic, emotionally distant, and reticent. My siblings and I taught her how to say “I love you.” After healing my father's wound, anger toward my mother suddenly rose to the surface. We were never emotionally close. Still, I couldn’t imagine going no contact.
We are living in different times. Many adult children are cutting abusive, toxic, narcissistic parents out of their lives. No judgment here.
But not every parent who has been pushed out of their child’s life or forced into no contact is toxic, abusive, or narcissistic.
Estrangement is strange. The stories are often one-sided. Parents’ stories are invalidated. “No child,” people who don’t know what they’re talking about will say, “goes no contact with loving parents.”
They are wrong. I had my shortcomings, but I was a loving parent.
Estrangement is complicated because the adult child’s story isn’t the whole story
Still in shock, I cried my way through the self-blame stage. I’m not above accountability. I love my daughter. Our relationship was once the most important relationship in my life. Now my relationship with myself, my peace, and my life are.
I’m old school. I like to talk. I like to hear the voices of the people I love. She would text but not call because she said, “I get anxiety when I talk to you.” Got it. No problem.
And then she asked (and of course I said yes) to spend eight days with me. I didn’t question it then, but months later wondered if I still lived in the States, instead of a bustling beach town in Mexico, would she have visited me?
I worked on my communication skills. There’s a strong possibility they needed retooling. I’m a lawyer and a mother: both roles lean toward giving advice, even when it’s not requested. I worked to stop. I endeavored to treat my daughter like another grown woman. If I wouldn’t say it to a sister-friend, out of respect, I have no business saying it to my grown daughter.
During one of Oprah’s gatherings on estrangement, a once estranged daughter asked how to have difficult conversations with her mother whom she’d reconciled. Dr. Anita Phillips, LCSW-C, a trauma therapist, turned to her and gently said, “You’ve got to raise that little girl within you first.”
Emotional age often lags behind chronological age. Emotional maturity requires healing work. Lots of it. For years, I walked on eggshells. Nothing I said or did was right.
Once you become the villain in your child’s story, everything you do or don't do becomes evidence of how heartless you are
The desperation stage is downright demoralizing. It’s only after you exit it that you realize how chasing, begging, bargaining, and attempts at shaming or guilting your adult child into reconnecting cost you your dignity.
I have no regrets about doing what I believed would bring my daughter closer to me. Did it work? No. We haven’t spoken in months.
What’s new is the stage I’m in now: Acceptance. Stage five. A place I couldn’t imagine ever being in.
But before acceptance comes anger. I’d like to tell you anger came and went, but that would be a lie. It still visits from time to time. I let it speak. Tell me what’s still unprocessed? Show me what it’s trying to heal in me.
Being a mother was part of my identity, not my whole identity. I had to remember that. I had to remind myself that I am a valuable person whether my daughter wants a relationship with me or not.
I still sometimes get angry at her for not seeing that value, for not seeing me as I see myself, as many others see me: kind, wise, loving, worthy of her time and attention. But you can’t make anyone want, love, or value you.
Healing isn’t linear. Though I no longer wake up in the mornings soaked in grief and sorrow, and I’ve stopped obsessively thinking and worrying about my daughter, I am not completely done crying.
We stopped traveling, making memories, and laughing together: that breaks my heart. I tear up when I miss her intellect, wit, giggle, innocence, our running jokes. Like now, as I write these words.
The daughter I now know isn’t the one I raised
JLco Julia Amaral | Shutterstock
The daughter I raised was sweet, sharp, kind, talkative, opinionated, confident, witty, full of laughter, and generous. She was like a little Buddha, wise beyond her years.
I won’t go into detail about what caused me to go no contact with my child. I will say this: after five years of pleading and pining for a relationship with her, I have peace now.
No more collapsing, chasing, begging, or bargaining.
No more thoughts of self-deletion.
No more desperation, despair, and depression.
No more feeling manipulated, exploited, or discarded.
No more walking on eggshells.
No more shrinking, shame, or self-blame.
I crawled, limped, and eventually stood upright to walk through the five stages of grief. A few realizations are helping me get to the other side of the pain, reclaim my dignity, and remember who I am: a human being deserving of love and respect, who gave birth to a beautiful soul thirty-one years ago.
One of the most provocative revelatory ideas I had was about motherhood, something once considered sacred: Maybe motherhood isn’t what we’ve been socialized to believe it is. Perhaps I am nothing more than a vessel through which my daughter’s soul chose to enter this world.
Kahlil Gibran’s famous poem "On Children" reminds us: “Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They came through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.”
Imagining myself as a portal gives me my life back. What if all I was called to do was allow my daughter to come through me, nurture her into adulthood as best I could, and then step back? Let her live her life as she sees fit.
If that is so, then I have fulfilled my sacred contract.
DeBora M. Ricks, aka Oluchi, is a writer, author, attorney, and expat who lives in a bustling big little town on the Caribbean Sea.
