Estrangement

In my newsfeed this morning from The Atlantic Magazine, September 20, 2025, here is a paragraph from an article by a psychologist who specializes in family estrangement. Most families I know have experienced this in one way or another.

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter.

Updated at 4:51 p.m. ET on July 28, 2022

"Sometimes my work feels more like ministry than therapy. As a psychologist specializing in family estrangement, my days are spent sitting with parents who are struggling with profound feelings of grief and uncertainty. “If I get sick during the pandemic, will my son break his four years of silence and contact me? Or will I just die alone?” “How am I supposed to live with this kind of pain if I never see my daughter again?” “My grandchildren and I were so close and this estrangement has nothing to do with them. Do they think I abandoned them?”

I have experienced several kinds of estrangement in my family, first my aunts, who were close and were my age and with whom I grew up. We stayed fairly close until my mother died and then we drifted apart. I searched for them on-line last year and found one had died and one was in a memory care unit in Texas.

Of course there is the estrangement of divorce, my ex-husband is still alive, in Colorado. We kind of grew up together since we were high school sweethearts and married when he was drafted in 1965 or so. We were together from my age of 16 to 35, and from his 18 to 38. The company where he was employed moved to Colorado just as we were separated, and we basically never spoke again although we had a divorce decree which I signed and a couple of e-mail communications when his best friend died.

One of my sisters is estranged from the family over a dispute regarding my father's bequest of 'living rights' to his house in W.Va. to our brother. She had a house of her own and he was homeless but she wanted Dad's house too and felt she should have had it, so she has been cut off from all her siblings ever since my father died in 2011. I still send her cards but we don't speak on the phone as she is perpetually angry and embittered.

Then, the most recent estrangement is my daughter. We have had no quarrel but I assume that I am somehow emotionally disturbing to her. At some point, her communication was reduced to one or two word cordialities and answers, such as "busy, working" and "glad you are well." I ran across an article about "gray rocking" relatives that you feel are emotionally challenging/damaging and I realized that was the answer to the mystery of the extraordinary brevity and vagueness of her communications with me. I examined my own communication and realized I always said too much, shared too much, expected too much attention, and that in my own mild way, I am eccentric and spread my emotional state to others. Also, I had been told by my daughter often that I am not a good listener and I do understand I tended to make things about me. Personality is a hard habit to break and I didn't succeed in it in time to save our relationship. So, it is, in fact, my fault. Also there is the "Alice Adams" situation. My daughter is moving up the social ladder and I am permanently planted in our working class past along with my working class siblings who have varieties of addictions and behavior problems. Social class, even in America, is a hard sedimentary level to move from. I became a working class intellectual, lots of college degrees, and proper manners and diction, even a respectable career as a college professor, but inextricably tied up with my working class roots - an over sharer. My daughter was far more comfortable with her father's and step-mother's social and economic class and since they had a child and gave her a sister, that was a more palatable and organic relationship to nurture and hold on to.

One thing love losses teach you in a life as long and filled with love as mine, is how to let go. I have lost my parents, and my best friends to death, my lovers to both death and divorce, and so many meaningful personal attributes like my beauty, my agility, my eyesight to aging, that most greedy and clawing thief of all, that learning how to let go is both a survival necessity and a continuing practice.

My daughter is a city girl, a New York City Manhattenite, a film producer, a young beauty and a career woman. She is indeed busy. And I am a factor of the past without, really, anything to contribute to her future. Also, I am not in need. If I were, I feel certain I could call on her and I have, once when I was in the hospital and when I needed to buy a car. Also, I have a sister who lives not too far away, and she is my mainstay. She has needed me and I have helped her and I need her and she helps me. I pay her to clean and to halp me with errands and we are friends, so our work days are also companionable. My daughter has the comfortable knowledge that I am not alone.

a line from a Catherine Davis poem: "After a time all losses are the same and we go out stripped the way we came."

It dishonors their memory to have not even mentioned all the animal companions I have loved and lost and whose portraits I have painted. They stare at me now and say, what about us? We loved you with our whole hearts! And, it is true, I have learned to deal with those losses as well. I have loved them too. From my earliest childhood these animal companions have been the safest and most devoted of love relationships. They do love with their whole hearts and I am never alone or lonely with their warm company.

Well there is plenty left after the losses, new animals in my home and heart, new friends, and the everpresent gift of the changing seasons. This August and September was the most beautiful pair of months I remember. Every week was filled with cool sunshine days with just enough rain, mostly in the evenings to keep the green world happy! The leaves are just beginning to turn and I have beautiful, peaceful places close by, as close as my own yard, in which to walk and contemplate my life and times. The larger world outside may be in turmoil, but my little world is at peace and it is beautiful!

There is no time for rancor or self recrimination, or resentment. There is only time for love and appreciation and enjoyment of the precious miracle of existence in this dimension. It isn't about what I have lost or what I don't have, not at all. It is all about what I HAVE and what is bountiful around me in the present.

It is certainly true, as the family psychologist explains in his article on estrangement, that the American family has changed and families have become disengaged, but the world has always changed and every family in my history, once lost a homeland, a home, a family, a personal history. It is what happens. What remains is what we need to focus on.

Happy Trails wrightj45@yahoo.com