The Silence I Chose: On Estranging a Parent
Tuesday, August 5, 2025. This 2 blog series is for my client Reid in the Windy City.
I did not plan to leave. I rehearsed staying for years.
I tolerated the comments. I smiled through the guilt. I made phone calls I didn’t want to make and sat through dinners where my body vibrated with something I didn’t yet know was panic.
I came home on holidays because that’s what good daughters do. Good sons. Good children.
And then I stopped.
It was not a grand decision. It was a quiet breaking. A hairline fracture turned chasm.
And then a choice, buried in the repetition: I will not go back into the house that taught me to doubt my own aliveness.
The Story You Think You Know
You believe I’m ungrateful. You think I’ve rewritten history. You assume I was radicalized by therapy, or Instagram, or a partner who doesn’t like you.
You think I’ve been poisoned by “boundaries.”
You’re not entirely wrong.
I have rewritten history—not to lie, but to survive. I had to become the narrator because when you told the story, I was either the problem or the punchline.
I did go to therapy. And yes, I started learning words for things I used to call normal. Enmeshment. Emotional parentification. Gaslighting, even if you didn’t mean it that way. Even if you said, “I was doing my best.”
I Know You Loved Me
This is the hardest part.
You loved me. You still do.
You packed lunches. You showed up. You fought for me, in your way. But love is not a shield against harm. You can love someone and still leave them wounded.
I know you had it hard. I know your parents were a lot worse. But I needed you to notice me, not need me. I needed protection, not performance.
When I tried to tell you that something was wrong, you said I was too sensitive. That I remembered it wrong. That I always take things the wrong way. That it didn’t happen like that.
Eventually, I believed you. Until I didn’t.
Why I Didn’t Say Goodbye
Because goodbye implies closure. It implies explanation. And I had already given you decades of footnotes.
I didn’t want to fight. I didn’t want to plead.
I didn’t want to spend another Christmas regulating your feelings while ignoring my own.
So I slipped away like smoke. Not because I wanted to hurt you, but because I finally understood: staying was costing me something I could no longer afford.
Estrangement wasn’t an act of vengeance. It was an act of breathing.
What I Want You to Know
I didn’t stop loving you. I just stopped loving who I became in your presence. The child-version of me who learned to make herself small. The one who learned that love was earned with compliance. The one who internalized your sadness like an inheritance.
I want you to be okay. I want you to forgive yourself. But I can’t be the one to offer you absolution. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
The silence is not punishment. It is space. Space where I learned what it felt like to sleep through the night without bracing for your voice.
If I Come Back
If I come back, it will not be as the child you remember.
It will be as a stranger with my name. A person who has rebuilt their nervous system in your absence. I will not need your validation. I will not defend my choices. I will not forget what it cost me to leave.
If I come back, I will not sit at the old table pretending nothing happened.
If I come back, I want you to ask. Not explain. Not justify. Just ask, “What was it like for you?”
And then stay quiet long enough to hear the answer.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Blake, L. (2017). Parents and children who are estranged in adulthood: A review and discussion of the literature. Journal of Family Theory & Review, 9(4), 521–536. https://doi.org/10.1111/jftr.12216
Carr, K., & Wang, L. (2021). Making sense of parent–child estrangement: Exploring narratives of adult children. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 38(9), 2751–2773. https://doi.org/10.1177/02654075211023904
Agllias, K. (2018). Missing family: The adult child’s experience of parental estrangement. Journal of Social Work Practice, 32(1), 59–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/02650533.2017.1291604