“No One Calls Me Mom, Anymore”

“I'm slipping into the depths of this grief. There's nothing I can do to fix it—nothing I can do that matters. The pain's beyond explanation."Mother estranged from daughter and 5 young granddaughters

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We need to matter. Especially to our children. We are not individuals, sufficient unto ourselves, able to thrive through any condition. We are more like a forest of Aspens, clonal groves joined by roots braided beneath the earth.

As a psychologist specializing in estrangement, I find that I am no longer a therapist—I’m a counselor of the bereaved: helping parents mourn the loss of children and grandchildren who are still alive. Those with whom they invested everything; whose parental love is now viewed as worthless, irredeemable—perhaps something worse.

“I am in a prison cage of blame, shame, and accusations with no opportunity for resolution,” writes the mother. “How in the world does a daughter who loved her mom, end a relationship? I've lost my entire life. I am the living witnessing what it would be like to be dead to her.”

The guillotine of no contact: judgments and conclusions, accusations framed as explanations—forged in the soundproof rooms of therapists: the child’s wounds salved with a diagnosis that poisons the mother.

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A letter carefully crafted if she’s lucky—hostile and accusatory if she’s not—explaining the new rules, the necessity of disengagement, the crimes of the past, the need to heal through a banishment with no end in sight. The letter—perhaps even signed love a word made bewildering by all those preceding it.

The sociologist JE Davis observed that we raise children with the “reciprocal bond of kinship” in mind: we invest mightily assuming they will continue to want us in their lives. Not as a transaction or bargain or a trade tendered between equals. Rather, as a living dynamic, like tides pulled faithfully by the moon—the act written into the body of the sea itself.

Time speeds up in ways harder for our children to comprehend, deepening the gravity, the need, the desperation for reconciliation. Birthdays, graduations, weddings, mark time in a synchronous and soothing way, while the absence creates something frozen, unrecognizable.

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Grandchildren are prevented from afternoons and overnights with grandparents, the soft sweet reflecting pools of their innocence, vulnerability and tenderness removed and hidden away. The simple magic of proximity. Their ability to remind us of everything that matters in life and living.

Rachel Cusk writes: “The child goes through the mother like a dye through water: there is no part of her that remains uncolored.”

Similarly, estrangement bleeds into everything. It hollows out holidays, weekdays, the future you thought awaited you, promised or made more likely by your years of love or dedication. It dismantles the story of your life in silence, in absence, in letters that read like indictments.

The mother estranged from her daughter and 5 granddaughters also had a child who died. She wrote the following to me, “When my son died, everyone, understood my sorrow. To this day, everyone says: ‘The loss of your son must be so hard.’ Comparatively, with my estranged daughter, hardly anyone outside this situation understands, or calls. They say ‘move on’ as if... as if being treated as if you are dead, and unworthy, and unloved, is something you can move on from. No one calls me mom, anymore.”

The burdens of carrying a love with nowhere to land.

“…how tenuous the links between mother and children, between friends, family, things you think are eternal,” Janet Fitch writes in White Oleander. “Everything could be lost, more easily than anyone could imagine.”

There is no easy fix. No perfect insight. Just this truth: if you're in this place, you're not the only one. You're not crazy. You're not evil. You're not beyond repair. You loved, and you’re experiencing a loss unspeakably deep. And if your child is doing well without you, it’s likely because of all that you gave to them.