Shadow Daughter by Harriet Brown

Author:Harriet Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2018-11-05T16:00:00+00:00

Almost all of us remember things our own parents did that could be characterized as mistakes. But most of us wouldn’t dream of severing the relationships. So, why today, do so many adult children cast off their parents, and even their entire families? And as many rejected parents ask: How can doing so seem so easy for them?

A few pages later she adds, “Even when a reason for [estrangement] is given it often makes no sense.” Many parents apparently agree; 6 percent of the parents in the 2015 Texas Christian University study said they had no idea why their children cut them off. My mother would have been one of them. Over and over through the years of our chaotic back-and-forth she asked me why we couldn’t have a closer relationship, why I was so upset, and no matter how I explained it, what I said or how I said it, she kept asking. I thought she was being willfully, stubbornly deaf, trying to punish me with her refusal to comprehend. I’m a reasonably articulate person; of course she understood the problems. I couldn’t figure out why she acted like she didn’t.

I understand now that she wanted me to name one interaction, one moment, one reason. If the cause of the rift is something you’ve said or done, or something that happened, maybe you can undo the damage, retract the comment, revisit the problem. But if the cause isn’t a specific crisis but rather the way parents respond to the inevitable family crises, and to their children—well, that’s much harder to articulate. When my mother asked me what she had done, how could I say it wasn’t any one thing by itself but everything together? How could I tell her that while there were specific incidents that distressed me, it was more the way she looked at me, her tone of voice in talking to and about me, the disapproval and judgment she radiated in my direction? She wanted a description of something that had happened. All I had was a description of her. To really hear what I was trying to convey, she would have had to put aside the story she told herself not just about our interactions but about her own essential nature, and consider a different one.

That’s a hugely threatening process, though some people do manage to pull it off. In her book I Thought We’d Never Speak Again: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation, Laura Davis tells a story about a woman named Miriam who went through a process of reconciliation with her children after alcoholism, sexual abuse, and rage caused a long estrangement. Miriam wrote her daughters letters expressing her regret about not protecting them from the sexual abuse and taking responsibility for her own frequent emotional outbursts. She went to therapy with one daughter and went through therapy on her own as well. With four of her five children things got much better, but one daughter remained angry and aloof. Miriam persisted, at

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