#4: The backlash against family estrangement
How many boundaries is too many?
Today I’m going to be a little bit cheeky and reshare some writing I did back in July. A couple of things have changed since then: I am now 33, and its proximity to 35 is more en-frazzling than turning leaving my twenties behind ever felt to me. I was coming to the end of therapy, but then depression struck so I’m still in there, for the most part, though with no more traumatic memories to process. Frankly, without EMDR, it feels a little bit dull: just a weekly roundup of everyday struggles I mainly have the tools to figure out for myself. This is progress, I think!
In addition, there has been even more coverage of family estrangement. They talk about it on the podcast Everything is Content in response to a New Yorker article ‘Why So Many People Are Going “No Contact” with Their Parents’. Oenone is struck by one mother discussing how anything, anything at all would be better than being totally cut off by her adult child, seemingly with no explanation. Ash Sarkar on If I Speak mentioned her preferences for a partner several episodes ago and said that her husband’s closeness with his family was important to her as it indicated he hadn’t given up on things that might be difficult.
I’ll be honest: I felt a little bit slighted by this stuff, aware, as I am, that I be characterised as a boundary-wielding cutter-offer. It’s not as clear-cut as ‘no contact’ in my case, but the cultural wariness of people who feel shortchanged by their mothers has weighed on me on occasion. It makes sense: I’m confident I would make for an excellent dad but only a pretty good mum. Our expectations for mothers are so high and I think we do still have to take this into consideration when critiquing others’ parenting. Nevertheless: I have my reasons, ok! And it’s not just because I saw an Instagram carousel of slide shows on ‘protecting my peace’.
Vox’s Today, Explained had an episode on the same topic in the run-up to Thanksgiving where one woman, whose mother couldn’t bring herself to say her daughter’s sexual assault at the age of 17 had not been her own fault, remarked:
“There is no estrangement police; there should be an estrangement police. This is America: we have the right to never speak to our parents again. When it’s like ‘duty, obligation’: this is not American…Just think of all the people, at Ellis Island, holding a suitcase, thinking ‘I’m never going to see my family again’ and being overjoyed that that’s the case.”
I think it encapsulates both the reasons people might be supportive of enstrangement, and struggle, in an increasingly consumerist and atomised culture, to get fully on board with the prediction the interviewee has of an America where more people aren’t in contact with their parents than are.
If you want to read about my views on this whole issue from July, with reference to British comic Katy Wix and the daughter of Canadian writer Alice Munro, you can do so here:
The reason I foolishly have two different publications on Substack is that I was on tinyletter with Peeled and Portioned long before this platform was created. And then I got in a tizz about GDPR and whether I had the right to move everyone over to this mailing list when tinyletter shut down. Silly, silly, but we are where we are.