26 Jun Art of Estrangement

Art of Estrangement, available at Amazon.com

now available on Amazon

ART OF ESTRANGEMENT

a compilation of paintings by a ghost

Barbara Bose

When I searched the Facebook Groups page for the term ‘estranged parent,’ there were so many private groups that no matter how much I scrolled, the list grew and grew and grew. I stopped at 1,674 groups. Memberships to these support groups ranged from a few dozen people to thousands of them, with most groups averaging about 1K members. It is a terrible club to belong to, and, like terminal cancer, it seems to be spreading worldwide in an insidiously cruel way.

My experience with parental estrangement is from both sides of the brick wall, from watching my parent’s bewildered anguish at my older sister’s estrangement of them, to being involuntarily estranged from both of my adult daughters for years now. Having grown up under the same but actually more acute reign of abuse and neglect as my sister the psychologist, I decided to never fully cut off our clearly toxic parents like millions of trendy kids seem to be doing these days. It seemed like the merciful thing to do. After all, I recognized them as typical unenlightened old school types who had too many children. So I managed to keep them at a safe arm’s length and several states away.

My family of origin was so bad that I wrote a book about it, (Tree of Lives) but politely waited until they were safely dead to share my tale of woe, abuse and neglect. I even used a pen name so the innocent and the guilty wouldn’t be exposed in an ugly spotlight. But they know who they are and what they did and how they failed me. In the book, I traced what I believe was the cause of my violent father’s crazy behavior back to a massive trauma he experienced as a youth — his uncle murdered his entire family of six (his wife, four children under 10, and finally himself) in front of thousands of horrified onlookers. Understanding this crucial element, which I didn’t learn about until I was in my 50s, put my father’s undiagnosed mental illness into perspective for me. His entire extended family was wiped out and he was forced to never mention it again. No wonder he was a mess.

Not every parent is a narcissist. Its rare. The millions of members of my terrible club are sharing their stories and guess what? The estrangees are all reporting the same thing! The cookie cutter techniques these NC adult children use is the same scripted pop-psychology terminology (we are toxic, controlling, narcissistic transactional, etc.), imposing identical, harsh character judgements resulting in life sentences of emotional jail. It is a culling of the herd-of-origin.

So what’s behind this excruciating phenomenon? I think its a very appropriate question that begs some sunlight. Why would so many 40- and 30- and 20-somethings not only break their parents’ hearts, but also short circuit their own and their children’s foundational inheritances, not to mention elder love, wisdom and support — all this in exchange for false, social media-driven pseudo-principals.

I’m guessing that my oldest daughter ditched me at the urging of her angry ex-step father. Why my other daughter, who has two wonderful sons pulled the plug on me is a complete mystery since she and her sister fell out a decade ago and she has no truck with my ex. In a truth vacuum, there’s no way to know anything for sure. To me, not facing the one person who cares about your more than anyone in the world, and tell them they are being fired is an act of cowardice. This ‘ambiguous loss’ is one of the most searingly brutal effects of going ‘NC’ (No Contact). It’s very much a death, but not something one is likely to discuss with anyone who has normal relationships with their children. And most people do have normal relationships with their kids, making every holiday, vacation story and talk of life’s daily interactions an excruciating and lonely gloss-over. It is the reason why these support groups are so important and ultimately revealing that there is something sinister going on.

As for me, I am an artist, so I paint about this pain. Dealing with the whole scenario is such a head trip that every day I can feel myself looking over a cliff’s edge into a chasm of deep depression. But because I have a loving husband, wonderful friends and a medical marijuana card, I can express my pain onto canvas or a keyboard. But this never ceasing, solid pain casts a shadow over everything which takes all of my mental muscle to ignore. I also worry about what my daughter is modeling for her sons – the art of erasure.