Ever Completely Left Your Family? How Did You Do It?

[Kent_Clark]

My aunt wrote her parents and each one of her siblings a note which detailed why she wouldn’t speak to them anymore and simply refused to have any more contact with any of them.

My grandparents were hurt and puzzled, but the siblings – the entire family having a certain sang froid – figured if that’s what she wanted, then to hell with her.

Her daughter was fairly close to a cousin, so when my grandparents died the cousin passed the news to the daughter, who passed the news to my aunt. Her reaction was along the lines of “I understand why you felt you should tell me that.”

Later my aunt had a falling out with her daughter, and didn’t speak to her for 12 years. Some people just want to be left alone.

[ContumeliousBob]

If I were going to cut off and disappear from my family I’d join the french foreign legion.

I wont though, because my grandmother would get upset with me, and it would break my mother’s heart.

Having said that my family is pretty crazy.

My Dad is very smart, but not motivated to do anything at all, except for pleasing himself. He doesnt clean up after himself. He leaves his everyday debris where-ever he goes.

i.e. He yells for my eldest sister to get him a twinkie, he is sitting in the living room, she upstairs in her room, the twinkies are in the kitchen. Sister moans and groans, dad yells. Sister gets the twinkie. He unwraps twinkie and puts the wrapper in any handy spot. On the sofa, the floor, the table, where-ever it might fall.

My Mom works two jobs, one full time, one part time. She tries to cope the best she can. She knows what the problem is, but is reluctant to act. She lets my dad and brother walk all over her. She basically is polishing the brass on the titanic.

My eldest sister is smart, but weak willed. My dad controls her.

My other sister is smart but very liberal, thinks Bill Clinton is great. You know like those people that idolized Ronald Regan. She looks down on my parents. She has her own house. She spends spends spends, she and her hubby live beyond their means, it just hasnt caught them just yet.

My brother is just a carbon copy of my dad. He likes to drink and smoke. He makes everyone in the house-hold do what he needs. He needs beer, he asks mom to get it for him, or tells my dad who tells my sister who moans to my mom who tells my dad who tells my mom to tell my sister to just go and do it. He leaves empties in piles on the floor. Some have 1/3 of their contents left inside them, beer or soda.

My brother has his friends over on a regular basis, cause he has beer to share.

There house is a wreck, because my mom is the only one who cleans, and she is working all the time.

Thank goodness I dont live with them anymore.

It is a shame they are all adults, because if they were children, then it wouldnt be so bad, they could have the attitudes corrected.

Of course I am not the perfect person either and dont have too much room to talk.

[El_Kabong]

Man, what a depressing thread. Even more so because I can throw in a story or two as well.

I’m the eldest of three brothers, of parents who, while neither drinkers nor overtly abusive, had a highly negative tendency to bottle up emotions until they’d spill out at the silliest times. For example, one parent is mad at the other for spending excessive amounts on one thing or another, and instead of arguing about that, there’s a huge blowup, ending in shouting and tears, over the correct way to slice a Thanksgiving turkey. Things like that. Both brothers, for whatever reasons, ended up rather inexpressive and volatile personalities themselves.

Number Two pretty much cut everyone off more than 20 years ago, with the big split occurring after a lurid fight with Number Three that ended with a bit of gun-waving on Three’s part. The piece in question was an inoperative war relic, and the only way you could hurt someone with it was to throw it at them, but obviously it was the thought that counted. Over the next several months Two moved several hundred miles away, then gradually stopped talking to my parents and, over the course of a few years, to me and my sister, who had been uninvolved in the whole drama, but who, I guess, just reminded him too much of things he’d rather forget.

My parents pushed me occasionally to try and make contact, but I saw no reason to, as he obviously disliked being prodded on the subject and as, IMO, it was his right to stay away if he wanted to. Besides, sometime after 1985 or so, I simply had no idea where he was or what he was doing. This did present some difficulties when my father passed away in late 2001; we had to do considerable research to even find out in what state he was living, and it fell to me to tell him the news. He came to the viewing but stayed less than five minutes despite having driven 12 straight hours to get there, obviously freaked out by the whole thing.

The capper to all this is that Brother Three, who had for all this time loudly denounced Two for not speaking to his sainted parents for so long, decided to cut everyone off two months after the funeral, in yet another huge blowup that occurred on the following Thanksgving. Of course, in long-standing tradition, the stated cause was just a precipitating factor, and more of an excuse to vent a couple decades worth of accumulated resentment. At least in this case, after a couple of years of angry silence, he is gradually re-establishing contact with the rest of the family.

If it matters what I think about any of this, I say let 'em do what they want; I’m no strong believer in maintaining strained familial ties for no other reason than because someone feels they have to. OTOH, both Two and Three caused my parents no end of pain and torment by simply refusing to speak to them and while they certainly don’t have to answer to me for that, I find it hard not to resent the selfishness of their behavior.