That may not have been what the children really wanted. My Mom used to baby sit for a divorced mother who had three kids. This woman worked long hours as a therapist to provide every material and financial need for her kids. This meant that she generally had no free time to spend with them. She was usually absent from birthday parties and such. Their house was four stories. They literally had an entirely unused story because nobody needed it. Yes, her kids had the latest video games and all the toys they could ever want. What they really wanted was a mother who spent time with them and showed her love through behavior and not material goods.
Yes, of course, there’s that. A parent always away working and providing things, things, things, aa child would feel unwanted or whatever.
A lot of the stories also seem to come from supposedly average, happy enough families. Two parent comfortable home, happy seeming; holidays, birthday parties, family movie nights, friends always welcome, sleepovers and showing up for sports. Grandparents, siblings, cousins all welcome and interacting without major issue. What makes a kid from a happy home just leave one day and end contact?
Sometimes I think it’s the KID who has some mental issues, or is influenced by an SO, or could possibly be on drugs. There are millions of drug abusers and a lot of them often hide it pretty well. Even better if they go low contact or. no contact.
Just because a family does all those things doesn’t necessarily make it a happy home, though. You can have all those things (and my family would have appeared to have that to an uncritical eye), but if the parents are constantly negative, hypercritical, shallow and image conscious, then it’s not going to be a happy home.
FWIW I think these ghosting are rarely based primarily on behavior between parents and the adult children, other than as viewed through a lens of perceived childhood issues, be it very real, or mostly in the child’s misperception. And to that each will have their own truth. It is also very rarely about the adequacy of material stuff. It usually is a perception of childhood emotional neglect or abuse, or failure to protect from it, which the parent may lack any awareness of. And which the adult child now sees, correctly or not, as the root of some adult unhappiness.
There are also two fundamental ways of viewing families - the magic way and the pragmatic, realistic way.
People who believe in the magic way believe things such as “family comes first” etc, regardless of the behaviours - positive or negative - of the family members. If these people have had toxic experiences, they will tolerate further relations with the toxic people, that they probably wouldn’t otherwise tolerate, “because their family”.
The pragmatic realists understand that there’s nothing inherently special or sacred about family if certain members are toxic.
And sometimes people do not recognize that they are actually the “toxic” personality.
Anyway.
What you call “magic” others simply call their basic values. I do not judge anyone’s decisions on these subjects myself.
My own relatively boring family of origin story of estrangement is that I am the youngest of five with the three oldest sisters, the youngest seven years older than me, each estranged, including one deciding to estrange only when our mother was terminally ill and dad long gone. They each also estranged from my brother and I and from each other. Now I have no idea what their early childhoods were like; I was either not born or too young to be aware when they were young. My childhood was not their childhood. My experience of our parents was different I am sure. In terms of adult interactions though my perception was that they each are in their own ways quite disturbed people. I don’t see that “toxic” word as meaning much but the oldest was a major part of raising me and being dismissed by her, I think only because I wouldn’t take a side in a conflict that had nothing to do with me and that I had no understanding of, really hurt.
I won’t at this point in my life expend any effort to connect to any of the three. My life is I am sure much happier without dealing with them in any way. And if any of them reached out to me, needed help from me that I was able to give, absolutely and without hesitation I’d respond positively. Knowing that only grief would follow. That is not pragmatic but it also is not in my mind a “magic way” of viewing family. It is just a value I have.
I haven’t spoken to my biological father in 35 years. I heard through the family grapevine he was still alive as of six or seven years ago but I know nothing since then and I don’t care to. I remember the day I made the choice that I was done with him, and I also remember part of that choice was not communicating it. I was just done. In the current parlance, I ghosted him, permanently.
He was a breathtakingly terrible human. Just a thorough, unrepentant asshole. Physically and emotionally abusive through my whole childhood, and sociopathically manipulative into my early adulthood. A genial monster.
I’m not the only child who’s cut him off, either. I have a blood sibling and a step sibling who have decided he’s too poisonous to tolerate.
I have no idea whether he claims to feel hurt or bewildered at all this. And I don’t give a shit. I would say fuck him, but that feels angry, and I’ve sufficiently turned my back that anger is no longer relevant. He’s just a non-entity.
He’s free to go fuck himself, though.
Not to disagree with you, but in my family’s case, all four of us, in two clusters 15 years apart, recognize the dysfunctionality of our parents and their toxicity.
Yeah, I severed ties with my father and when he died, my reaction was “oh,” it was like telling me that the dental hygienist I saw a couple if times in middle school had died.
You are not disagreeing with me. I was making no implication about your specific circumstances which I have no knowledge regarding.
I am however very confident that none of my sisters see themselves as anything other than victims, and at least in regards to interactions with me? One was my childhood at home bully; one couldn’t care about me one way or the other, and the one who was the most caring to me as a child rejected me as an adult for nothing that I did. But who knows how they see what my role was?
Again though the point is to your dismissiveness. Your conclusion is “pragmatic” and values that some of us hold, including being willing to deal with a fair amount of crap because they are family, are just a naive “magical way of viewing families” …
There really are not just two fundamental ways of viewing families: your enlightened pragmatic view and a naive magic way. There are many of us who feel some degree of family responsibility and are willing to tolerate a certain amount of shit if necessary in order to stay true to that value. Because we think it is the right thing for us to do. But not without limit. And that is the right decision for us, even if it wouldn’t be the right decision for you.
I’m not sure if my case would count, as my total estrangement was initiated by my mother, though I have since grown to prefer being estranged and would try very hard not to have contact start again. It’s been 37 years. I did years of therapy including two sessions with the surviving members of my original family, which seems to have been what started it. The last several times I saw any of them around the time of those sessions were pretty excruciating, and I had initiated those visits, so I stopped initiating anything, and never heard from them again. The family problems had included sexual abuse, a drinking problem, and suicide, and those two therapy sessions with family members were for the purpose of discussing these.
If I count myself as the child who cut the parent off (which in one sense is maybe close to accurate because I am now very much against any contact), then I’d answer the OP question “there were many words of explanation”.
But if I’m literal about what happened, with my parent just dropping contact, well, she didn’t explain anything about making that choice. The context at the time obviously included our contact being uncomfortable in the extreme, so maybe it was self explanatory, just hanging in the air.
Looking back, I just wish I’d been part of another family. Or that I’d gotten away from the family at an earlier age. Or, maybe, going into a boarding school at a younger age, which I did actually do at an older age. I loved that school. It was a very loving and constructive environment. That’s what I get homesick for. That, and the home of one of my grandmothers. I wish the past with my immediate family could just disappear from history.
I might mention that, if my parent is still alive, they’d be nearly 100, which is fairly unlikely. Though, I’ve looked online and can’t find anything about a death, obituary, funeral, and the like. So I’m really not sure what’s going on there.
I’ve had two close-up experiences with this. One was my aunt, who at the age of 70 completely severed ties with both her parents and her siblings. (I should note that my aunt had a history of mental problems and had checked herself into and out of institutions for 20 years.) She was polite enough to write each of them a detailed letter with all the grievances she had against them through all the years, but refused to communicate with any of them for the rest of their lives. When she discovered her daughter had stayed in touch with our grandmother, she broke off contact with the daughter for 20 years.
My father had one of three reactions for every point in my aunt’s go to hell letter to him.
a) That wasn’t me who did that, that was so-and-so
b) We were children (and she was the oldest) when that happened.
c) What the hell is she talking about?
The other person was my first wife. Her standard method of dealing with any perceived disrespect was to cut off all contact with the offender. It didn’t matter if it was a relative, friend, coworker or whatever. I actually remained relatively cordial with her after the divorce, until I managed to piss her off and she cut off all contact with me. At that point I had the second longest relationship with her, behind only one of her brothers.
OTOH, my two sisters had completely different relationships with our father, despite them being only a year apart in age and growing up under the same circumstances. She never completely broke off relations with our father, but things were decidedly cool between them until my mother’s death brought them somewhat closer together. Sometimes people just don’t get along.
Two of my kids cut me out of their lives after I divorced their mother. Then, after a number of years, the eldest divorced his wife and realized that life doesn’t always go the way you thought it would. He actually ended up apologizing for his behavior. My youngest, being the more stubborn of the two, took a lot of years to finally come around. And now he’s been through a divorce and we are good friends. I guess the moral of the story is to exercise patience and hopefully people will come around. Sadly, it wasn’t the case with my brother.
I apologize for that dismissiveness. It’s probably informed by my personal experiences and those of my wife’s. I grew up in materially very comfortable circumstances but never entirely comfortable around my dad. By today’s standards he would be considered abusive though by the standards of the day he wasn’t. With him there was never a default setting of accepting that his kids were actually good kids.
In my wife’s case, she grew up in near poverty, in an almost stereotypical trailer park trash environment, except they were crappy houses and not trailers. Christmas, by the time she was leaving home for the world, was evidently a large gathering of drunk, smoking-to-death, constantly arguing assholes. One year my then young adult wife decided screw it I’m spending Xmas with a good friend and her family. My wife’s mother berated her about this because you just have to come home for Xmas regardless, because “it’s family”.
For another factor:
Not all children want, or need, the same things.
Parents who are genuinely trying to do their best by their children may do something that actually is good for one child – but is actually terrible for another one. And the parents may not understand that it was terrible for that child; and the child may not understand that it wasn’t something terrible for children in general.
But I don’t think you’re going to get one overall answer; because there are so many different possibilities. Some of those possibilities involve bad behavior on the part of the parents, some of them involve it on the part of the child, some of them involve it throughout the family; some of them are basically misunderstandings between very different people.
I have a considerably older sister who will have no contact with me, or with anyone on my side of the family. While I don’t think it’s the entire reason, part of the reason in my case was probably that I didn’t take her side about something that I had no idea was happening at the time; but was told about decades later by a cousin.
Yeah part of the story with my oldest sister is that her adult children had to break off contact as well, lest risk that.
Appreciated. And mind you I am grateful that I don’t have to follow through on being there for any of them. One actually did reach out to me as me to serve as named guardian for her disabled adult son since she was fighting with her oldest daughter who had been in the role. She managed to reconcile enough with the daughter, a lawyer, and the request became moot. She then went back to no contact saying contacting me was a mistake. Whew. Close. My brother would not talk to any of them no matter what, but he was closer in age to them and more a target of their vitriol than I ever was.
As with many of these tales, it’s complicated. But the complication is simple, so I’ll explain. The older kid estranged themself first, while the younger kid continued visiting the parent (who was/is divorced, which may be at the root of the problem), going on vacations together, lots of weekend visits, closeness, conversations on long drives, well into the younger one’s college career. Gradually, though, during this years-long process, the younger one began withdrawing, which the parent took as normal growing-up stuff. I personally witnessed much of this process, and they seemed like a perfectly normal parent/child couple, getting along, joking, sharing some tastes (movies, books) and not sharing others (mainly music)–I never noticed any particular tension or issues between them, but then the younger one said that the older one confided some mysterious stuff that the younger one was sworn to secrecy about and that was when the withdrawing and ghosting began, about 10 years after the older sibling became estranged. The parent was puzzled, but every inquiry about what the hell was going on was just received with responses like “You’re intruding on my privacy” so the parent stopped raising the questions. Finally, the younger one, without a word of elucidation, just announced that total withdrawal on the grounds of “feeling unsafe” would be the policy now, and this has gone on for the past two or three years, with both kids being utterly out of touch.
In this instance, as with several others I’ve been witness to, I can testify that I spent extended periods with the parent and the child, and I can remember thinking “They get along so nicely. I wish I felt that comfortable with some of my relatives, but we can’t have everything, I suppose,” so I was shocked to learn that they were no longer speaking to each other. A woman I’ve been friends with for over 60 years (we met in kindergarten) was the sweetest thing to her two nephews and her niece, giving them lovely birthday and holiday gifts every year, listening to their complaints and worries that they felt shy about confiding with their parents about, just being the best aunt I ever heard about, until the day when they just dropped her like a rock. (The niece actually died from a drug overdose, which is a pretty good excuse for ghosting someone, I suppose.) My friend has gotten over it, but she remains puzzled and hurt by the behavior of these kids.
An acquaintance who has a very dim opinion of “millenials” told me the sad story of her neighbor: "Her son and his wife were so lucky! She lived right next door so she went over when the kids got home from school before her daughter-in-law got home from work and cleaned up their house because it was always such a mess! And her daughter-in-law is a really terrible cook, so she always fixed dinner and then put some in the freezer for later! And her son and his wife are such typical millenials! They never even said thank you once, and then they moved to Virginia! She is heartbroken!
My only thought was: she’s damn lucky all they did was move away. This sounds like a potential homicide.
I’m still in contact with my mother despite struggling at times with knowing the best way to deal with her. Thankfully my father died decades ago but I could easily see cutting him out completely.
My father was a monster, physically, sexually, and emotionally abusive. My mother was a battered wife and unable to protect us, as well as being emotionally neglectful.
The youngest sibling is Schizophrenic but always has been emotionally abusive to everyone. Everyone has cut off contact with him.
The oldest has also been abusive to everyone, as well as sexual abusing the youngest brother and I. He refuses to take responsibility for his actions and consequently several of us have cut off contact.
I have no idea what the right answer is for anyone else.
There’s a situation in my extended family where the two adult sons have nothing to do with their biological father OR his own family, and our mutual relatives will not tell me why. I know about some of the things their mother did during the divorce, one of them being her desire to file sexual abuse charges against him, which the kids refused to go along with because they said nothing like that ever happened. Therefore, I probably don’t want to know - and they think she’s da bomb!
When they were married, it was really obvious to me that he only showed interest in the kids when he had an audience, and even if he was a pedophile, he probably wouldn’t have been interested in them enough to do that, either. Weirdly, at first they had 50/50 physical custody, which I am quite vocal in advocating for this NEVER being done, and yes, I know this is n=1 but I’ve never seen it work out for anybody else, either. Most of the time, it’s just a ruse for guys like this who never showed any interest in the kids to call himself a single parent, and use it as a chick magnet (or a guy magnet, as this man actually turned out to be!).