Living with Estrangement

I want to write about estrangement and it’s difficult because in many ways estrangement is like grief. 

Estrangement is an event, call it the Big Hurt that happens –  which forces an estrangement into existence.  Or it’s the cumulative of many little hurts and over time the estrangement is the oxygen needed, to take agency over one’s life. 

Estrangements can be critical tools for setting healthy boundaries and they can be avoidance tactics, too. Maybe even, a bit of both.

As children in families we inherit them, we get swept up into the web of them, and we honour them. But we carry the grief of them, too. 

There’s an analogy about carrying grief around that goes like this: 

Imagine a box with a bouncing ball within it. There’s a pain button. No matter how you carry your box with care, the ball will bounce and hit the pain button. 

You can forget entirely about the estrangement and then bam! You see a person at the market who looks just like them and you wonder, what are they doing right now and are they OK being apart from me? 

Milestones, holidays, and every day glimpses on social media and your pain button will get alarmed again and again. 

The funny thing, or perhaps the saddest thing about family estrangements is that they’re not solvable by two people who can come together and forgive and resolve to do better, to be better. 

Family estrangement is like opening up a box of Christmas lights and wondering how did these ever get so tangled? No one knows where the first knot occurred or who tied it anyway, or perhaps everyone has a pretty good idea who tied the first knot. 

The fact of the matter is that there’s a big wreck of lights that’s knotted beyond belief and it’s held in tact with pain and fear which only tightens its twists and loops some more. 

So, we put the mess into a box and we only think about it when we need to think about it, or when the ball in our box hits the pain button and we’re reminded of it all over again. 

A new year might be the time to forgive because well, we’re all going to die anyway. Or, maybe a new year means recommitting to a healthy boundary. There’s no right answer. 

What I do know is that we all matter more to one another than we sometimes let on and when we really think of it, love is all there really is anyway. 

Photo by Denny Müller on Unsplash