I joined a Facebook group called “Estranged Parents Are Sick of Your Shit.”
I lasted about twenty minutes before I was banned.
Before that happened, I posted a letter.
It was a letter I wrote pretending to be my mother who, when I was thirteen years old, was told what my stepfather had done to me.
I wanted to know how people would respond if they heard the story from her perspective. So I wrote it the way I imagined she might have told it. I gave the excuses. The rationalizations. The denial. The version of events that allowed her to see herself as the victim rather than the parent who failed to protect her child.
The responses came pouring in.
And they were not what I expected.
Comment after comment defended the daughter. They understood why she would cut her mother out of her life. They understood why she would protect her own children. They saw things in that letter that the people in my own family had spent years refusing to see.
Eventually, some of them figured out that I wasn’t actually an estranged mother.
I was the daughter.
I watched complete strangers read the story from my mother’s side and still say:
The daughter was right to leave.
Now I know, without a doubt, my memoir will help others like me.
I’m 85 years old now, and my daughter cut me out of her life in 2012. The reason goes back to something that happened when she was 13 years old. Her stepfather, who is still my husband, exposed himself to her. He apologized, promised it would never happen again, and as far as I know, it never did.
For many years, our family moved forward. Then when my daughter had children of her own, she brought the incident back up and said she did not want her children around my husband. While she still allowed me to have a relationship with her and my grandchildren, things changed after I took the children to lunch one day. They were young at the time, and I told them that their grandfather would never hurt them, that he was a good man who had made a mistake many years ago.
When they told their mother what I had said, she cut me out of all of their lives. My husband had been a provider throughout her childhood. He paid for private school, bought her a car when she graduated, and was involved in raising her. She remembers him very differently than I do.
The years have passed, and my grandchildren are now adults. None of them want a relationship with me. I believe my daughter influenced how they see both me and my husband, though I know she would see it differently.
I have come to accept that I cannot change any of it. Still, acceptance does not erase the grief. I miss my daughter. I miss my grandchildren. And even after all these years, the loss still
