Lost and Found

"The peace comes when it doesn't depend on the other person." Gabor Mate

Dr. Mate does workshops now for parents experiencing estrangement from adult children, and the above is his response to a mother, estranged from her daughter, who had just described herself as having no peace.

I found his response to her incredibly helpful so wanted to blog it here: "The peace comes when it doesn't depend on the other person."

Years ago now a friend asked me of another friend grieving a break-up, "Why would you want a relationship with someone who doesn't want one with you?"

She's from Hamilton.

Still, I think it's a good question for a parent to ask in the context of estrangement from an adult child, too.

There's so much pressure, on women mostly, to keep our families together. I certainly felt it, especially after I separated from my husband. I felt doubly responsible for keeping everybody in the fold, trying to make separation work where marriage hadn't.

It was hard.

The pressure to be a "proper family" comes from ourselves, our extended families, but it comes from society, too. There's a lot of stigma, still, when marriages end, because, as everyone knows, it's hard on kids. We've let them down. They know it, we know it, everybody and their Aunt Louise knows it.

Half of marriages end but we still say til death do us part.

I often quote a woman I worked with in the store whose husband left her for a young employee in the business they'd built together but which went belly-up in divorce, "But I had to admit to myself, nobody leaves a happy marriage."

And that's true. So I guess it's true, too, nobody leaves a happy family.

What's a happy family? Well a psychologist once said to me of making decisions, there's no good decision, bad decision, there's just a decision. I think it's like that with families. There's no good family or bad family, there's just a family.

So maybe it should be, nobody who's happy in a family, leaves.

I get it. Families are the worst stereotypers of each other. And living ones own life, as opposed to one chosen for us by parents, can require a breaking of ties. But adult children, Millennials, are cutting off their parents, their families, all over the place nowadays.

I've watched a lot of videos tackling what's described as an epidemic of estrangement, distraught parents trying to figure out how to get their adult children to return to the fold. They're embarrassed, ashamed, many of them afraid they'll never see their child again. They've been rejected, broken up with, divorced.

It's heartbreaking. They're concerned, too. As with me, for many of them it's come out of the blue, and so we wonder what's going on that we hear nothing for months and then <boom> we're persona non grata.

Time helps, though, and I'm done with the videos now. I'm asking myself why I want a relationship with someone who doesn't want one with me, instead, and taking to heart the wise words of Dr. Mate: "The peace comes when it doesn't depend on the other person."