I recently read a thought-provoking article on what is evidently now being called “No-contact families.” What surprised me was how increasingly common it’s evidently becoming…. And that surprise led me to a deeper disappointment about present-day humans.
Growing up watching The Cleavers, The Brady’s, even The Partridge Family….. my home life wasn’t like that. My mother and I had a great relationship from birth until I was about 6, and then it became challenging. Throughout my early years, I discovered those TV sitcoms of my youth were lies.
Wanting to heal that mother/son relationship in my mid-20s I started looking at the situation and what each of us was doing with/to each other. I started focusing on what things I could do to help her feel better about Life in general… How I could stop pushing her buttons… How to not knee-jerk when she pushed mine. That took some time. About a decade.
Eventually in her depression – after 3 failed attempts to kill herself with pills – she tried drinking herself to death, but only got as far as drinking herself into a coma. Specific details of that being saved for another time, when she returned from her coma we had another great 4 years until her death.
That’s 9 years out of 43 shared years on earth where we really enjoyed each other. A little less than 1⁄4 of our time. But did I EVER seriously contemplate removing her from my life??? No – never. Why would I?
She was my only mother. (Well… my only biological mother – I found several female adult mentors along the way to fill the voids. But that’s also a different story.)
Cut to me now at the age of 67 – being a year and a half older than she was when she died – and I see so many families, including mine, not weathering their storms…. They’re “cutting their losses” and moving on.
Several years back, my wife and I attended a memorial service for a family member of hers in Eastern Washington. This not only gave us another opportunity for a Road Trip (one of our joys!) but it was going to allow us to see and catch up with many of her family members we hadn’t seen in years.
In chatting with a couple around her age, they were happy to share the updates and successes of 2 of their children, and then seemingly just as happy to share that there were 2 other children they had removed from their lives because they no longer shared belief systems. I thought “How do you just throw away two of your children?”
Shortly after that, someone I’m close to had a daughter remove them from her life because the daughter felt the mother’s recent unsolicited advice was too controlling and they didn’t need that constant “toxicity” in their life. I was (and still am) boggled that someone could just cut their mother from their world.
At various points in time, both of my own children have blocked contact with me because they evidently found my parenting “toxic”. And on one occasion I had to tell one of them that I couldn’t talk to her until she allowed me an opportunity to speak. We had had a disagreement and all she would do is shout demands over the top of anything I tried to say in search of finding an understanding about the situation and a resolution. The stress of not being allowed to share my thoughts – of only being dictated to – was internally overwhelming and did serious damage to my blood sugar levels.
As a diabetic I had to set a boundary I did not want to set – but I was very clear about it: “Whenever you are ready for a two-sided conversation I am eager to find a resolution. But you are not allowed to just run over me.” Two years later there was a short conversation that created a semblance of resolution.
During those personally challenging years I came across many people who were having similar familiar issues: Parents & children or siblings who had chosen to remove relatives from their lives. As more and more time passes, as this becomes more and more common, I keep circling back to the thought: “Are we really just becoming too emotionally lazy to attempt to heal relationships any more?”
It looks like laziness to me.
There is just no way that any of us are going to get through life agreeing with everyone we know or meet – and there’s just no way that we are going to get through life without intentionally or unintentionally offending people we care for. But isn’t that part of this experience? Aren’t we supposed to learn to forgive, accept, give grace? Allow for differences? Embrace diversity? Learn to love IN SPITE of differences?
With current-day personal “devices” in our hands nearly all the time, it’s so easy to become accustomed to instant (or nearly-instant) gratification. If we don’t like the sentiment of a post or an Instagram we can just swipe it away and ignore it. But that’s swiping away a thing, not a person – not someone who’s presence in your life is (or should be) valuable.
We get one mother, one father. World history is chock full of parent/child relationships that had major challenges. It’s nothing new. Some had fatal outcomes, but the majority were things that eventually found some form of resolution.
In my teens I was told that often the people we have the most difficulty with are people who remind us of us. When we see things we don’t like in others it’s often a reflection of what we don’t like in ourselves – and it’s so much easier to take issue with the others and not deal with ourselves. I’ve found that to be truer and truer over my years.
But blocking/swiping away people who illuminate our flaws doesn’t actually benefit us – we are still going to have those issues until we address them….only without the company of people who might actually want to love and care for and walk with us along the way.
IT TAKES WORK!!! It’s not easy! You have to want to keep someone’s presence in your world to work through the challenges between you.
But again: This is your only mother, your only father. OR: This is a human you brought into this world.
OR: This may not be your only sibling, but it’s one of the souls that shares more history with you than most others. Isn’t the proximity of their presence in your life worth the investment of a little emotional work?
So you might not ever become Best Buds…. But shouldn’t you at least be able to be in the same room at a family gathering for a couple of hours?
If you have to exert a little grace/patience/self-discipline to do that, surely that’s better than writing them off…ignoring their existence. You’re going to feel that loss on some level until the conflict gets resolved anyway. That un-resolution is damaging!
I won’t get into this at length now, but I see a tremendous parallel between “no-contact family”-ing and the rampant current polarization we are experiencing nationally.
Computers/cell phones/social devices are NOT our friends here – they do not assist in our learning how to co-exist with other human (biologically related or not) who do not completely agree with us on every issue. They elevate our inhumanity, blocking us from successfully sharing a world with others.
We’ve simply got to start being better about learning how to accept each other, even if we disagree.
We need to be willing to put in that effort – to live by Grace and Acceptance of flaws and failings….
Because, bottom line: we need to be accepted with OUR OWN flaws and failings. We’ve ALL got ‘em….. ain’t none of us challenge-free – no matter what our childhood TV told us!
