I grew up the eldest of three siblings, in a loving home with a mom, a dad, and a dog. We always had a home with a backyard, in a neighborhood with lots of other children to play with. It was pretty idyllic. Until one day when I was about 10 years old, and my mom took a phone call that was from the police. My father, an executive with a large corporation, had been shot during the commission of an armed robbery and he was in the hospital and also was under arrest. Aparrently he had committed several armed robberies in the months preceding this. From that surreal moment and every moment forward, our lives were completely different from everything we’d known and everything we imagined they would be.
My father spent the next 7 years in prison in South Carolina and we visited each weekend. My mother and my sisters and I moved in with my mother’s parents in North Carolina, leaving our schools and friends behind. It was my life’s mission to make sure no friends at my new school found out that my father was in prison. The embarrassment would have been more than I could take. Meanwhile, we never had a family meeting about the situation, or discussed it in any way. After 7 years, when I was a senior in high school, still living with my grandmother (my grandfather had died), my father came home after his release.
Again there was no family meeting, no discussion about the past 7 years or the future.
Needless to say, I floundered through my early twenties, untethered from any sense of stability or belonging. That’s a whole other post. I wouldn’t see a therapist for another decade. Cut to May 1992, two months after I married the most wonderful man I’d ever met. My father pays us a visit and says that he and my mother are getting divorced. It made perfect sense to me: they didn’t sleep in the same bedroom and they never seemed happy to be together. He spoke to her like he thought she was an idiot. When I spoke to my mother, though, she had a far different story. A few months earlier, she had received a letter that said my father was having an affair, nearly living with, another woman. Mom did some detective work and found it was true. He’d been having an affair with this woman for years, practically since he was out of prison.
I asked my father about this version of the divorce and he denied it. A couple of months later I ran into he and this woman at a basketball game and realized it was true.
I haven’t spoken to him, or seen him, since.
I have recently read a half-dozen articles about estrangement and it seems to be more prevalent than it was. I don’t know about that - maybe people are just more open about it than before. I know that I am. I grew up terrified that someone would find out the secret that my father was in prison. When I cut him out of my life, I did not advertise it and I even made excuses when people asked about him. But not anymore. I know that it was the best thing I could have done.
I do not have room in the life I’ve made for that person. I had therapy and found positive, healthy ways to deal with a dysfunctional childhood. I have a wonderful husband, we’ve been married for 32 years and have two grown sons. I was very honest with my sons when they were young - my father was no longer a part of my life because he was not a good or truthful person. He had been dishonest with my mother, left her to raise us with no financial or emotional help from him for 7 years, and then could not tell her the truth when he wanted to leave the marriage years after she stuck with him. My siblings made their own decisions about staying in touch with him, and we have agreed to disagree about including him in our lives. I have never felt that I’ve missed anything, nor that my children did. Not only did they have a wonderful father, his brothers and his father until his death, but we raised them at a church where we were very active and they had dozens of great male role models.
No way was I going to allow my father’s chaos and dysfunction into my life when I was an adult and had a choice.
I used to have a lot of anger toward my father, but I’ve come to see that it’s been a wonderful blessing to have him out of my life. Not everyone is capable of honesty, maturity, respect for others, or being a good parent. I guess my decision about estrangement from him was more about what my family & I deserved and less about what he didn’t deserve - it wasn’t a punishment for him, but emotional stability for us.
I empathize with everyone who is estranged from a family member because I know it is difficult and that it creates a long road to healing and better days.
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