2001-2002
April 3, 2001: Introduction
April 6, 2001: The advantages of parrots
June 4, 2002: Minor stuff
June 15, 2002: Powerlessness
June 16, 2002: Father's Day
June 22, 2002: Someone else's estrangement
July 14, 2002: The impact of estrangement on daily life.
January to April 2004
May to December 2004
January through May 2005
June to July 2005
On Typepad with posts archived from July 2005 to present.
One of the most insidious things about being estranged is the inclination to define ourselves in terms of being estranged: "I am an estranged mom or an estranged daughter or an estranged father or ..." As though we have failed at something. But there is so much more to life than whether we are estranged from someone. Often there is nothing that we can do to end the estrangement if we weren't the one who made the decision.
What we can do is live a life that contributes something positive to the world. I chose a picture of myself in which I am smiling. I am not smiling about being estranged but being estranged hasn't taken away my ability to smile.
Ginny
Estrangement, the website, has been up for 3 days. I spent most of today enlarging the links pages, finding the movies that I could remember, adding bookmarks to the Yahoo! Estrangement Group site. I have wondered if it would be possible to have an Estrangement humor page or if that would be too bizarre. Something along the lines of Hilary Clinton wishing she were estranged from Bill maybe!
I don't know if I'll include a humor page. But I did recall something that I wrote a few years ago. It isn't specifically about estrangement but it was inspired by the estrangement from my daughter. I'll include it here for now. Here it is:
The Advantages of Having Parrots Instead of Children.
- Parrots hatch. This is a big plus!
- As long as your parrot is alive, you will always have a child in the house. (For some this may be seen as a disadvantage!)
- A parrot plays like a child, talks like you, has temper tantrums like a child, gets over them unlike some children.
- A parrot will eat her veggies.
- Parrots grow their own clothes which are usually attractive, colorful & enhance their looks. A parrot will never wear a lycra see-through blouse or their jeans below their underwear. If their underwear isn't clean, it means that they are sick. They are good about their grooming.
- Parrots are cheaper to educate & appreciate your efforts to educate them. After classes are done, they do not move to the other side of the country & stop calling you.
- Your parrot talks to you. If she doesn't talk to you, she will sing or whistle to you.
- Parrots are good listeners. They love to hear you talk about anything as long as they are not tired. If you wonder if they are listening, they will repeat back to you what you said.
- A parrot is always happy to have dinner with you. Or lunch or breakfast. If they would let parrots in the stores, your parrot would go shopping with you &/or to the movies. When she is tired, she will yawn & go to sleep if you let her.
- When a parrot is angry with you, she is direct about it. You will know. There is no reading between the lines.
- If you do not abuse your parrot, she will not stop talking to you for years. Parrots make sense. They are logical creatures. They know who feeds them & who is kind to them. They reward love with love.
- A parrot appreciates attempts to make her happy.
- A parrot knows who is kind & who isn't. She does not reward those who are not kind. Those who love her & show her they love her are the ones she trusts. She will not run off with the ex-con drug addict who she met in a bar. She might bite him!
- Parrots do not go out & buy drugs or indulge in liquor.
- Parrots are naturally smart!
- At night parrots sleep quietly. They do not play drums or watch MTV at full volume till 3 A.M. or hang out in bars or on street corners carrying boom boxes & a bottle in a brown paper bag & funny handrolled cigarettes in their pockets. Parrots do not smoke.
- Parrots have a sense of boundaries. If you let them know, they will sometimes respect yours but they won't hold a grudge over boundaries. They will let you know where their boundaries are. There is no guessing with a parrot.
- Parrots are cheerful, affectionate & funloving.
- A parrot will never ask you for advice & then get mad at you for giving it.
- A parrot is a very forgiving creature.
- Parrots do not fart!
- If a parrot throws up in front of you, it probably means she loves you!
- Parrots never ask for money unless you teach them to ask for money.
Ginny © 2001 All Rights Reserved, May not be reprinted without written permission.
Redoing website. Discovered a couple of months ago that Yahoo! had stopped allowing FTP file transfer on their Geocities pages where this site used to be. I discovered that shortly after taking the site down or would have left it there. So I'm making a few changes and then will upload it to a mac.com site.
In my personal life, nothing has changed as far as the estrangement goes. The estrangement with my daughter is going to be 7 years old shortly. I have gone on with my life. I'm pursuing some creative personal projects. I no longer think about her every day. I hope she's well and enjoying her life. It's very strange to be so distant from someone to whom I once felt so very close. Life is going on.
Once again working on website. Creative projects like this are kind of like having children. It is something that we bring to fruition and then let out into the world and let if fly. Whether anyone else gets anything out of it or not is not up to us. We just put it out there. Whether it's a sculpture or a painting or whatever. Of course, creating an object is very different from bearing a child.
We have no control, or very little control, over how a person turns out other than doing our best as a parent. Genetics and luck and each person's own will, talents, and personality are beyond our control. As parents we don't get either all of the credit or all of the blame. Unless we have been very very bad parents indeed. But most of us do our best.
My daughter's birthday is in August. This time of year leading up to August has been a tough time of year since the estrangement began. I tend to feel very out of sorts and I fight off depression.
June 16, 2002 Sunday, Father's Day
That's my father in the middle. Third from the left. That was in about 1940. Six years before I was born.
I am aware of strangers reading my words here and finding fault with me. That makes me feel defensive and at the same time self critical. I know I can be irritating. But then most of us can be irritating. Each of us find things irritating about some people that don't bother others at all.
About 6 years ago a stranger jumped all over me on an AOL discussion board. She had no reason to do this except that she was estranged from her mother and despised her mother. She decided she would take it all out on me since I was a mother estranged from my daughter. Apparently she concluded that all the issues that she had with her mother applied to me. In her mind I was the wicked witch of the west, east, north, and south. It was startling. It made me aware of how we can bring our preconceptions and baggage to other situations where they might not apply.
This morning I found a link to add to the links page. It is an online article about mother/daughter relationships that went bad, largely due to the mother's inappropriate behavior. The article is very tough on the mothers and probably deservedly so. It is disconcerting now though to be on the side of the estrangement equation where I am the mom and an estranged mom. This is an equation where I've experienced both sides, having been on bad terms with my mother on many occasions over the years and even now not able to find a way to have a relationship with her in which I can trust her.
It's Father's Day. My father died 14 years ago and I don't miss him. We didn't have a good relationship. He suffered from lifelong alcoholism and a gambling addiction. It's fair to say that I never really knew him. I don't know that he ever got to know himself. He buried himself in addictions. It was tragic all around. He wasted so much of his life and those who would have loved him never were able to know him. That's just the way things are sometimes. When I was a kid, I tried so hard to make him happy on Father's Day. Now I can't remember the details of holidays of years ago other than that my father always got drunk and made a scene. Now Father's Day is just another day for me.
My father was good at gardening. I plant flowers in his honor. That was one of his good hobbies. Every spring when those flowers bloom, I think of his gardening and how much I enjoyed that.
My ex-husband is my daughter's father. I briefly thought this morning of calling him and wishing him Happy Father's Day. He would not like that. He hasn't spoken to me since 1985. As far as I know, my daughter still has a relationship with him. She lives in the same area that he does. I don't think she'll ever live anywhere else. Her husband is unlikely to move away from his family too.
It's ironic to me that my ex-husband has ended up being the parent who has a lasting relationship with my daughter. I know that he let her down in years past and that she used to dislike him. I have suspected that a process like Parental Alienation Syndrome (see links page) has occurred and that she has a feeling that she can't have a peaceful good relationship with both of us at the same time. But that is speculation and may be just psychobabble. I don't know. When I first learned about PAS and read a book about it, I sent both my ex and my daughter the book. In retrospect all I probably succeeded in doing was irritating them. They might not even have opened the package. Who knows?
I don't like my ex-husband but the dislike is mainly due to his behavior after our divorce. By refusing to speak to me and by hanging on to bitterness, he made it particularly difficult for my daughter to have a relationship with us both. I believe that if we had been able to have a more amicable parting my daughter would not have felt torn between us. But in an atmosphere of bitterness, fingerpointing, anger, and angry silence, I think that she eventually chose a side. I don't think she would see it that way and would deny that the divorce had anything to do with the estrangement but in my heart I think it paved the way for her to see only the things about me that irritated her and blinded her to anything good about me. It's impossible for me to know for sure.
Yesterday I was talking to a man in his seventies who I've only met a few times. He is someone that my husband and I met in the course of doing business. He has a wonderful reputation in our business as an ethical person and as a very nice human being. During my conversation with him yesterday, I learned that he is estranged from his 45 year old son who won't have anything to do with him. The son has also estranged himself from his sister. The father sounded as though he missed his son and was at a loss to understand why his son felt the way that he did.
This reminds me of how prevalent this condition of being estranged is. It affects all sorts of people from the nicest to the worst. I'm not saying that the son doesn't have good reasons for his estranging himself. I really don't know. But I know from personal experience that doing your best and being just an average decent nice person doesn't protect you from becoming estranged from people who you never wanted to lose.
Today I am thinking of how being estranged from family members has affected me in my daily life. One way that I know it affects me is that I am less afraid to voice how I really feel and think to others. Once I experienced losing someone even though I had censored my real thoughts and feelings, I decided it made less sense to censor myself. That I might as well be honest about how I feel because being anything else didn't prevent the worst from happening. It only made me regret not being honest sooner. Maybe regret is not the right word. I would have known more if I had been honest sooner.
It might have been better to have known more, even if the pain would have been quicker in coming. I am less fearful of some losses. But it also makes me choose my battles. Some battles are unimportant and not worth risking a relationship over. I let those go on the days when I am being wise. I wish I were wise all the time. Being human, I haven't figured out how to do that. Chances are that I never will.
I censor myself less and also more. If that makes sense?