Estranged: You Must Have Done Something Terrible
There is a thought floating around that I've seen pop up over the years that if you are estranged you must have done something terrible, way beyond the pale. In some cases that may be true, for the majority it is not. I don't think about estrangement as much as I used to, and it's been de-sensitized for me when I do think about it. It's been seven years. Life moved on. As Aeschylus said memory is the mother of all wisdom. That's the gift of accumulated and evaluated experiences in later midlife. That's the place that I'm coming from. As far as the blanket, flip, no insight, response to estrangement, my response to that is there is a dangerous arrogance in believing you can sum up a parent's entire story in one assumption. Yes, some estrangements happen for valid reasons - abuse in either direction, harm, trauma, etc. No one denies that. But not all do. The abusers generally don't give a damn but the rest of us have had our hearts ripped out and that...