The Hardest Goodbye

on deciding whether to go no contact

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

This summer, we’ve been looking at commitment and what it takes to make communities and relationships work. Sticking it out has its place, certainly, but what about its opposite, calling it quits? Is there ever a time when we are justified in stepping away from relationships, even one as sacred as that between a parent and child?

Content Warning: suicidal ideation. If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, please call or text 988 for help.

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During the summer of 2020, I debated going no-contact with my mother. While my social media feed lit up with photos of people retreating to childhood homes, praises for grandparents as backup daycare, and even intergenerational TikToks, I was staring at the bland cover of a self-help book that detailed the process of cutting off a loved one. I couldn’t even decide whether to read it.

The library had been closed for months, so this book sat in a stack next to my desk, calling to me like the tell-tale heart each time I sat down to write. What was I going to do?

Part of me was stuck in disbelief that things had gotten this bad. As a child, I’d idolized my mother. I remember going to JoAnne’s to pick out fabric for matching dresses, watching her lay out the pattern pieces on the fabric: her larger pieces in the center, my smaller ones filling in the gaps. I would ask her endless questions about her life before me, making note of how I ought to be in the world. My baby book catalogues my aspirations at various ages: ballerina, teacher, nurse, mommy—all her ambitions became my own.

I loved her biting sense of humor and her creativity. Her smile, when she turned it my way, felt like stepping out of a cold shadow into sunlight. And if she often kept me at a distance, shooing me towards the TV whenever I broached the kitchen where she spent most of the day cleaning, cooking, and drinking white wine, well, I aspired to be less annoying, more useful.

We had our ups and downs. When I left home for college, she sank into a depression so deep I felt it even 500 miles away. She joked about how I “abandoned” her. When we’d lived together, I’d been adept at gauging her mood and avoiding her triggers, but on the phone it was difficult to take her emotional temperature and figure out the right thing to say.

In the summer of 2020, our conversations felt like stepping on landmines. I wrestled with duty—what did I owe the woman who gave me life, who raised, fed, and clothed me? Who, as she often reminded me, “only lived” to be a grandma to my kids, then 8 and 5.

I never doubted that she loved us. But I also could no longer ignore her increasingly erratic behavior. On our weekly Skype calls she was usually drunk and moody. One night, she accused me of not being grateful for the matching sweaters she’d recently sent my kids. I objected that I had thanked her on a previous call and promised to send a photo of the kids wearing them when the weather was…you know…more sweater appropriate? My explanation only enraged her further: she accused me of secretly hating the sweaters and her, before enlisting the help of family members to harangue me for my ingratitude.

By now this was a familiar pattern. After many years of therapy, I’d begun to wonder about my mother’s drinking and the way my family readily accepted her version of events. As I’d worked towards having healthier communication in my own relationships, the difference between my household and my parents’ was thrown into stark relief.

This new self-knowledge also made me question the past: had I always wanted to be just like Mom, or had that been my only safe option?

I’d spent the previous several visits trying to set boundaries with her around her drinking. When confronted, she acted like she had no idea what I was talking about but eventually agreed to not drink around us, “since it’s so important to you.”

But during her visits she continued to ask for alcohol, to purchase it under various guises (“it’s for the marinara.”) After she left, I’d find empty wine bottles hidden in various nooks throughout my house.

After so much energy spent policing these boundaries, the forced separation of the pandemic came as a relief.

I blamed our increasing distance on being COVID-cautious, but she could sense I was pulling away, which triggered more acting out. On a random evening, I might get half-a-dozen angry voicemails about what a terrible person I was. Sometimes she threatened to commit suicide since I obviously didn’t care enough about her to answer the phone. (When she did this, I’d contact family members who lived with or near her who would then call 911. Always take suicide threats seriously.)

One of the hardest parts of having an addicted family member is the silence that surrounds the illness. In my family-of-origin, there was no accountability for what was said or done in a drunken haze. It was always explained to me that the alcoholic felt immense shame about their addiction, and we didn’t want to make that worse, did we?

I was tired of being collateral damage. I dreaded each interaction with my mother. For a few hours before and after our weekly Skype date, I was tense and irritable, snapping at my own children. I realized I was displacing my own anger and grief onto them, the same way my mother had barked at me after visiting my grandma in the nursing home.

But I had to do this, didn’t I? I was obligated to let my kids do a weekly videocall with their grandmother, even if she was drunk and sulking about God-knows-what? I was afraid of what she might do if I stopped talking to her. And I felt an ancient guilt: that somehow her addiction, her life’s many troubles, were all my fault.

My therapist and I spent months gaming out possible solutions. She’d been the one to recommend that library book that had been gathering dust next to my desk. Finally, I got so fed up that I opened it and saw my feelings of fear, obligation, and guilt (FOG) reflected back at me. The author asked whether this could ever be the basis for any kind of healthy relationship? And I knew she was right.

Still, it took several more months of hemming and hawing before I wrote my mom a letter. In it, I explained that the only way forward for our relationship was for her to work towards sobriety and to make a fourth step amends to me for the damage her alcoholism had done to our relationship.

As I dropped the letter into the mailbox slot, I knew this was likely the end. I couldn’t remember Mom ever offering a non-sarcastic apology and I doubted she’d start now, even if it meant losing a relationship with me.

The fallout was quick and predictable: more voicemails. Gifts and cards sent to my children. Other family members asking repeatedly what, exactly, I wanted from her, as if my demands had been complicated or finnicky.

And then, quiet. Relief.

The guilt is still there—I worry about her; I imagine what I could’ve done (could still do?) to get her to stop drinking. I still harbor fantasies that she will recover and we will rebuild our relationship. But as her disease progresses that possibility slips farther and farther away.

Looking back now, I suspect that my mother suffers not only from Substance Use Disorder but also Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and that her lashing out at me was likely due to what she perceived as rejection, a major symptom of that disorder. I have a lot of sympathy for her and I don’t blame her. Given her genes and life experiences, it makes total sense why she ended up this way.

That doesn’t mean I’m willing to step back into the line of fire.

Much has been written about the “trend” of estrangement. There’s little actual data regarding the reasons family members become estranged or how long they contemplated it before initiating. Is it possible that people are becoming estranged for rash and selfish reasons? Sure. People vary in their maturity and ability to negotiate conflict.

Still, I bristle at the assumptions that tend to be made about those going no-contact: that we are big, whiny babies who don’t value others. For some of us, distance is the only way we can truly love each other.

I acknowledge that my choice deeply hurt my mother and also negatively impacted other family members. If I could’ve seen any way to preserve our relationship without sacrificing myself in the process, I would’ve done it.

But when I think about the foundations of a healthy relationship, I keep coming back to accountability. If a person can’t take feedback and course correct, I don’t think there’s any hope for a real relationship.

It’s interesting to me that questions of atonement and forgiveness are at the heart of Christianity. As much as my gag reflex activates when I hear the phrase “a personal relationship with God,” this parallel between human and divine relationships is striking: we all screw up, we all hurt those we love, we all need a way back. I wish the theology that formed my mother and me had focused more on healthy repair rather than the unattainable pursuit of moral perfection. I wish we’d experienced grace and learned that a well-done repair actually strengthens relationships.

Maybe things would’ve worked out differently for us.