The deserted mothers' club

IT'S a cruel thing to be disowned by your adult children - but even worse is not knowing why.

Family mediator Judy Simpson says mothers are condemned to suffer in silence. Picture: Eddie Safarik

"I have one son. I have seen him three times in five years. There is no contact from him. The grief is all-consuming. For the life of me I cannot understand how someone can just turn their back on their family."

"I'm an 87-year-old widower with four children, 11 grandkids and a couple of great-grandkids. But I haven't heard from any of them for years."

"I gave birth to three children who are strangers to me. I used to grieve for the loss of their friendship but now that grief has become like a hard lump in my throat."

"I thought I was the only one whose children have chosen not to speak to them. I have racked my mind to try to find what possible crime I committed that could have justified this dismissal, this death."

"In the last couple of years I have been alienated by one of my children. I am at a loss as to what I've done or said. The pain is indescribable."

"I have tried every imaginable way to keep contact with the children I raised and loved unconditionally. I always believed they'd give me time and respect. Instead they have shattered my dreams."

BLOOD is thought to be thicker than water. You can pick your friends but not your family, according to homespun wisdom that held generations responsible for each other's welfare regardless of whether you love them or like them or could happily live without them. But when our columnist Nikki Gemmell wrote recently about one mother's isolation from her adult children, there was an overwhelming roar of recognition from older parents throughout Australia's suburbs, cities, regional towns and coastal retirement strips. They are bewildered and bereaved by the fraught relations they now have with adult offspring who they nursed and clothed and fed and schooled and reared as best they could. Most hide the estrangement from close friends and relatives because they are ashamed by this breach that has no name. "I'm dying inside," one mother says.

Sometimes they can point to a "trigger event" - an argument or an ill-conceived criticism; sometimes the phone calls and texts and emails bounce back in a resounding silence and mothers discover inadvertently their daughter has moved house or given birth; sometimes the freezing-out happens because of unresolved tensions from childhood and teenage years; sometimes a mother or a father's new partner corrodes connections with biological kin.

Counsellors, psychologists and social researchers specialising in family are aware of the phenomenon. But there are no statistics, no plaintiffs, no procedures for a category of dispute that does not bother the Family Court since there is no contractual obligation on parents and adult children to behave civilly towards each other.

Rifts have long been part of the fabric of family life yet within the growing number of smaller, splintered nuclear units the loss is felt more acutely, or perhaps parents are more likely to vocalise their angst. Very few adult children contacted us. Said one: "God, this sounds familiar ... these are just the kind of comments my mother makes ... But you have to ask why none of her children want to see her. There is always a reason."

Our account of the schisms in these pivotal relationships is based on interviews with 30 parents, mostly mothers. Bound by their requests for anonymity, I could not approach the children who cold-shoulder them - in many cases, the parents are still hoping for reunification. The parents speak of "walking on eggshells" as they try to win back the affection of sons or daughters and their partners. They don't know where to go for help or support and they don't understand the silence. "I've begged my son to tell me what turned him against me," laments a woman who sees only one of her three children. "I've approached various organisations for help. I've been to Relationships Australia. I've contacted an agency that helps grandparents who don't see their grandchildren because the parents are divorced. I've talked to psychologists. I've explored every avenue."

Once a month, Jane drives to the parking lot of a McDonald's in Brisbane to take custody of her two young grandchildren. The arrangement was struck with the help of a solicitor after Jane's adult daughter refused her mother access. "She seems to be punishing me for something," Jane tells me. "I've tried to talk to her. I've been to psychologists, counsellors; she won't come along. She won't meet me. In the end I wrote her a letter. I told her I loved her and I'd always be there for her. Then she sent me an email saying it was the end of the relationship."

She has two adult daughters. The eldest, who is a lecturer based overseas, talks to Jane regularly although they don't see each other often. There were problems with her younger daughter's devotion to Christianity during adolescence. Jane jokes that she must have been the only mother fretting over how much time her daughter spent at church. But Jane never imagined these difficulties would poison an extended family relationship.

She collects her grandchildren at a place halfway between her home and the house where her daughter's family lives. "It's usually her husband who drops the kids," Jane says. "I've spoken to the children. I've told them I'm sad about this and that I've tried everything and can't fix it and they nod their little heads." She entertains the two preschoolers for the day and then returns them with gifts of books and clothes. "I do it for them and for me," she says of her reluctant intervention.

The tussles with her youngest daughter do not seem on the surface to be insurmountable. Both daughters are successful professionals with stable families of their own. Jane blames herself. She left her husband after marrying too young and worked to support the girls she raised largely on her own. "I feel a great shame," she says. "You feel as if you've failed."

She sees a therapist who is the same age as her youngest daughter. "I lie down on her couch and cry and tell her everything." She wonders whether her parenting weakened attachments. "We put them before ourselves and they knew they could walk all over us. They end up with no respect for you." That said, this mother never forgets her daughter's birthday. "I always send her an email."

Judy Simpson is a Queensland-based family law mediator with a masters in conflict resolution who is concerned by what she regards as a growing incidence of parents being rejected by their children. She became aware of the problem through friends and clients who came to her for advice when their children turned on them. "Out of the blue these parents had received emails from their daughters listing complaints about the way they'd been brought up. They are the lucky ones. At least they have been told where they went wrong and they can try to fix it up before the relationship shuts down completely," she says.

"So much is expected of mothers. They are put on a pedestal and blamed when things go wrong - and yet mothers usually do what they do with the best of intentions. From my experience the 'shame' for mothers is so great they may deny or minimise family schisms, condemning them to suffer in silence."

She believes expectations of parenting have expanded dramatically. We now know more about the psychological wounds inflicted in childhood while the growth of literature around parenting has turned motherhood from a labour of love learnt on the job into an exacting profession. Simpson points to modern marketing campaigns with pictures of perfect families that stoke envy and deprivation when childhood memories inevitably fall short of these ideals. "We were grateful if our parents fed and sheltered us and sent us to school," she jokes.

The mothers I interviewed tear themselves apart worrying where they went wrong, yet without exception every story they tell entails a measure of sacrifice on behalf of children who have succeeded to the extent that they have jobs, partners or families and a roof over their heads. One mother ferried an Olympic swimmer to and from the pool at dawn each day as she followed a meticulous diet and training regime. "I thought we had been really close but I have been completely shut out. They lock the door and they have the only key. I am absolutely powerless. I never in my wildest dreams thought I'd be talking about my children like this."

Some mothers worked as a financial imperative and now suspect childcare hampered early bonding. "I put him in daycare when he was three and I think he resented that. I was part of the first generation of women to work," says the woman who helped fund her son's medical degree yet now says she never hears from him. Others chose to stay at home, always on tap. "I devoted my life to those children. I'm resentful and I'm angry but most of all I'm really saddened. This is so hurtful, so distressing."

Sue Yorston, a counsellor with Relationships Australia, is familiar with complaints of estrangement between older parents and their adult children. So is Ruth Weston of the Australian Institute of Family Studies. "We are very aware of the fact that some grandparents are not seeing their grandchildren or their older kids. People have been ringing us about it." She believes a number of structural influences could be exacerbating this drift: the crowded lives of two-income families squeeze out grandparents and limit opportunities to attend extended family gatherings; job mobility has shunted sons and daughters interstate and abroad, so that geographical separation often encourages emotional distance, despite a plethora of technological solutions. Good relationships require practice and attention, Weston says. "You have to put the time in to strengthen them."

Weston wonders whether the shrinking nuclear family amplifies a sadness that has always shaken mothers to the core. With two children now the norm for most families, parents can't afford to relinquish the affections of even one. According to ABS data, in 1981 women aged 40-44 were just as likely statistically to have two children (29 per cent) as four (28 per cent); 30 years later, four times more women in the same age bracket have two children (39 per cent) than four (10 per cent).

Simpson says there should be a proper conflict resolution process. "There are processes that can help educate people and give them tools to deal with it. As a society we don't handle conflict well and the longer you leave it, the harder it gets to solve," she says. "Our inbuilt survival instinct ensures we remember the bad things that threatened us, and the good things that happen are overwhelmed - they get lost in the argument. When people feel hurt and aggrieved there is a selective bias against the positive stuff."

One father of three adult sons tells of how he and their mother have been cut out of a relationship with the oldest child, who is a highly successful businessman in his 40s. Recently, the son refused to visit on Mother's Day. "We got an hour-long diatribe about all the things we'd done wrong as parents, including putting him out of the car when he was naughty and driving off. We actually did that to all the sons at one stage. It was quite effective. Made them behave a bit better. They all turned out all right. Our kids don't know how lucky they are."

In a recent lecture at Melbourne University, Australian writer Anna Funder recounted a childhood story of her narrow escape from a grizzly bear in the American wilderness to illustrate an eternal truth about mothering. Her mother had been breastfeeding Funder's brother and shooed the little girl out of the tent with directions for how to find the bathroom at the camping site. Funder kept returning to protest that there was a bear blocking her path. Her mother dismissed this as a figment of the child's imagination until finally another adult stormed into the tent to ask: "WHO keeps sending this child down to the shower block?! There is a BEAR down there."

Her late mother often told this tale against herself. "Mostly, I see now, she told the story as a metaphor for the eternal Mantra of All Mothers, a mantra that only now as a mother am I initiated into, a mantra which is: 'I tried my best. It wasn't enough. But it could have been worse,'" Funder says.

Christine, 71, hasn't seen her middle child, a doctor, for 10 years. Of her three children she grew closest to the second-born after her first husband, the children's father, passed away. "I've no idea what I've done," she says. "I have beaten myself up trying to explain it. I went through a stage of being terribly depressed. I saw a clinical psychologist. In the early stages I thought that it was my fault."

When she finally got her middle daughter to come to the phone after a period of abrupt silence, the message was clear. "I was told I wasn't a fit mother. She didn't want anything to do with me. That was the start of it. I wrote letters. I phoned. 'Please explain what I've done.' She said: 'I'm not ready to tell you.' This was blowing my mind."

Following months of silence, Christine's second husband served as an envoy. He discovered that in the interim the daughter had given birth to another child without telling them. Christine believes her daughter's anger was triggered by an earlier dispute over the possession of a treasured family photo album. Christine says: "I had told her I wouldn't give it to her until I died and then I would leave it to the three of them.

"You never get over it," she says, unable to hold back tears. "You've got all this love to give."

The psychologist she consulted asked her what she most missed about her daughter. "I said, 'Sitting in my backyard watching my grandchildren play'."

Untangling these internecine conflicts is impossible when you hear only one chronology. Trigger events like the photo album request may seem trivial on their own but they may give vent to simmering hurts stretching back decades. Not all of us are skilled in managing conflict - so that antagonism or disagreement leads to bigger ructions that become harder to quell.

Are individuals less tolerant of the behaviour of parents and siblings in an age when family ties can be cut or loosened more easily? Today's families are so much more elastic. We have blended families, gay parenting and social networks that are not underpinned by any biological connection beyond a shared belonging to humanity. Did we once shrug off slights and irritations or childhood grievances because that was expected of us?

My late mother cooked Sunday roasts for the extended clan. These functions often disintegrated because of bad behaviour or indiscretion. But we limped along with an idea of being inextricably in this together. She was an exceptionally difficult woman but I loved her dearly and, like Funder, I understood her mood swings and frustrations so much better once I had children of my own. Somehow our fragile unit survived. We've had ups and downs but no one has gone missing. I've hung on to the value of reciprocity where the strongest looks out for the weakest in our midst.

Older generations of parents interviewed for this article spoke of tolerating parents and parents-in-law with gritted teeth because it was beholden upon them to do so. "I only recently stopped looking after my parents," says a mother wounded by her eldest son's refusal to contact her. Another, estranged from her married daughter, says: "Once a month we saw my husband's parents. I didn't want to go but that's what you did."

A mother who says her married daughter banned her from visiting recalls her contemporaries managing tensions with extended family. "I didn't warm to my mother-in-law. She was a very strong woman. But I respected her and we rubbed along as best we could." This refrain is common to many conversations. "My mother wasn't particularly helpful to me," one woman says, "but I would never have thought to myself, 'Well, I won't speak to her'. It would never have occurred to me. I feel so lonely and hurt. I don't think I've done anything to deserve being wiped out of my children's lives."

A Victorian woman in her 60s, who tells me she's been abandoned by her 25-year-old, newly married son, looks after an 81-year-old mother. "I can't understand how someone can turn their back on family," she frets. We spoke a day before her son celebrated his wedding in Asia. She had wanted to attend the ceremony with her elderly mother but had never travelled overseas before. When she sought her son's help with the arrangements, she felt marooned. Years earlier they had clashed when he accused her of failing to lodge his tax return after he'd fallen behind with his records. She's a bookkeeper by trade. "That became my fault," she says. "That was the beginning of the end."

Whatever the rights and wrongs of this particular conflict, it became a roadblock in their relationship. She last saw him in January. She cries as we talk about it. "He was my only child. I feel totally abandoned. I probably need psychiatric help. It has been the most hurtful thing as we were once so close," she says. "I just want some answers. I wrote him a letter a couple of months ago but there has been absolute silence. I won't shut the door but I have to find a way to get on with my life. This is soul-destroying; it eats away at you. What do you do?"

The father of three adult sons saddened by the estrangement of their oldest blames a muscular culture of rights and entitlements. Many of these parents hold themselves responsible for raising a generation of self-absorbed citizens. "Maybe I gave them too much freedom," says one mother. Another says: "Families are much more tenuous and fragile but the individuals within families seem to be really, really strong."

Tony Townsend, a member of Queensland's Council of Grandparents, concurs. "There is such an emphasis now on the rights of individuals as opposed to the responsibilities individuals have to their families and the community. The whole thing has swung out of kilter." He sees grandchildren used as weapons in disputes with grandparents. "Often it seems these disputes happen for no good reason other than some remarks are taken the wrong way."

"I'm so careful with what I say," says a mother who sees only one of her three children. Another mother insists she bent over backwards to repair relations with one of her two sons after he overheard her criticise his partner. "I've apologised in person and in writing," she says. "I think we're out of practice at shrugging off the stray inappropriate comment. No one spends enough time with anyone. Families sit down together so rarely that we don't have a lot of practice at it." After losing contact with two out of three offspring, another mother tells me: "I feel as if I can't say anything or the last one will cut me off. I will take my sadness to the grave."

A mother who admits she slapped her eldest daughter across the face during an argument says: "It was not OK to have responded like that and I've apologised from my head and my heart. I said I was happy to go to a third party to talk about the dynamic between us." For the girl's 40th birthday her mother made a quilt. "I took it around and left it on her doorstep with a nice note saying how much I'd loved being her mother. I never even got a thank you."

Judy Simpson likens the emotional turmoil of a faltering mother-child relationship to the identity crisis when a senior businessman is retrenched. "For a lot of women the only really important anchor in their lives is motherhood. If they fail in a primary role they feel should come naturally it is devastating for them." Hyper-conscious of how these relationships can go so spectacularly and abruptly awry, Simpson rang each of her four adult children recently to ask if they harboured any grudges towards her as a mother and, if so, would they like a face-to-face meeting to thrash things out.

As I go from one mother to the next the news that they are not alone cheers them all. "It is almost like a sisterhood of women out there who need to get together," says one. "We should start a deserted mothers' club," says another.

The women have each found distractions and coping mechanisms. One paints. Many write letters they do not send. A Victorian mother throws her energies into a Thai orphanage. "I manage a productive life so as not to fall into 'victim mode' or set up the remainder of my life as a shrine to my estranged children," says one. Another insists: "I step out of myself and see myself as a strong, resilient person instead of a grandmother who is not coping."

Some have given up contacting children. They do not want to stalk them. They also fear the sting of rejection. Others keep trying to communicate with letters and cards and emails and phone calls. Mother's Day, Christmas and Easter are holidays that haunt them. One parent sends a postcard every week to the grandchildren she is not allowed to see. The day before we speak she received an olive branch: a photo sent by text of her grandson wearing the birthday present she'd sent him.

Perhaps the most poignant advice came from a 64-year-old woman who left her mother behind in Ireland in the days before mobile phones or Skype or emails. By post the letters from her mother came watermarked with tears and a spidery script infused with the shiver of grief. "She'd write of her loneliness. She'd say, 'I gave my life for my children and now they're all gone.' I always wrote back and tried to reassure her." Once the daughter became a mother she was determined not to hold expectations of an ongoing closeness with her children. Although she suffers over the fleeting contact she has with her eldest son, she remembers her mother's melancholy and tries not to fill her emptiness with resentment. "Sometimes we've got to be happy with what we have," she says.