To Canceled Parents Everywhere

A Mother’s Day Look-Back

Mother’s Day is a great day for a lot of women. But not for everyone. It wasn’t so great for me during five years of infertility.

Some people don’t get the happy ending to that journey that I did, either.

And also, Mother’s and Father’s Day isn’t so great for parents who’ve been canceled. I wanted to give a hug, and some love, to the growing and epidemic-number of parents who have been canceled by a teen or adult child.

This is not something I ever thought would happen to me. I was no perfect parent, but I really gave it my all. And ten years ago, I was canceled by one of my children.

Mother’s Day is a great time to reflect on my relationships with and celebrate memories of my other three children and see them or talk to them on the phone. But I do have a child that I have missed nearly a decade of his life.

I haven’t joined the huge groups of estranged parents online, though I know they exist, and I hope they’re helpful for many people. Honestly, it’s still just too painful for me, and I mostly don’t like to talk about it, or wade around in it–so, I rarely do.

Recently I saw an extremely detailed and well produced video on YouTube by a mother who has been in great pain since four years ago, her only child canceled her. She talked a lot about anger, and how she’s been in the “letting go” process.

I didn’t really relate to that much, as my emotional experience the last 10 years is very different than that, anger isn’t something I’m aware of feeling much of, and I still haven’t let go–but I think we all process pain differently and that’s okay.

There really aren’t enough words, or the right words, to explain how painful the canceled parent phenomenon is. I think of it kind of like limbo or purgatory.

If your child dies in an accident, you will be surrounded with love and support, and casseroles–for a long, long time. And by saying that I am in no way saying it’s less painful to lose a child to death, because that’s not true–the canceled parent still has hope that something might change, and the canceled parent at least knows her child is out there carrying on with life.

Tori Spelling finally forgave her mom, and Jennifer Aniston forgave her dad, after all.

But this culture doesn’t really know what to do with, or for, a parent whose child is very much alive, but has chosen to pretend he has no parents. 

And by the way, I don’t make this statement today to imply that there aren’t people with abusive parents who need boundaries and distance and safety from a parent who was consistently neglectful and abusive.

And someone will point out to me that parents cancel children occasionally too. I saw Jessie’s parents in Breaking Bad, and I acknowledge your point.

I do, however, want to ask any child who has canceled your parent this question:

Does the punishment match the crime? And I guess I want to say that the greatest lesson I’ve ever had to learn in my life has been how to forgive. How powerful forgiveness is.

I have a friend whose son died in a drug overdose. His remaining child, a daughter, got angry with her parents at the funeral of her only sibling, and canceled them many years ago. Years later, she was in a serious car accident, and they flew across the country to sit in her hospital room, holding her hand and watching the monitors and praying.

When she recovered, she still chose to not speak to them. She went on to have two small children of her own. Children who have never met their grandparents.

This is a heartbreaking story, but I have another one that hits even closer to home, and is why this topic is again on my mind. (Besides it being Mother’s Day and the 10-year anniversary of the loss of my son.)

When I moved to Florida, I made friends with some Christian church pastors, a husband and wife whose son canceled them many years ago. Two weeks ago, that same son, not yet 40 years old, died. Of pneumonia and sepsis, in a hospital following a procedure.

I reached out that weekend to my own son who hasn’t talked to me in 10 years. To tell him this story.

And to ask, as I have many times before, for forgiveness. To ask, does the punishment fit the crime? Can 10 years be enough yet?

And: please don’t make me lose you twice, because it could be your last day, or mine–and why should we leave it like this?

When you forgive, you are released from bondage. You never have to tell the story of victimhood again; you are freed from it; you have freed the transgressor; and perhaps they don’t even deserve that; but you’ve also freed yourself.

I am in need of forgiveness, and so I try to extend it. I hope a child who canceled her parent sees this and reconsiders it. Not many of us have perfect parents who didn’t make mistakes, sometimes big ones.

Half of us parents got divorced. While raising children! Of the other half who stayed married, half of them were in a cold war–or a hot war!

Who is left? Who doesn’t have some trauma from our parents, and the trauma our parents came from?

Are there any among us who do not need forgiveness? And if the answer to that is no, then–

–would we not all be wise to consider forgiveness, the hardest and best thing you may have ever done? (Or never done. Yet.)

If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it. You can forgive and still have boundaries.

On behalf of canceled parents everywhere, I hope everyone will take a minute to consider your role, to consider whether you may have let a punishment go on for too long. Consider what forgiveness might feel like.

Consider if today were your last day on Earth, who you’d want to forgive. Consider other people affected by any choice you may have made to not forgive, or a choice to punish someone for an extended length of time.

Consider if you may have lost out on many rich experiences in order to cancel someone who may have given you what they had to give, even if it wasn’t enough.

And above all, I hope that you have hope. How things are today may not be how things always are.

I hope we remember and experience the story of the prodigal son in our own lives. Whether we are the father, or the son, or the other son, in that story–I very much hope there is a homecoming for everyone.

Please share this article or the podcast I recorded about this topic to a fellow mother. 

Thank you for your support of this blog. I hope you had a wonderful Mother’s Day.