It’s a year and a half since Jody last spoke to her mother, and the conversation ended badly. Though their relationship was always fractious, with long spells of not speaking, Jody had been feeling anxious about some big changes in her life and was craving comfort. Listening to some old voicemails from her mother made her nostalgic enough to pick up the phone. But the call quickly degenerated.
“My mom has a proclivity for expressing her emotions in really extreme, volatile ways. She lashes out and insults people,” says Jody, who is 29 and in the process of moving overseas. Her mother has suffered long-term mental health problems, she says, and sees herself as a victim conspired against by others: Jody learned young that if she didn’t beg for forgiveness when her mother started hurling accusations, she would be frozen out. But not this time. “When it finally clicked that my mom weaponised her own emotions to manipulate mine, I stopped feeling a reflex to defend myself.” She hung up, blocked her mother’s number, and decided they would never speak again.
Though Jody is sure she made the right decision, living with it hasn’t been easy. “I still miss her, and wish I could have those moments other people have with their moms. I can’t remember what she smells like or how it felt to hug her.” But she can’t live, she says, with being continually tested, as if she were an employee permanently on probation. “What she didn’t seem to take into account is that, just like any other fed-up employee, I can quit.”
The kind of broken relationship Jody describes is almost certainly more common than you might think. In Britain, research by the charity Stand Alone suggests around one in five families may be affected by estrangement – defined as a relationship in which communication has stopped. In the US (where Jody currently lives), a study by researchers at Ohio State University found 6% of respondents were estranged from a mother and a startling 26% from a father.
While the experience is still often cloaked in secrecy and shame, it’s perhaps no longer as taboo as it was. In her recent memoir, the Labour MP Diane Abbott described her complicated feelings about being estranged from her difficult, domineering father when he died. Prince Harry’s exodus from the royal family and his wife Meghan’s estrangement from her father have been played out under glaring spotlights. And what was once a lonely, isolating experience is increasingly shared on TikTok, Reddit or in forums offering advice on how to go “no contact” (cutting ties entirely) or “low contact” (bare minimum interaction) without feeling guilty.
“People seem to think that hashtags on social media create estrangement,” sighs Becca Bland, who founded Stand Alone after being estranged from her own parents aged 25, and has since moved on to coach estranged families. “But in the 12 or 13 years I’ve worked on this, I’ve never met someone who hasn’t had an extremely good reason to consider it.” Apart from the loneliness and pain of leaving a family, she says, young people can pay dearly for being estranged in a world in which almost a third of British 25- to 29-year-olds still live at home and parents often co-sign student loans, guarantee a young person’s rent or contribute to a first-time buyer’s deposit. All of which may help explain why the peak age of estrangement isn’t in the rebellious teens but – as it was for Jody – during the more considered, financially stable late 20s and 30s.
