To the mother whose daughter won’t speak to her

Her birthday came and went. You mailed the card on Tuesday so it would arrive in time, and you still don’t know if she opened it. Her number is in your phone under the nickname you gave her when she was four. Some nights you scroll back through your old texts, past the last cold one, to the ones with hearts in them, just to see that they were real.

And in your head there’s a courtroom that never closes. You argue your side. Then you argue hers, better than she ever did. You bring up the hard years, the move, the thing you said in the car a long time ago. Every night the case is reopened, and every night you lose.

In his 2020 book Fault Lines, the Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer reported a national survey in which more than a quarter of American adults said they were estranged from a relative at that moment. If you sat in a room with a hundred American adults, around twenty-seven would be estranged from someone in their family, and about ten from a parent or a child. Most of them would never say it, because estrangement is a family sorrow people often assume you must have earned.

Being apart from your daughter doesn’t prove you were a bad mother. It means something broke between two people, each with a history and reasons of their own. You don’t have to win the case to be allowed to grieve.

Nobody can promise you she’ll come back. That isn’t anyone’s to promise. What you can choose is how the door looks from her side. A door with a long explanation taped to it is hard to walk through. A door that just says “I love you, I’m here, no questions” is easier. One line on her birthday. Nothing that needs an answer.

Want a letter written only for you? Write my free letter →

And on the nights the courtroom opens, you can try something small: let the trial wait. Put a hand on the table, palm down, and notice what missing her feels like in your body, without explaining it to anyone. Missing her is not a crime you’re on trial for. It’s love.

You loved her before she could say your name. That part was never in question.

— Be A Good Mom

Source: Pillemer, K. (2020). Fault Lines: Fractured Families and How to Mend Them. New York: Avery. National survey conducted by Karl Pillemer, Cornell University.