A Strange Grief Part 2
on mapping stars and getting free
I traveled across the country last month to talk through the strange grief of estrangement with people I love, whose stories of rupture and separation have crossovers and likenesses to mine even as our estrangements are unique to us. We sat on a rocky beach by the Salish Sea and unpacked our lives to show each other wounds that had scarred and wounds that felt like they’d never heal. Nature held us while we did this: We saw a meteor fall to earth changing colors as it descended; we saw bioluminescent plankton shining its wondrous and otherworldly green when we swirled the dark waters at midnight; we sat under a hot sun and watched sea lions swim by, reminding us how big and wide the world actually is when we zoom out from our own grief; we got soaked in a rainstorm while looking for beach treasures to return home with. We ate snacks and meals and drank coffees by the window and talked nonstop until everything was laid out before us and we could make a map of the constellation of the family we came from. This celestial cartography was deep it was dark it was beautiful it was filled with grief it was filled with joy it was rooted in love. All of that, all at once, intermixed and mingled and hard to separate into those different components.
I have a complicated family of origin, particularly on my dad’s side. It is punctuated by intergenerational hurt and trauma buried so deep it is unrecognizable as separate from inherent nature to those who have not made the choice to sift through the hurt and break the cycles that hurt creates. Liberation, though, comes in the sifting, and some of us do not live in bodies that allow us to avoid the truth, as difficult as it may be. Our bodies force us to sift, to map the stars, to understand the nets that hold us even as they harm us.
My dad was a WWII combat veteran and the age of my friends’ grandpas. He’d met my (much younger) mom, already a single parent after her first marriage, not too long after his first wife died, and their May-December romance, that should have probably remained an ill-advised rebound, turned into marriage within about 6 months. 35 years earlier, my dad had married his childhood sweetheart before he shipped out overseas, and they had three kids when he returned from the war. This gave me half siblings a full generation older and a whole swath of nieces and nephews who are the same age as I. Together their three nuclear families formed a constellation around which I floated like a satellite; the same age as my dad’s grandkids, but sharing a parent with the adults. It was never not strange, being this odd space junk in the mix.
There was no easy way to explain my satellite relationship to them that didn’t cast shame over my existing so I hated to receive any questions that are normally simple: “Do you have any siblings? Oh! How old are they?” Answering truthfully led to people feeling entitled to know WHY my oldest brother was almost the same age as my mom, to tell me how my parents were selfish because my dad would die before my peers’ parents. Lying led to more questions I couldn’t answer since I am actually a HORRIBLE liar, so it was the ultimate catch-22 for a kid who spent every moment of every day trying to not be noticed.
I so desperately wanted to fit in, with anyone. Be claimed by any of those family clusters, but I never was. My nieces and nephews and I often fibbed and said I was a cousin, which is a story that falls apart as soon as someone asks one question about my parentage. To me, lying seemed like so much work; I felt like a secret everyone was trying to keep as they had to tolerate me in their lives, always having to explain away this misfit child who was the same age as their kids but shared their dad with them. For me, then, all these years later, I can recognize this as what bell hooks names as a site of wounding that was called love: The secrets and the lies, all told to keep up appearances; “Love” as an object that could be taken or given depending on the day, me not ever knowing the rules; People telling me they “loved” me but their actions always conveying the opposite, a thing my neurodivergent brain could not make sense of. This wounding-as-love planted the seeds of self-doubt that flourished into an ugly and thorny garden within me. The garden grew so wild and fast and filled every open space that it didn’t take that long for me to think I came with the garden already installed. I was a faulty version of a human full of weeds and vines that whispered “you’re not good enough” every chance they got. Wounding-as-love does that to you, it makes you believe so deeply that those stories are your own, the vines of the poison garden wrapped so tightly around your throat, you can’t even question them.
Where my parents’ union was unconventional and unwelcome by my older half siblings, I believe there’s a universe where I, who had no say in any of it, could have been born and cherished. A real, “well this situation isn’t IDEAL but look at this little kiddo we get to love and treasure in the aftermath of it all.” That’s my inner child dreaming talking, but I am positive it has happened somewhere, sometime, to some other late in life baby with siblings from another generation. Alas, this was not my own lived experience on this universe string, but I have big hopes for my next life. My parents split when I was just over a year old, and my mom was yet again single raising me and my half-brother on her side, and everyone in the constellation of my dad’s family went about writing their stories and narratives they decided would be the truth going forward, none of them kind, and none of them actually honest.
The trauma and sadness in my dad’s family goes back generations. Our German last name means one of the most unsavory professions I can think of, so I know we do not descend from Kings and Queens of the Black Forest in some mythical memory and historical tale. The grief I think of when it comes to this group, this constellation of people whose stories helped me form beliefs about myself and my life, belongs to my paternal grandmother. She died in October 1921 after complications from my dad’s birth 6 weeks earlier. That’s the extent of what I know about her life in our family. My newly-widowed grandpa married the 21 year old nanny Helen, asking her to raise his now motherless children but also to know she’d never have any of her own because he was done, and my paternal grandma Minnie was never spoken of again. When I asked my dad about her, he replied, “Grandma Helen is my only mother.” For my whole life I have thought, “what a deep and awful wound. To deny the mother who brought you into the world? Deny her existence, that she was here, lived and breathed and laughed and birthed, because it seemed easier to erase her.” I have since learned she had 7 siblings, her father’s name is the same as my dad’s middle name, her whole family lived in our city. None of them ever saw her children again as far as I know. A whole other constellation wiped off the map with silence and unprocessed grief masquerading as love and family nature.
When I was pregnant with my first kiddo I would wake up from nightmares where I would die, or be unable to move or talk, and I would watch my husband and future child continue life as though I’d never existed. This mother wound of sorts, then, haunted me my whole life. It was sewn into my DNA by Minnie and my dad, waiting, wailing, longing for someone to hear it.
This is only one of a million unspoken things in my family of origin. There are quiet whispers and also some genetic confirmation that our family who came here in the first half of the 19th century were likely part of the mass emigration of Jews from central Europe looking for safety on another continent, choosing new identities to belong to so that they might fit in. Driven by the same longing for belonging and acceptance that my child-self was. If the whispers (and genetics) are true, then we’ve been hiding our true selves for centuries at this point. What a cycle to be caught in, what a curse to try and break.
In this group, speaking truth can cause rupture beyond belief. And if you can’t speak the truth, you lash out and punch down to try and relieve the pressure formed by unexpressed pain. So then, what my life has felt like to me is this: instead of looking at me and deciding to cherish this odd ball out who came tumbling into their lives via an unlikely romance between a widower and a divorced single mom, the constellation decided I’d be a worthy recipient of its anger and its grief, expressed in the form of insults whispered behind my back, spoken out loud to my face, joked about amongst its stars while I orbited around looking for belonging. Those stars were full grown adults taking aim at a baby, a child, a teen, every age/form/iteration I became.
The insults ranged my whole life from cracks about my intelligence (“she’s too dumb to succeed at ANYTHING. She’ll be a leech on dad forever”) to their beliefs that I’d never form healthy relationships (“none of the women in her mom’s family know how to keep a man”). All comments wrapped in the toxicity of Midwest Nice and under the guise of “concern,” shared around the dinner table while I silently ate what had been offered. Swallowing my pain and their cruelty with the fish sticks and tater tots on my plate. Since they were delivered under the lie of concern, taking them personally meant I wasn’t grateful, my silence or responses only furthering the narrative that I was a selfish bratty loser. There wasn’t a good way to respond, a way that was rewarded with love or care. What it felt like was I existed to them as a giant pile of faults no one wanted to claim or care for at all. I was a broken rickety satellite orbiting the constellation, unclaimed with no place to go, but also unable to be free and move on, tethered to those star clusters by DNA and obligation and constant attempts to be everything they said I couldn’t be.
The effort, by the way, it takes to prove your worth to people who have planted a garden of viney cruelties and thorny doubts is massive, and I promise not worth your energy. But that is a lesson we learn in the doing, not in the telling. Sometimes the doing takes decades. And often we need outside help who can point out what we’re trying at, and ask us why and for what, and a cycle starts to fray. The grief through generations becomes a steady hum instead of an occasional whisper or shout in a dream. And in a family like this, what that grief starts to tell you is this: maybe none of it was about you, maybe it was about your connection to God. Maybe you aren’t a pile of faults that somehow took human form, maybe the you who existed under the effort and the masks to prove you could be good enough to be claimed is actually where the magic lies. Maybe there’s nothing you could have done right enough to be loved as you are, maybe the constellation would always look at the space junk satellite with disdain, an easy place to launch their ire like we throw trash in a landfill, never really thinking about it again.
The more distance I created, which should be read: the less I stopped trying to be accepted and just started learning who I was without the effort, unearthing my true self and magic after years of pushing it all down to the depths in the hopes my reward would be love, the more I could see how the cycles and patterns repeat across the constellation backwards and forwards in time. Here are my discoveries in my celestial captain’s log:
The root abuses can be the same even when how they present can be different.
Each star cluster, beginning probably even before my dad, is able to use love as currency, a good that can be given or taken depending on the mood and the day, and the rules are vague at best and nonexistent at worst.
It is a family that knows only how to experience love through a lens of domination and control, not as a living and breathing ecosystem. If you don’t comply, you simply are not showing love back, and deserve to have their love taken away
If you only learn to love through a lens of domination and control, you also learn that your self cannot be trusted, because the truth comes from the authorities in the constellation. They will tell you if you can and deserve to be loved or if you cannot.
When I arrived, then, on the other side of the country a few weeks ago, I was armed with my discoveries and my theories and my suppositions at how actually none of what I’d received was personal, it was all part of the patterns that squash authentic lives, lives that stray too far outside the boundaries of what is “good” and “acceptable” even though none of us gets access to that rulebook. We were ready to dig into our stories, clean the gravel out of the wounds, see what truths we could find underneath it all. We sat around a bonfire and ate food and chipped away at defensiveness and rumors and insults and baggage. We ate fancy cheese and grapes and swapped stories of similar behaviors that people across the constellation had kept to themselves, thinking they were the ones who’d done something wrong and maybe they could just try harder next time. We walked in the rain and affirmed and confirmed each other’s magic, each other’s beautiful humanity, each other’s courage at stepping away from long held family structures in favor of truthful lives and the commitment to being different parents to our own incredible and deeply loved children. Because that’s the thing with generational trauma and abuse: it gets passed down and down and down until someone decides to stop. It’s been almost 200 years in this group of secrets and lies and erased lives all in the effort to keep alive a narrative woven to keep up appearances, appearances that no one in 2024 really cares about but the weavers themselves.
We’d all decided to cut ties to protect ourselves, and our own children, from the net of patterns that covers the constellation, and without any guarantee anyone would ever understand us. That’s an isolating landscape to inhabit. Even though we’d spent a lifetime learning we ourselves could not be trusted, we decided to trust anyway. We had faith, even if it wavered at times, we were making the right decision. We carried the pain that the people we needed our family to be didn’t even really exist as one of their forms; we’d created imaginary love that felt like it was being withheld, when really, we and they do not even speak the same language of love. When we left the constellation we formed a different universe. The dialects are too different to understand now. The people we came from simply will never provide what we needed them to, and perhaps, really, if a miracle happened and they became those loving versions of parents and siblings we’d so desired, the truth is it would be too late.
By the end of the trip, after hours and days of talking through grief and excavating these truths together, we had landed in the most beautiful space we could have imagined. We had all individually arrived at estrangement station on our own. We’d all taken a step on the staircase out, not being able to see the bottom, or where it would ever lead. Over the course of a week together, we turned a curve on those stairs and found only beauty and a depth of love we couldn’t see before. We found affirmation in our determination to break cycles and so much purpose in the severing of ties to people who’d caused so much harm, pain, and doubt. In me they found an auntie who would do anything for the whole lot of them, and will never want them to be anything other than exactly who they are. Among other treasures, I found great-nieces who might as well think I hung the moon, and a great-nephew who snuck back downstairs way past his bedtime to give me three more hugs before I left early in the morning to come home. And in getting to know each of those humans who I actually share DNA with who love me unearthed and unmasked with no expectation to change, I found that one of the wounds I thought would never heal started to kintsugi itself together with the gold of their newfound love.
All the years I thought my unlovability was my fault, that if only I could do or say or be the right thing, someone would claim me and I would belong. In the end, that was never true for the constellation. But it was true for me. I belong to myself. I am claimed by some of the most beautiful humans I can imagine, even if they aren’t all people who have known me my whole life.
In the constellation and counting my satellite self, there are about 4 of us who have decided we will no longer participate in love as domination and control. The people who love us will only know love as an ecosystem where we all breathe in and out together, making space for needs and forms and life that no one gets to dictate. Among us 4, we are parents to 9 of the 17 kiddos in the next generation of this DNA cohort. That means we’ve broken cycles and torn up the net of abusive patterns for over 50% of the kiddos emerging from this family. This is, then, the gold of estrangement: When you learn to trust yourself, when you decide to protect what’s sacred from people who will want to control it or steal it, when you’ve made attempt after attempt but no one else has, You Can Leave. You can exit out the back.
Some things are made so much harder by that decision. And you also make a lot of space for beauty, and grace, and truth. Building a life out of those materials instead of compliance and secrets and appearances and lies is the better choice, I promise. But again, those are lessons that come in the doing, not the telling.
I will always let my inner child wish we’d had a family who loved and supported us, even when we didn’t comply. But I also remind her, the family we dreamed of being in is the family we created ourselves. I found it for us, and so did the others who left or find themselves distancing from the constellation. All of us have partners and kids who love us, just as we are, beyond measure, who cheer us on and who helped plant new gardens when we pulled the old poisoned ones out by the roots. We built a new universe where truth is everything, and love is freely given and never taken away. We shimmer more like an aurora rather than being in motion within the constellation. The nets no longer hold us. In the end, our estrangement looks like this: we tried, we loved, we ruptured, we grieved. We made ourselves free.
