The Station

This is the first in a several-part series, as this is a big and challenging topic and I want to do it justice.

My family always did Christmas in a big way. We moved to a house with a bit of an entrance hall when I was 9, and by the time I was an adult, the entrance hall transformed every year into an increasingly elaborate arctic scene, complete with a snowy Christmas tree, a little round mirror that functioned as a winter pool, and a rather strange array of glowing animals. Penguins, polar bears and reindeers, to be exact. Also, for some geographically inconsistent reason, the Star of Bethlehem was in the background. I remember laughingly questioning my dad one year on the animals’ ability to live symbiotically with each other and he looked at me and said, ‘er, it is the sacred geometry of chance.’ So that cleared that up.

This year, Christmas looks very different. I will not be spending it, as I did for 31 years, with my family. We are no longer in contact with each other.

Estrangement from family, particularly parents, is on the rise amongst millenials (those born between 1981 and 1996). As a 1992 baby, I’m firmly in that range, but I never, ever thought that I would be part of this particular statistic. If you had told me two years ago that this would be my reality, I would have laughed at you.

Yet, here we are. And when I say no contact with my family, in my case I’m talking about everyone. Mum, Dad, both sisters, nephews, aunties, uncles, cousins (my Mum is the youngest of ten so we’re talking a lot of family members). My sister had a baby in May and still hasn’t told me – I found out on social media a few weeks later. There’s currently one Uncle, Aunty and their son on my Dad’s side who will still answer my calls, just about, as long as I don’t push to talk about the rest of the family. So, the extent of the collapse is, frankly, catastrophic.

You must surely at this point be wondering what on earth I did to cause such a rupture in so many relationships. They can’t all be the problem, I can hear you thinking. Charlotte, you’re the common denominator here.

But, after some extreme soul-searching, daily questioning of my entire reality and a lot of doubt and self-blame, I have come to the conclusion, along with my friends, who watched all this unravel, that all this is the result of a very toxic family system. That’s not to say I never did anything wrong – I did. Of course I did, especially recently. I often lost my temper with them towards the end. I shouted at them a lot in the last year we were in contact. I tried desperately to be heard in a situation where nobody was willing to listen.

To understand properly, we have to go back to my childhood. Of course.

I grew up in the North West of England in the 90s. I was the oldest of three girls, and my parents worked hard – Dad was a teacher, Mum worked in the city for a big company, before ultimately becoming a teacher too when I was about 10. Financially, everything was solid. We went on holidays a couple of times a year, often to France. On a Saturday, my Dad would look after us as Mum worked and he would make us what he called ‘McDad’s’ – burgers and chips in front of the TV, complete with homemade paper hats and paper chip-holders. We were all taken to Disneyland Paris on two different occasions. I was musically gifted and was sent to regular piano and flute lessons from being young, and I sang and played with the local music service three nights a week. My parents came to see me perform regularly at concerts. My sisters also had music lessons and dance lessons. When I got a bit older and more proficient, my Dad and I accompanied the local dance school on the piano every weekend, and put togehter a band for their annual show. That time with my Dad on a Saturday morning, sat giggling in the corner of the room and playing music for the little girls and boys to dance to, was incredibly special to me.

Life looked good. I was very successful academically, but I sometimes struggled with the politics of friendships. I was frequently labelled ‘very sensitive’ by my parents and other adults. I liked to read, write stories and sing, but I was lacking in the self-confidence that would have made me into a good performer. I lacked in self-confidence generally, looking back. My parents used to say I was ‘addicted to praise’, but I think that was a fundamental misunderstanding. What I actually needed was reassurance and safety.

Things deterioated when I was a teenager. Some terrible decisions were made, in my opinion, that caused a lot of damage, and relationships became increasingly tense and stressful at home. Being in control was very important to my parents, and they also had very rigid ideas about who and what I should become in order to be a valuable member of the human race. I felt the extreme weight of these essentially unmeetable expectations. They had a habit of saying horrible things in anger – this is not your home, it’s ours, and you are simply a guest. You’re such a cold fish, that’s why nobody likes you. You take up the lion’s share of the resources in this house, that’s why your sisters don’t like you. You’re always trying to get thinner, but it never actually happens, does it? I never recieved an apology after arguments for things that had been said, and the silent treatment went on for a long time. When I eventually conceded and apologised to them, it was taken as an opportunity to reignite the shouting and I would stand and take it all over again.

Fast forward to my adulthood. I was diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder at 23 after some intense struggles with my mental health. On reflection, I think this diagnosis – which my parents actually strongly discouraged me from getting because then I would be ‘in the system’ and therefore ‘unemployable’ despite the fact that I was quite literally not safe and needed help – became an opportunity to lay the difficulties we had all experienced at my feet. My sisters bought into it, as did my mum’s sisters. Nobody wanted to consider that perhaps I was a product of my experiences. Nobody asked me why I was suffering. They just shifted the blame for everything onto my shoulders, because I was the squeaky wheel. It didn’t matter that there were many complex and varied relationship issues within the family that had absolutely nothing to do with me; it was easier to believe that I was born broken beyond repair and they were just my long-suffering carers. It also meant that I suddenly doubted who I was and what I was, what my values and opinions were, because I was not ‘of sound mind’. The fact that my values and opinions had never particularly aligned with my family’s was brushed under the carpet and I lost my sense of self for such a long time.

Nine years later, at 32, I had been medicated with antipsychotics via depot injection for half a decade. I had also trained to be a teacher, mainly out of an increasing feeling of pressure to forge a career, even though I fundamentally disagree with the education system in England. My Mum lovingly said to me that she felt like she ‘finally had her daughter back’ at one point. The drugs calmed me down to the point of sedation, made my usually powerful brain sluggish and slow, and I was much more compliant. Strange, because I had always been quick-witted, intelligent and somewhat eccentric, with a strong sense of moral justice. Why would she think that this sloth-like version of me was real? Perhaps that’s just what she had actually wanted rather than what she got when I was born.

My marriage broke down two weeks postpartum, and my parents stepped up and let me live with them with my newborn for three months. I was hospitalised with life-threatening sepsis as well around this time, which I struggled to recover from. It was then that I really noticed the burning resentment my sisters bore me. I knew that the relationship was strained, that they talked to each other a lot more than they did to me, and that I was trying harder and harder every time I saw them to make them like me and it wasn’t working. But there was an evening nine weeks after my son was born where they both got drunk enough to verbally lay into me, telling me how much of a disappointment I had been, reliving everything I had ever done to antagonise or irritate them. A lot of it seemed to come down to anger over parental distribution of resources and time. I held my newborn and listened quietly to this tirade for nearly two hours without interrupting, as did my parents. Even though this is demonstrably outrageous behaviour, I just thought I deserved it. And so did they.

The breaking point came when I chose a new partner that they disapproved of. He has done some political activism that they disagreed with ideologically – I didn’t actually tell them that, seeing as it was literally none of their business, but one of my aunties decided to google him and spread that information about. Another of my aunties rang his sister on her business phone on my mother’s orders, two weeks after I met him, to grill her about our relationship and my behaviour. He was not allowed in their house, not invited to family events and they pretended he didn’t exist. He was never given an opportunity to even meet them until nearly a year and a half after we got together, at which point we went for the world’s most awkward coffee date with my parents and both of them refused to speak to him directly. My sister rang me and told me that it was unreasonable of me to go out with someone that The Family disapproved of so heavily. My other sister simply absented herself from the situation. We are actually very compatible and he looks after me and my son very lovingly. But because he didn’t fit the required image, we were both expelled, and my parents’ relentless smear campaign was extremely effective. It left me with absolutely no one to turn to, and my son with no extended family to speak of. There’s that excessive need for control creeping in again.

Despite all this, and this is not the full story – there’s not room here for everything – I still feel extremely, unbearably heartbroken. I feel deep, deep shame (which is compounded by the fact that shame was definitely one of their parenting tools) at the fact that I am alone in the world. I cry every day, usually alone in my car. We are programmed to be part of a tribe, after all. I feel exactly like this:

I also really struggle with avoidant behaviour now. Sadly, the relationship they punished me with their absence for has been deeply affected by their behaviour. I find it hard to accept love; my walls are so far up that I’m practically unreachable. I wasn’t always like this. I was open, warm-hearted, compassionate. Now, I am cold, angry and distant. The grief has threaded all the way through every single part of me. But I had to make a choice between my autonomy and right to make my own choices, or fitting in and making myself smaller and smaller in order to be accepted and loved conditionally by them.

I know that this desire in me for autonomy and emotional safety is an undeniable human need, and it was incompatible with me staying in contact with my family. I’m sure they all have their own griefs and traumas to process. But until they are able to accept their own need for change and growth, instead of just focusing constantly on scapegoating me, I need to keep them at arm’s length. Even if it means my Christmases will now be much, much quieter.