I have to start somewhere.

And it’s not at the beginning. It’s here, nearly four years into the estrangement from my kids, that I can finally begin to make sense of what has happened to my family—destruction.

Married over twenty-five years. And happily, I thought back then. Two kids. First a son, and three years and two days later, my daughter. Stay-at-home mom who baked sourdough and offered homemade spaghetti bolognese as an after-school snack. Every day. Unless my kids preferred to order pizza or get drive-through, which meant burgers from In-n-Out and then a second drive-through at McDonald’s, where the fries are better. You get the picture.

In families that resemble that picture, parental estrangement is an epidemic. In upper-middle class and educated families localized in North America and Western Europe, estrangement is on the rise every year.

But it’s a silent epidemic. Shame keeps parents quiet. Over the past few years, I’ve ventured to disclose my circumstances, and I’ve found there are two distinct responses to hearing that my children don’t speak to me. One is the visible recoil, masked horror, and the question (whether verbalized or not), “What did you do?” The second is slumped shoulders, a deflation of the body, and three words spoken with eyes averted: “Mine don’t either.”

Four years ago this June, my children made the decision to remove me from their lives. From my perspective, it came without warning. Out of the blue. Out of nowhere. The blindsides of all blindsides. Now, my daughter is going to be twenty-three, my son twenty-six. I missed my daughter’s twenty-first birthday party, because I wasn’t invited. Missed my son’s wedding for the same reason.

I am estranged.

At first, it came as a shock to me that I could purchase the domain name “parentalestrangement.com” for ninety-nine cents because it had never been claimed. But just as quickly, I realized it wasn’t shocking at all, because shame keeps us quiet. The estranged are muted. We mute ourselves, rather than expose our predicaments for the world to judge. It’s hard enough living every moment of every day swallowing the reality that your child is consciously deciding, every moment of every day, to exclude you from their lives, let alone absorb the shame that the world casts on you for that reality.

Back in June 2021, I couldn’t begin to understand what was happening, let alone metabolize my childrens’ decisions to estrange from me. It’s taken nearly four years for me to even begin to make sense of the experience of parental estrangement, but I’m ready to begin.

This is the beginning.

We need a community. We can’t do this alone.