Still Standing, Still Loving

Healing through family estrangement

“The Three Ages of Woman” by Gustav Klimt

"There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you." ~ Maya Angelou

Dear Reader,

This year, I decided to begin writing my memoir, thinking I could skim lightly across the edges of my family estrangements, as though casting stones over the surface of a dark lake. But here in my sixties, I see that it’s impossible, for their vast, tangled roots aren’t just fleeting moments in my story – they are my story. Roots that have shaped me, haunted me, and taken me decades to confront.

Before I dive in, I’m deeply grateful to Kristi for her heartfelt post “Unfriends” about sibling estrangement and social media, which sparked these reflections within me. Her courage reminded me that while estrangement leaves its jagged scar, it does not have to define us.

As a daughter, a mother, and now a grandmother, I’ve lived through the shifting tides of womanhood – through love and estrangement, hope and heartbreak. From Maiden to Mother to Crone, each stage has left its mark on me, tested my resilience, and shaped the person I am today.

And yet, despite it all, here I am. Still standing, still loving, carrying the weight of these wounds – they may be my story, but they will never be my ending.

Writing this today feels like tearing open old wounds – wounds that never fully healed. At times, the words blur through my tears, and the memories press so heavily on me, I have to stop and catch my breath. I’ve come to realise I can no longer ignore this pain - this multigenerational trauma that has insidiously shaped my life. Only now, with the hindsight of decades and the clarity that age brings, have I found the courage to put these truths into words. Confronting the shadow that’s loomed over me for so long isn’t just an act of healing – it’s an act of liberation.

The day my daughter left home was the day my heart shattered all over again. The sound of the door clicking shut was small – barely audible – yet it echoed through the deepest chambers of my heart. She was gone – just as my family had vanished so many years before.

I thought I knew how to bear this pain, how to carry the weight of absence. But this time, it was different. This time, the loss was sharper, deeper, cutting into me in ways I hadn’t known I could still bleed.

The Maiden

When I left home at eighteen, I took little with me – a bag of clothes and thirteen poems, fragile attempts to give my voice its first expression. You see, my parents’ brokenness left no space for voices like mine. Their way was divide and conquer; back then, loneliness was all I could feel. By the time I left, I was both liberated and rejected, free yet hollow.

Even then, the loneliness wasn’t just between my parents and me. My siblings – my first companions in life, my first sense of belonging – were caught in the same destructive storm. We became strangers under the same roof, each of us retreating into silence, unable to bridge the distance our parents’ divisions created. By the time I left, those threads connecting us had already begun to fray.

After I moved to the old fishing town, I tried to mend those bonds from afar, sending cards, writing letters and calling sporadically. But every attempt felt like throwing a lifeline into the dark, unsure if anyone would catch it – or even wanted to. I slowly realised estrangement wasn’t just physical; it was woven into our shared family history.

Over the years, my siblings and I drifted further apart. The rare family gatherings were haunted by unspoken words and the ghosts of what could have been. As I built a life of my own, the absence of those relationships left an ache I couldn’t quite name – a loss for something that was never fully mine to begin with.

Even now, in my quiet moments, I sometimes catch glimpses of what we shared as children – brief memories of laughter or whispered secrets. Those moments, though distant, remind me that even amidst the estrangement, there was once love, however fleeting.

The Mother

And then my daughter left. My eldest, my firstborn – the child I had cradled close and sang lullabies to in the quiet of thousands of nights. She was just sixteen, pregnant, and clinging to a man who not only shared my father’s name but also his violent, controlling ways.

History repeats itself in the cruellest ways.

The shock of that realisation hit me like a cruel, cosmic joke – my daughter, bound to a man whose name echoed the one who had broken me first. Yet, even in the silence she left behind, I remained standing – held by the enduring love I have for her.

I understood why she had to make her choice, but understanding didn’t dull the pain. It didn’t stop me from calling after her on those rare occasions when I saw her in the street – her back turned, her pace quickening as though my voice were nothing more than the wind at her heels.

Twenty years of silence stretched between us like a vast, shadowed plain. Yet, there were moments – sporadic and achingly brief – when we spoke. I remember one morning, sitting in Costa, seeing her outside alone with her third child – my granddaughter, just two days old. I invited her in, and for reasons I’ll never know, she agreed. In those fleeting moments, I felt like a mother again, even as the silence between us lingered, heavy and unspoken.

These encounters, though rare, shine like jewels scattered in a darkened room – a reminder of love amidst the pain of absence.

The Crone

And then there are my grandchildren – my first. I held him the day he was born, his tiny fingers curling around mine, his soft cries filling the delivery room. For a brief moment, as I looked into his beautiful small face, all my pain disappeared. But it wasn’t long before my daughter returned to the man who hurt her in ways I cannot bear to recall.

This year, my first grandson turns twenty – a man now, yet a stranger to me. I wonder who he has become, what kind of world he dreams about, and whether he even knows I exist. That heartache, the absence of knowing, is something I carry quietly each day.

As a grandmother, I now stand in the final stage of womanhood, reflecting on a journey marked by scars and wisdom. I’m neither the Maiden, full of untamed hope, nor the Mother, consumed by fierce love and heartbreak. I’m the Crone, carrying the weight of all I have endured – yet also holding onto a wisdom that only time can offer.

With time, life’s patterns, once elusive, now lie bare: echoes of pain passed through generations of my family, the same wounds silently shaping us all. It’s taken me a long time to find compassion for myself and for those who hurt me. Compassion does not erase the pain, but it softens its edges, giving me a strange kind of peace I never thought possible.

And yet, even as the past looms large, there remains love – a love vast and steady for my daughters and grandchildren. So much of it exists only in the quiet spaces of my heart for the daughter I'm estranged from, while the other daughter holds my love freely.

As I write this memoir, I find myself reflecting on what it means to reach this stage of life, for there is a bittersweet beauty in becoming the Crone. It’s not just about carrying the scars of the years – it’s about learning to stand tall despite them. It’s about finding strength not in what was taken, but in what remains.

Reflections

How have I carried this weight without crumbling?

My journey through womanhood – daughter, mother, grandmother – has been one of love, resilience and loss. Family estrangement feels like a curse, passed down to me without warning, repeating itself in the lives of all those I hold most dear. Perhaps tellingly, my parents were both severed from their parents by seventeen; I from mine at eighteen. And then my daughter, at sixteen, continued this ancestral pattern, leaving me behind.

Over time, I’ve come to see that even family estrangement contains a gift – as Mary Oliver so poignantly wrote, “Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift”. It is within this understanding that writing became my refuge and reckoning, transforming my family’s wreckage into threads of resilience and strength.

Today, life has moved on – the tides have risen and fallen, the years slipped quietly away. Yet the weight of these estrangements has remained constant.

Through it all, I’m still here – still standing, still loving. And perhaps that is the greatest strength of all: to love fiercely, even in silence, and to stand tall amidst the shadows of the past.

Kristi's post about sibling estrangement planted a seed of reflection within me that grew into this reckoning. Her courage reminded me that while estrangement leaves its mark, it does not have to define us.

In confronting the pain, I’ve found the strength to write my story, and in that writing, a path toward healing, resilience – and perhaps even hope.

Yours in words, Deborah

If my words strike a chord and you feel inspired to dive deeper into my poetry or explore my essays on Jungian thought, I invite you to visit: The Liberated Sheep