On Estranged Parenthood: The Unspoken Grief

By Dr. Patty Gently on Mother's Day 2025

Bright Insight Support Network founder and president Dr. Patricia Gently is a trauma therapist and coach who specializes in EMDR and works with gifted neurodivergent and other marginalized populations. She is an experienced author, educator, and presenter who promotes integrated inclusivity, a holistic understanding of neurodiversity, and information integrity.

On Estranged Parenthood: The Unspoken Grief

 

There’s a kind of grief we don’t talk about enough.

A grief some parents carry so quietly it goes unnoticed.

It isn’t death.

It isn’t divorce.

It isn’t distance.

It’s the grief of being erased.

Of being rewritten in the image of the problem.

Of being slowly excluded from the narrative---

sometimes by triangulation,

sometimes by alienation,

sometimes by a child’s own hopes and hand.

It gets different names, because estrangement is not all the same.

Some estrangements are the result of abuse, neglect, or violated boundaries.

And some, the ones we rarely speak of,

emerge from subtle campaigns of erasure.

Where reality is curated, and memory becomes malleable.

Where one parent becomes the villain in a story told too many times without question.

Sometimes it starts during a divorce.

Sometimes it starts with silence.

With one parent stepping back,

avoiding conflict,

choosing peace over clarity.

It doesn’t always look like violence.

Sometimes it looks like loyalty redirected drop by drop.

Like carefully chosen confidences.

Like a slow erosion of trust through absence and repetition.

These fractures widen when a child is intense---

when ingenuity, grief, and complexity turn developmental struggle

into courtroom-level judgment.

Estrangement is often framed as empowerment.

And sometimes, it is.

And sometimes, it’s inherited.

Shaped.

Reinforced.

Encouraged.

By family dynamics never fully understood.

By outsiders who only ever saw the surface.

By peer spaces that reward grievance over dialogue.

By friends who never asked for both sides.

By a culture that says: Cut out the toxic.

Even when “toxic” means nuanced.

Even when “toxic” means mother.

Or father.

Or the one who stayed up, held space,

and kept receipts no one asked to see.

This year on Mother’s Day, I sit with two flowers:

A marigold and a carnation.

The marigold is my daughter; gifted, self-possessed, unreachable.

In many cultures, it symbolizes grief, remembrance, and protection.

It thrives in soil watered by my effort, my love, my ruin.

And now, it guards the gate of her story,

and of my absence within it.

The carnation is mine: layered, unglamorous, enduring.

A symbol of the love that showed up:

In imperfect FAFSA forms and broken-down cars,

In phone calls answered at 2 a.m.,

In grocery runs and gas money,

In Ziplocks packed with snacks and survival.

I mothered through adversity.

Through an emotionally destabilized reality.

Through my own illness and disability.

Through the long quiet of being overlooked.

I made mistakes.

I overfunctioned.

I over-explained.

I enabled.

I worked harder than was healthy, hoping love, or at least effort, would be enough.

However, authenticity isn't always agreeable,

And agreeableness may not be authentic.

I thought self-sacrifice would teach compassion, though.

It didn’t.

It won't.

I missed things I cannot get back.

I trusted people I shouldn’t have.

I believed truth would prevail.

It didn’t.

It hasn’t.

That gets to be real, too.

Estrangement doesn’t always explode.

Sometimes it creeps in.

Until one day, you are the parent your child says they escaped.

And yet, some of us still love fiercely.

We hold complexity.

We cling to truth.

We protect our children from the chaos we may have unintentionally played into---

and sometimes were mistaken for.

That paradox is a wound.

And it is the reason we rise to name it.

So this is not a plea.

Not a confession.

It is a naming.

We exist.

Estranged mothers.

Alienated fathers.

Parents in shadows.

Caregivers who would give anything and are now strangers.

Not perfect.

Not blameless.

Not monstrous, either.

This Mother’s Day, I hold both flowers:

The marigold and the carnation.

And I let them ache side by side.

Because even marigolds, with all their bold protection,

forget sometimes where their roots were formed.

And sometimes the carnation neglects its own beauty;

its endurance mistaken for ease,

its loyalty mistaken for control.

Yet estrangement is not a fixed identity.

It is a dynamic, often misunderstood rupture,

one shaped by pain, perception, position,

and pressure.

We know memory is not archival.

It's reconstructive.

And children must construct meaning from chaos

by simplifying stories beyond their years,

and making sense of inherited family roles that lack reason.

And the silence held by the reflective parent,

who could not take space,

can be reinterpreted as absence.

And in the absence of context, silence becomes an abandonment

where the memories never made get already discarded.

The milestones we watch from the shadows

or not at all.

The grandchildren we will not hold.

The in-laws we will not get to love.

The laughter of family dinners that will never arrive.

The stories that will never begin.

This is disenfranchised grief---

grief without permission or ritual,

the kind too complex for sympathy cards or casseroles.

So if you are a parent who loved,

who showed up imperfectly and wholly,

and who now finds yourself erased,

know that this erasure is not proof of your absence,

only of an unspoken rewrite.

We name it because truth,

even painful truth,

can be a kind of grace.

This is not a request for sympathy.

It is a reclaiming of dignity.

A voice for those loving in the quiet.

A recognition of the complexity behind estrangement

that no single narrative can hold.

This Mother's Day,

I hold both flowers.

Though not as a symbol of loss and blame.

This holding is a testament:

to what grew,

to what broke,

and to what still remains

unseen,

unsaid,

and deeply real.

I hold the marigold and the carnation---

and in their ache, I see you too.