CHRISTIAN PARENTS of ESTRANGED ADULT CHILDREN Community Group
Estrangement makes it difficult to talk about with family, friends, neighbors and church members. Christians are NOT immune to broken families. Talk about your experiences with those who know how you feel and get positive support through your Christian faith...."In these last days difficult times will come, for men will be lovers of self...disobedient to parents,...
So my son called me yesterday to let me know he won't be attending service on Mother's day, also my 40th birthday weekend. He's decided instead to go with his wife to a friend's graduation because this university is so anti-family and anti-church that they scheduled their graduation for the morning of Mother's Day. She has been friends with the girl for less than a year and never goes to see her 2 hours away, but this is an excuse to not show up to church for Mother's day. I told him that would upset me a lot and it didn't seem to matter. He asked why I'm getting all upset over it, I told him that it's just not right, it's not like he's saying to be fair and spend the day with her mother and rotate per year between moms, no, this is for a semi friend at a "so called" prestigious college who decided to trump every mother's moment with their graduation (yes, I double checked the facts, they did schedule it on Mother's day). So, he told me this will give me time to get used to the idea and not freak out in May. I told him I was bothered and that I needed to go before I became more upset. I hung up the phone and went into a bedroom and cried. We'd been working in the house to switch rooms around and organize when I took the call, I was derailed at that point. The phone rings and my husband answered, him calling to say he wanted to talk to me, my husband told him I wasn't in a shape to take a call. He also told him that I've had to enter into counseling to deal with things because of him and that he's put a lot of strain on us. He got off the phone with him and I took some time to calm myself before I started to work again.
Today his wife posts pictures from their day hanging out with her family, fishing...which is something he never would have done in his life, he made us become vegetarians for several years when he was younger because of his tenderness toward animals and he would get angry seeing people fish or hearing them talk about hunting...now he is one of them. I know to some people they wouldn't understand why it bothers me, why it's a big deal that he went fishing and his displaying the fish he caught, and I'm telling you that it is because this is NOT my son, this is NOT that child I've known, this is a callous, angry, rude, desensitized man who I don't even recognize any longer.
Today is a hard day.
Today his wife posts pictures from their day hanging out with her family, fishing...which is something he never would have done in his life, he made us become vegetarians for several years when he was younger because of his tenderness toward animals and he would get angry seeing people fish or hearing them talk about hunting...now he is one of them. I know to some people they wouldn't understand why it bothers me, why it's a big deal that he went fishing and his displaying the fish he caught, and I'm telling you that it is because this is NOT my son, this is NOT that child I've known, this is a callous, angry, rude, desensitized man who I don't even recognize any longer.
Today is a hard day.
Now, 8 years later, we have reconciled. The minister who married my ES and wife said they were VERY headstrong and VERY immature. They are now 31 and back in my life (my husband has passed).
Hard as it is, remember what God said: Love God first, love your spouse second and love your children third. My husband and I worked hard on doing things for us. He was the strong one who held me when I cried. Oh, by the way, my son always wanted to talk to me and not his dad and I think it was because he knew he could make me cry.
I am not excusing your son's behavior but I do agree with lindajoan about his immaturity. Another thought of mine, not just about your son but many of our adult children....I don't think they really feel that not being with us on holidays is such a big deal. They are truly a different generation and, even more so, for the younger ones.
Last year, my dd (not estranged) said she was sorry but probably wouldn't be able to be with me on Mother's Day because my grandson was playing soccer out of state. (a side note: not just colleges, but athletic tournaments, are now often scheduled on what used to be family holidays). Anyway, it turned out my dh and I and dd's in-laws went to the soccer game a few hours away and ended up having a nice dinner before his game. However, if we didn't go, my dd made it clear what their plans were.
Lucy, in spite of your hurt in all this, I would just suggest you keep the lines of communication open with your son and dil and pray, pray, pray for wisdom on how to handle future situations. Trust me, I regret many of the things I said in the past and wish I just kept quiet and just shared my feelings with my dh. Nothing, in my opinion, is worth the agony of estrangement.
I remember the first Mother's Day my ES missed. He slipped into our house when we were at church and left some flowers and a card because his girlfriend's mom wanted him to stay at her house and watch the kids while girlfriend took her mom to the airport. What the heck? It would have been 2 hours they would have been left alone and they were teenagers. But, he was in love so did whatever she told him to do.
And when he called in the evening to see if I liked the flowers he left and I told him I was hurt, he couldn't figure out why. What was the big deal if he was not with me; he had remembered with a card and some flowers.
These kids are in a different generation. I can't wait until they are all older and their kids do the same thing to them. Then they will understand the meaning of being "with" someone, not just leaving a card.
As hurtful as it was, thinking back, I should have just thanked him for remembering it was Mother's Day. I was just so hurt that he felt it more important to be with her family than me.
Now the year that he has been back in my life, they have spent every holiday with me and my family. I wonder how long that will last? I have told DIL to make sure they spend time with her family also and that I never want to take away from their time with them. She just told me that they would be with us on Easter because her family doesn't celebrate Easter.
To give a bit of background...he is 20, got married last summer after a short courtship/engagement. They made the wedding planning really hard and stressful as we were paying most expenses and just as I thought with the wedding going over well and it all being over he became out of control with his hostility and personality. After quite a few episodes of being so rude and cruel that it gutted me, saying some of the most horrible stuff imaginable to me we went to basically no contact for 5 months. He'd attend church once or twice a month but we didn't sit together, he basically dropped out of our and our 6 year old daughter's life. He became hostile and immature toward her even arguing over a video game once before the estrangement, she was 5...he didn't care that he'd went from being close to her and a huge part of her world to not caring at all.
After 5 months we finally began to work on things again to reconcile and I fell for it because I wanted it to be true that he'd missed us. But he sits timers out during visits because they are timed visits, on the rare occasion that I call his wife answers and says she'll see if he wants to take my call. He's made a ton of unreasonable rules about when we can call or come by and for how long and the one time he drove up here unannounced he was angry that our daughter was home because school was cancelled so he left, leaving her in tears.
It is immaturity and lack of life experience to some degree, but it's also callousness, anger that grows out of control to huge scenes (we've had to drive away from a couple of his tirades in front of neighbors), and it's cruelty. It's beyond words and beyond my understanding why it's all happening.
They won't work, they go to college but they each caused the other to lose jobs for following each other around on the job until management let them go from both companies. They barely have enough to eat because they don't want to work. He failed 1 of his college classes for not doing the work and they aren't doing any other adult thing except being married. Every other aspect of their lives is done in the most immature fashion. This is beyond spreading his wings and flying independently, this is throwing all good sense to the wind and assuming things will still be fine...they won't be and we can see the fall out coming.
In the last year of him living at home he was impossible to live with and we couldn't get him to leave until it was his idea to move out, so regardless of what happens we'll never let him move back in with us but it's hard to see him not working, failing school, becoming so harsh that you can't be around him, and changing so much from the person he once was.
I understand about how life comes up making holidays different, my own mother is nearly a thousand miles away so I won't be with her on mother's day, but I paid their way to come out here in December and do that once or twice a year to see them and let them see our kids. I call her almost every day, we talk constantly. It's hard because he just doesn't care about us or his sister anymore and it feels like he just dropped out. There's no reasonable reason for him to have done that like a horrible childhood or alcoholic parents, or any thing of the sort but he wants to paint his childhood differently even though we have picture proof that we went on vacations, did fun things, he and his dad did bonding things without me, we let him take lots of different lessons for things, he had some great experiences and he wants to rewrite history to say we didn't do much, or enough, and that he never spent time with his dad without me (which of course they did). I just don't know when he became this vile person but looking back over the last couple of years I could see the build up coming.
Like my ED, we will pray that your son will learn life lessons from his choices. Living it out is the surest way to learn it good and hard. He is still young so there is plenty of time, and, of course, it's never too late for God to work in his heart and mind and life.
So sorry for your pain.
Hugs
If you can, decide ahead of time that you won't be offended regardless of what immature decisions they make. Perhaps you could invite them to lunch on a different day close to Mother's day ....
Difficulttime2, I'm doing what I can the make the most of what comes and those who are in my life and make my life full of love, and I'm trying really hard to make less of what goes out of my life, it's a struggle that I'm working on each day. While your advise is sound to set aside another day, I'd just really, at this point, rather not set up a time to spend with him. He's determined to be hurtful and I'm thinking we need space so I'm not hurting so often. We'd arranged 5 weeks ahead of time for a family day and he worked as hard as he could to ruin it and make it a very unpleasant experience, this was 2 weeks ago and it had been the first day we'd spent together since August. I think I'll let some time pass before planning family time that includes him and in the meantime figure out a way to celebrate my 40th birthday with my husband and daughter.
I would travel back the my home state to be with my own mom but my grandmother is in 4th stage cancer and has arranged a family gathering late June that she desperately wants everyone to attend, I'm afraid that if I paid airfare to travel in May I wouldn't have the money to go in June and it's really important to her to have as many people come to celebrate what will probably be her last birthday, so I did consider that as an option to mother's day but it would mean not being there the next month. And while I have an emergency money set aside in the event of her passing suddenly, I really don't want to touch that because it's very important that I get back for my mom when the time comes.
Maybe this is the thing I need to plan a birthday day trip not too far, but something that incorporates my birthday and leaves after Sunday school. Thank you everyone, I do take your advise to heart and I know you are doing what you can to offer support.