Estrangement sucks.
There is always this small part of you that thinks that you might be a bit broken because familial ties are upheld as THE emotional connection that you need in your life. There is this idea that family is everything and it makes sitting with the fact that that might be bullshit hard.
Add to that small part the fact that I made the decsion to end all contact with my grandparents (primarily, although there was extra collateral) at 16 and the part gets a bit bigger.
16. Old enough to have sex and get married. But not old enough to drive, drink or vote.
When I have a wobble, which I have had a handful of times in the last 14 years, that is the thing that makes me question whether I made the right choice. Was I really mature enough at 16 to make such a drastic decision? I had no idea what I wanted to do with anything else in my life (I still thought I was going to follow the history path, I have an English degree now) but I was so sure about that one thing? That doesn't sound right. It feels like it shouldn't be right. It feels like I should maybe want to do the work to repair the bridge that I was so convinced had been torn down into ruins (please note, I will use so many different metaphors for this, because…well just because I can). It feels like once the raging hormones of being a teengage girl settled down then I want to cross that bridge again (spoiler alert, the raging hormones of being a teenage girl also don’t actually go anywhere becuase oestrogen and progestrone really just keep ebbing and flowing until the menopause).
Here is a thing I know to be true though, 16 year old me was right.
Here are some other things that I know to be true. I was 3 when I unknowingly became the least favourite. I then officially lost out to the ‘little prince’ when I was 8 and it became apparent that my brother was going to be the only grandson. I was 8 or 9 when I was made to feel fat for the first time. I was somewhere between 10-12 when my grandparents went and became immigrants in Spain. I was 16 when I knew I couldn’t do that relationship anymore. I was 20 when I wobbled for the first time and thought about maybe taking it back. And at 30 I know that the relationship couldn’t be rebuilt. Nor do I want it to be.
I am told that in the time before my brother sped into the world I was adored by my grandparents. I don’t remember because who remembers being an infant? I am the eldest grandchild. I was the only grandchild for 3 years and 70 days. The day I met my brother for the first time my Nana's greatest wishes came true, one she got her grandson and two she could get her hands on my curly hair. Under the guise of making me look pretty to meet my baby brother, she could tame my hair and demonstrate all the ways that the way my parents were dealing with it wrong. My parents were making sure it was clean and detangled and then just left the curls to do whatever they wanted. It’s not overly dissimilar to the way I deal with it now, I just know which products work best and there is more information on how to deal with curly hair out there in the world.
I met my little brother with slicked back hair that had a few curls teased into perfect ringlets. I looked like a perfect little doll and, like a doll, I didn’t put up much fuss when she was doing it. I was a polite kid, so I waited patiently in the chair while she carved her masterpiece even though all I really wanted was to meet this person that had been living in my mum’s belly for what felt like forever.
I imagine it was unintended but this experience taught me that my hair in the form that it existed in naturally was not acceptable when meeting new people. So even though my parents still encouraged me to wear it down as much as possible by the time I started school I wanted it tied back, one because it was practical but also because deep down I believed that my hair tied back was when I was at my prettiest. So began the ritual of me sitting on the floor between my dad’s legs every morning so he could slick my hair back into a ponytail and then plait that ponytail tightly so any trace of my curly hair was erased.
On the plus side, my Nana’s approach was gentler than my hairdresser when I was a kid, who mentioned every single time I went that he really wanted to relax my hair because it would make it easier to deal with. I pushed for it because I wanted straight hair, it was prettier. My Mum held firm and said no. She never wanted me to lose the curls that so many, including my own grandmother, deemed unruly. I’m grateful for that now.
When we were younger my brother and I saw our grandparents often enough that we had some form of a relationship with them. It wasn’t a super close one, but it was close enough. It was at our grandparents’ house that my brother developed his taste for tea. It felt like the only place where we were ever allowed peanut butter sandwiches on white bread that stuck to the roof of our mouths. Our granddad tried to get us into golf with mini golf clubs and a hole in the garden for us to practice with. My brother and I used to argue over the yellow golf club. I was always made to give it to him.
The only time we stayed with our grandparents for an extended period of time was when our parents went on holiday without us. I was hurtling towards puberty and maybe the most impressionable that I was ever going to be. It was only a long weekend, but it was a long weekend that would impact me subconsciously for years to come.
Over the course of this weekend, the small gap between the way my brother and I were treated by them opened up into a chasm. The food I ate was monitored in a way it never was at home. The portions that I received were smaller than his even though at home we were always given the same amount of food when our Dad was dishing up. The peanut butter sandwiches remained but for the first time, I was told that I probably shouldn’t eat too many of them moving forward.
Under the guise of it being a game, we were both weighed. My brother’s weight made no difference to the look on my Nana’s face. He was a boy, and a growing one at that. Mine however elicited a reaction. I didn’t think there was anything wrong with me, although at the time I wanted to be shorter because being the tall girl was never fun, but something about her face when she saw my weight staring up at her made me think otherwise. I knew from her reaction that it was bad.
I didn’t eat peanut butter or bread for years.
In my late 20s when I finally started to reframe and heal my attitude towards eating and my irrational fear of being fat. I knew that the root of the issue couldn’t have come from inside the house. I was raised by a mother who was very intentionally body neutral. There were no scales in my house. So it had to be external factors that made me quietly loathe the skin I was in. I assumed it could be pinpointed on the fact that I grew up in a time when everybody was overly skinny on magazine covers and billboards because that was the ‘it’ look. It made sense to take an odd sense of pride in the fact that my ribcage was visible and that I could sustain myself on so few calories when that was what surrounded me as I came of age. There were countless articles about removing lower stomach fat which made me feel bad about the fact that I could never get rid of my little pouch. I was successful at maintaining a thigh gap, even though I had to try very hard to keep it, because that was the in ‘thing’ for so long.
Then one day I remembered. A scale, a ‘game’, a look. Pre-pubescent me was made far more aware of my weight than a child needed to be and subconsciously I internalised the fact I needed to be as small as possible at all times. I was trying to avoid a sly look from a woman who wasn’t even around anymore.
They left the country when I was barely in secondary school and I saw them maybe once or twice before I turned 16. I felt pretty neutral to that fact on account of the fact that I was a teenager and I felt pretty apathetic about almost everything, except staying out of trouble.
Mum wanted to celebrate the fact that I had finished my GCSE’s and so we went and stayed at her brother’s house in Spain which happened to be where my grandparents had decided they wanted to be immigrants in. Seeing them that summer was weird. I’d grown into my own person. I was taller. My hair was longer and as unruly as ever (I had also found a hairdresser who wasn’t trying to relax it every six months thanks to much research by Mum). I was better educated. I was still a polite kid, but I wasn’t as timid anymore. I was more aware of the fact that I was half black, although the half in wider society really don’t mean shit. I ain’t white.
They were largely unchanged. Except for the fact that they now spoke a lot of broken Spanish before reverting to loud, over pronounced English. They also loved to talk about how much cheaper everything was out in Spain, always giving us a breakdown of the cost and then asking us what the same thing would cost in London. London is an expensive city, we get it.
But it took my Nana next to no time to bring the sly comments back. They were innocent enough. Never explicitly shaming, but the subtext was there. Then there was the comment that changed it all.
It was our first night in Spain. We were having a civilised, if not frustrating, conversation that I was only half paying attention to because I was also in the middle of eating a pizza.
It’s 2009. Obama’s in the White House. He’s mixed race, like me. He’s married to a black woman. There were black children in the White House. I guess it’s a lot to take in if you’re white and of a certain age…
Then the fatal blow was struck.
‘I really do think that slavery helped black people.’
By 16, I had long accepted that I was never going to have the relationship with my grandparents that seemed to be everywhere. They were never going to be heavily involved. I was never going to tell people that they were just as supportive as my parents. They weren’t present and I’d learned to be fine with that.
Despite that, I never once thought that I would feel a burning shame to be related to them.
Redness doesn’t show up on the skin on my face, it’s a blessing because I’m an anxious person who heats up quickly when I have to speak in front of people. I can feel it, but no one can see it. It meant that no one could see my shame as I burned up from the dumbness of the statement and the anger I felt relating to it. My mother does not have that same blessing. Nor does my Nana, who at least had the decency to be embarrassed that she had something so incredulous while her daughter tried to put her into place.
The relationship between my mother and her mother had always been a powder keg on the brink of exploding.
In that moment it went boom taking my relationship along with it.
When the ties were severed I kind of thought that maybe they would be repaired one day. Maybe a bit of an ugly scar but healed enough that things could move forward (again I thought this because I was 16). I saw them again at 19 and 20 but those were not the times when I attempted to make amends, I avoided interacting with them as much as I could. Throughout the course of my 20s, I just came to accept that some relationships just end messily and there is no such thing as closure. The only closure you can have is the peace that you have with yourself for erecting a boundary and keeping it up.
For various reasons, the prospect of reconnection with my grandparents has come up recently. When it was first spoken about I felt my heart rate spike and my blood felt like it was running cold in my veins. It felt like shock. It brought with it a whole host of anxiety. It brought up a lot of old shit.
It’s made me feel guilty. It’s made me feel like I’m a bad person. It’s made me wonder whether I should be more flexible in who I am as a person and see them. Re-open that line of communication. They are obviously not getting any younger and maybe I will regret it.
On the flip side, I’ve felt like shit for a week now. I’ve been reminded of things that I had already processed and thought healed. But the wound has been excavated now and I’ve gotta start that all over again. And it will be harder this time. Cutting them off was always a conscious choice. But actively shutting down a chance at reconnection means that I am firmly drawing a line at a time when I should maybe be more amenable. I can’t figure out if I feel that way because I am a woman and women are always supposed to be more caring and compassionate and feel empathy or all that shit. Despite not being a pathological people pleaser (on a tangent, did Taylor Swift really need to come for blood with You’re Losing Me?) I do find myself wondering how I am going to come across when my absence is so obvious. The Little Prince will be there and we basically possess the same face, so it’s even more pronounced (this makes it sound like I’m bitter about the existence of my brother, I’m not. Because I removed people from my life who made me feel like I was less than him).
So the question I had to ask myself when debating whether I should alter my plans in order to be the bigger person was, what would I gain from the whole thing? It wouldn’t be closure because I’m pretty sure that they don’t see what they really did wrong. They won’t see all the inconsistencies that came with their treatment of me vs him. They won’t see the subtle damage done to the way that I viewed myself and I can bet you that they wouldn’t actually like who I am now. I don’t feel like they are people who are entitled to know who I am and what is going on with me at this point in time. So I would wreck my own mental health, which has already been negatively impacted by this whole debacle, for what exactly?
16 year old me made the right choice. Some stuff that 30 year old me has found out recently has made that abundantly clear. They aren’t good for me. I am better without them. I am not a nice enough person to put on a performance where I can make them feel welcome in my life and nor should I lead them on like that. The alternative is laying out all the reasons that they fucked up and they don’t deserve that at this point either.
Estrangement is painful sometimes and it sucks a lot and it remains a minefield of emotions (the oscillation between sadness and anger right now is WILD). You have to make peace with the fact that you are both victim and villain at the same time. It’s exhausting. Time makes it better, until it doesn’t, but then it will again.
‘When you are young they assume you know nothing’ but sometimes you know enough.
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"The only closure you can have is the peace that you have with yourself for erecting a boundary and keeping it up." WOW, YES.
I unfortunately felt like I was given an ultimatum to reconnect with someone before I was ready (who knows if I ever would have been ready, but I know I wasn't when I was basically told I would lose more people if I didn't). I am still angry and I am still resentful I let this person back in my life. I say all this because you absolutely know what is best for you, every damn day you can put your finger on your pulse and ask yourself. No one else can do that for you and I am so grateful to have read this as a reminder of that in myself too.
Thank you for sharing <3