Was I Really That Bad?
A Thoughtful Guide for Mothers Facing Adult Child Estrangement
The mothers who go looking for a book like this one are rarely the ones who did the most damage. They're the ones awake at two in the morning, going back through 20 years of ordinary afternoons for the one moment big enough to explain why the calls stopped, and finding nothing that size.
What the book gets into
Why you've been looking for one moment big enough to explain it, and why there isn't one
How two people can share a house for 20 years and come away with honest accounts that don't match
What a spouse, a therapist, or a diagnosis did and didn't do to your child
What you answer for, what you don't, and how to grieve a child who's still alive
A few of the chapters
- Chapter OneIt Didn't Start When You Think It Did
- Chapter TwoYou've Been Living in Two Different Families
- Chapter FourWhy Did My Child Leave?
- Chapter Nine"I Did the Best I Could" and "I Didn't Know"
- Chapter ElevenApologizing Without Disappearing
About the book
I interviewed adult daughters who had ended contact with their mothers, every one of them at least 25 and at least a year gone. Nearly all of them said the same thing, which is that they wanted their mothers. What they weren't willing to return to was the relationship as it had been running, and what they were asking for was different behavior instead of another explanation. This book tells you what they said, including the parts that are hard to read, and it's written for mothers of estranged sons and daughters alike.
It won't promise you your child comes back. What it gives you is a straight account of what happened, which part of it was yours, and what changed behavior would have to look like before it would be worth anything to either of you.
Was I Really That Bad? The Companion Journal
Guided Reflection for Mothers Facing Adult Child Estrangement
This journal goes with Was I Really That Bad?, and its thirteen sections follow the book chapter by chapter, so you can read a section and write about your own family while it's still fresh, or write first and go back to the chapter afterward. The exercises ask about particular conversations and particular years, the complaint you heard more than once, the year before the last message, what you meant by something and what your child took from it, because the general account you give people when they ask what happened doesn't have enough in it to work with.
You choose one child when you start an exercise, and if more than one has pulled back, each gets separate entries so one child's history doesn't turn into the explanation for another's. Every exercise has an opening prompt, a further question, and a full lined page to keep going on, and the prompts keep asking you to separate what your child actually told you from what you've assumed, which takes longer than you'd expect. There are opening reflections before the first chapter, unsent letters near the end, and pages for coming back to earlier entries once some time has passed.
Nothing in it asks you to contact your estranged child, and the letters stay in the journal, though a few exercises ask you to try something different with the people still in your life and come back to write down how it went. It isn't therapy, and it can't tell you what happened in your family. What you'll have at the end is a record in your own handwriting of what your child actually said, kept apart from what you've been guessing at, and you can bring that back to the book or to the next conversation, if there is one.
The book tells you what the daughters said, and the journal is where you work out which parts of it are about you.
Dr. Keisha Clark, PhD, for The Estrangement Project
