Most women who look this up already have the word, what they want to know is whether it applies to them, because their own situation doesn't look like the ones they've read about. They still talk to their mother, they see her at Christmas, they answer about half her calls, they text a picture of the kids when something good happens, and by every outward measure the relationship is fine. What's missing is harder to point at, they can't tell her anything true, or they can, and it gets repeated to an aunt within the week, or the calls are pleasant and neither of them says anything either one would remember. Contact is not the same as being known. A good deal of what women mean when they say estranged is happening inside relationships that are still technically intact, and plenty of daughters spend years deciding they don't qualify for the word because nobody has stopped speaking.

Keisha Clark, PhD, is a developmental psychologist and the author of Family, Interrupted and Useful Isn't the Same as Loved.

What estrangement between a mother and a daughter actually looks like

Some of it is what everyone pictures, a blocked number, a returned card, an address the mother doesn't have anymore, and everyone in the family knows the date it started even if nobody agrees on the reason. Most of it doesn't look like that, it looks like a daughter who calls on the first Sunday of the month because she set that schedule herself to keep it from becoming three times a week, who has a list in her head of subjects she doesn't raise, her marriage, her weight, her job, what she does with her money, and who gets off the phone after nineteen minutes having said nothing that could be used later. It looks like a woman who goes to the funeral and leaves before the reception, or who sends her husband to pick up the kids so she doesn't have to go inside her mother's house. She might see her mother more than her friends see theirs. The relationship still ended somewhere in there, it just ended without an announcement, and because there was never a fight anyone can point to, she has trouble explaining to her own husband why she comes back from those Sundays unable to talk for an hour.

It also runs on and off. She goes months without answering, then her mother has a fall, or a birthday comes around, or the guilt gets bad enough, and she resumes, and for six weeks it's warm and she thinks she was wrong about all of it, and then her mother comments on her granddaughter's weight at the table and she remembers exactly what she was right about. Women in it often think the on and off is proof they're unstable, when it's usually proof that nothing actually changed and both of them are doing what they did last time.

How common estranged mother and daughter relationships are

There's no honest count, and anybody who gives you a firm number is guessing, because the people inside it don't tell anyone and the ones who do tell somebody don't tell a researcher. Once a woman starts saying it to people, though, she finds out fast how common it is. She mentions it carefully at work, half apologizing, and her coworker says her own mother hasn't met her second child, and the neighbor mentions a daughter who hasn't called in four years. The woman at church who everyone assumed had a close family drives two states over for Thanksgiving specifically so she doesn't have to host. Families don't talk about it because the assumption is still that a woman who can't get along with her own mother has something wrong with her, so most of the women in it say nothing, and the silence gets read as evidence it doesn't happen much.

Why mothers and daughters become estranged

It's almost never one incident, though there's usually an incident everyone remembers, and the incident is generally the last item in a sequence rather than the reason. The reasons underneath are ordinary and repetitive, a mother who treated one child as the capable one and the other as fragile and expected the capable one to keep absorbing it into adulthood, a mother whose partner was a problem her daughter was left alone with, a mother who repeats what she's told so that anything her daughter says comes back to her through a cousin, addiction on either side, and money, which is usually the most specific of them, a daughter who cosigned a car loan in her twenties and spent four years paying it after the car was repossessed, or who sent three hundred dollars a month for two years while her own car needed brakes, or who was expected to babysit every Friday because she was the one without a real job, meaning the one who worked from home. Often what ends it is the first time she says no and finds out that saying no was never allowed.

From the mother's side the reasons sound different, and most of these mothers are telling the truth as they know it. A few know exactly why and won't say it. Others were told, repeatedly and in plain language, and heard their daughter being dramatic rather than a warning, so as far as they knew the ending came without notice. A mother who raised her daughter the way she was raised, and did better than her own mother did, which she knows for a fact, hears that it wasn't enough as being told none of it counted. And some mothers are estranged from a daughter for reasons that have very little to do with them, a husband who narrowed the family down to his own, a diagnosis, a daughter who stopped speaking to everyone and not only to her.

What each of them believes about the other

There are usually two accounts, both of them sincere, and neither one is recognizable to the other woman. The daughter's is that she said something for years, in escalating forms, and nothing changed, and the ending was the last option rather than the first. The mother's is that things were normal and then her daughter stopped speaking to her, and nobody will tell her why. Both women can be reporting honestly, because saying something and having your mother hear it as a problem she needs to fix are two different things, and a daughter can spend a decade doing the first while believing she's done the second.

The two accounts stop matching in what each woman does next. A mother who understands the decision as her daughter's own, even a decision she thinks is wrong, has some chance of eventually being told what it was about. A mother who understands it as something done to her daughter, by a husband or a therapist or something her daughter read online, will treat it as an error to be corrected, and she'll keep applying pressure through whoever will take her calls, which is generally the sibling who then has to decide whose side she's on. The daughter takes the pressure as proof she was right to go, the mother takes the silence as cruelty, and the sibling stops answering both of them.

Whether estrangement between a mother and daughter is permanent

Some of it is permanent, some of it lasts eleven years and ends at a hospital bed, some ends because a grandchild is born and the terms get renegotiated in the first month, and some resumes and comes apart again twice before it settles into something both women can tolerate, which is often a phone call at Christmas and nothing else. What doesn't work by itself is the apology. A mother can apologize sincerely and completely and still repeat the behavior within a month or two, because the apology addressed her daughter's feelings and not the practice that produced them, and most daughters can tell the difference within about two visits. What changes things, when anything does, is narrow and specific, she stops telling her sister what she's been told, she stops commenting on her daughter's weight, she asks before she shows up, she pays back the money. The word people want here is reconciliation, and what actually happens, when anything does, is narrower than that, they talk about the grandchildren and the weather and they leave the rest of it alone.

If you're the one deciding, you probably will regret it, at least in flashes, and there's regret in going and regret in staying, so regret won't settle it for you. What you can answer is what you get back if you go, what you lose if you stay, and whether the two of you have ever repaired anything before, an argument about a wedding, a year you barely spoke, anything at all that got fixed rather than dropped.