Raising Your Own Kids

Estrangement from your mother changes how you think about having a baby, and it raises two questions that keep getting answered as one. Whether you want to be a mother is the first. What your mother gets if you become one is the second, and you can answer them separately.

If you’re estranged from your own mother, you may wonder whether your daughter will one day do the same to you. Family estrangement patterns can repeat, but they aren’t inevitable. What often passes from one generation to the next is how a family handles conflict, apologies, boundaries, and repair, and those are patterns you can begin changing now.

The threat comes at the end of a phone call or in the third paragraph of a long email, some form of grandparents have rights, I've spoken to someone, you can't keep them from me. Then it's one in the morning and she's searching phrases she never expected to search, and what comes back is an attorney's landing page or a message board post from 2011, and none of it answers the question she actually has, which is whether a judge can make her hand her children to the woman she spent four years getting away from.