Parental Estrangement Guilt: In Trouble Whatever I Do
I feel in trouble whatever I do with my parents, and I hate that it still hits me.
That’s the whole post, really. This is about parental estrangement guilt, and the extra layers that come with it when you’re also raising kids and managing Type 1 diabetes. The rest is detail.
The double bind of parental estrangement
If I don’t call, I’m in trouble. If I do call, I’m also in trouble, just with extra steps. There’s no version where I get it right, and I’ve tried most of them.
I’m 30. I have a job, a mortgage-sized list of responsibilities, and two kids. I still sit there rewriting a text for twenty minutes so it can’t be read the wrong way.
What a birthday call looks like
I organised a call for my daughter’s 4th birthday. It took 40 minutes to get connected. The plan changed at 5:42pm, after I’d already agreed to a different app. By the time it worked, the kids were too tired to do anything but stare at the screen.
Everyone ended up sad (them, me, my husband watching me). Nobody won. At 8:27pm a birthday message turned up from someone else in the family, after a whole day of me being hurt that nobody had sent one.
Estrangement guilt, Type 1 diabetes and the 2am list
I know the facts. I know I’m allowed boundaries. I know the person I’m protecting my kids from can’t actually do anything to me now.
None of that stopped a panic attack at work over a message about plans. Then I hated myself for still caring, which is a second layer of guilt on top of the first.
It doesn’t stop at two layers. Here’s the full list, in the order it arrives at 2am:
- The thing with my parents.
- Feeling bad about the thing with my parents.
- My husband, who now watches me cry after a phone call and has to hold the whole house together while I recover. He didn’t sign up for this stress. He got it anyway, and I feel guilty every time he sees it.
- My kids. Am I doing the right thing for them? They only get one set of grandparents. I go back and forth on whether protecting them from the stress is worth what they’re missing, and I don’t have a clean answer. Some days I’m sure. Some days I’m not.
- What all of this is doing to a body I’m already managing around the clock.
That last one is where the diabetes comes in. I have Type 1 diabetes, so my body doesn’t get to treat a bad day as just a bad day. Stress hormones push blood sugar up, whether I’ve done anything “wrong” or not.
Nobody warns you that you can feel guilty about being upset because the upset is bad for your health. That’s a lot of admin for one feeling.
And I’m doing it on top of the usual: carbs, doses, sensors, the mental maths that never switches off. A lot of mums get to have a rough week and just have a rough week. Mine has a graph.
Gifts with strings
When my husband’s family pays for dinner, it’s dinner. When it’s my parents, I can feel the invoice coming or other expectations. Gifts now arrive through other people, which means I can’t refuse them or send them back. I can’t tell if that’s calculated or if it’s just how they show up. I still don’t trust it.
What I’m missing
My girls won’t have my parents in their photos this year. I see other people more than I see my own parents. That one isn’t guilt. It’s just sad, and I haven’t found anything useful to say about it.
What I’m trying to do instead
Not a resolution, because I don’t have one. A system:
- Answer once, and keep it short.
- Daytime, 10 minutes, video, confirmed in writing.
- Short videos and photos of the girls instead of live calls.
- Boring and practical, which is what I can manage.
If you’re reading this at 11pm
You’re not the only one. Estrangement doesn’t mean you don’t care. You probably care too much. The guilt isn’t proof you’re doing it wrong, and neither is a high number the morning after.