One Day, My Mother Disappeared. I Finally Found Out Where She’s Been. It’s Much Worse Than I Was Expecting.

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One evening about a year ago, I was preparing dinner when my sister sent me a Zillow screenshot featuring our mother’s ranch home. To our surprise, it was up for sale.

Five years prior, Mom had moved to suburban New Jersey to be closer to my sister and her family. She’d been dying to get out of Brooklyn, the city where my sister and I were raised. She’d grown to hate her neighbors, the stores, the parking, the smell, Brooklyn’s very existence. She hoped the suburbs would be a nice change of pace; that it would afford her more time with her grandkids. At the time, the move made sense. I lived across the country, and my husband and I are devoutly child-free. It was never going to be us she moved close to. My sister was the obvious choice.

Then one day, my mother abruptly stopped talking to her. She never said where she was going, but Zillow kept us informed. Within weeks, we’d learn that my mother’s home was under contract, and then sold, all without a word from her, her husband, or any of her friends. We—her children and grandchildren—still don’t know where she is. We only know she’s alive because she created a side hustle out of selling our gifts to her, and our childhood memorabilia, on Facebook Marketplace.

Her choice might seem odd to those who don’t know our family. But to our closest friends and relatives, it was a foregone conclusion; the icing on the cake of a mother and two daughters who could not find peace. Decades ago, Mom’s own mother had done the exact same thing. She uprooted her family and moved four hours north of Queens, deep into the mountains of New York, where she isolated herself and her three youngest children from all signs of civilization.

Silence, self-isolation, and estrangement have long been the weapons of choice among the women in my family. When my sister sent me the Zillow listing, I hadn’t spoken to my mother in over six years. My sister, meanwhile, had only recently become part of the large and growing world of estranged adult children. We interpreted my mother’s swift and silent move to be intended as a sort of emotional comeuppance; a punishment consistently doled out by women who know no other way of relating to their adult children.

I spent the better part of my own estrangement in therapy, trying to process my childhood and a significant portion of my adulthood, only to learn that the people and intergenerational patterns I was desperate to understand were not, in fact, understandable. Still, I wanted answers, and I never stopped trying to find them—especially after I received another screenshot.

At around the same time that my mother’s home hit the market, a stranger on social media reached out to my sister with a disconcerting message.

“I belong in a group on fb for estranged parents because I’m estranged from my mom,” the stranger said. “Your mom is in the group and is talking shit about you and your husband.”

Before this, I didn’t know such Facebook groups existed. The stranger was an undetected interloper into these spaces, spying on what her own mother said about her. With a sense of vigilante justice, she began sending us unsolicited intel about my mom.

First, there was a screenshot of a comment my mother had made lamenting her relationship with my sister and her lack of access to her grandkids. In another comment, my mom condemned the therapy my sister had. Evidently, like many estranged parents, she thought that was the problem.

Reading through these screenshots made me desperately sad. The group where my mother was posting seemed to be replete with parents who’d sooner drop off the face of the earth than fix their relationship with their family. At the same time, it fascinated me. Here was a repository of people on the other side of the estrangement coin, talking about feelings and experiences I’d been shut out from for years. I knew the group wasn’t intended for me, and I’m not one to keep tabs on my mother, but I wondered if seeing how other estranged parents spoke about their adult children could give me insight into what happened between her and me. Maybe I’d be able to see something in these discussions that therapy was never able offer. Maybe it would show me if we could reconcile.

Though private, this group was surprisingly easy to access, requiring nothing more than an agreement to adhere to community guidelines. But I soon became so intrigued with these spaces that I attempted to join other estranged parent groups, too. Most of the time, the moderation and security were oddly CIA-level, complete with interview questions and a personal assessment of my own social media page. I was denied from more groups than I was admitted into, but as it turned out, I didn’t need much access to get a feel for their tone.
When a group is called “Estranged Parents Are Sick of Your Shit,” it’s easy to imagine the nature of the conversations. Still, nothing could have prepared me for the rabbit hole that would follow.

“I’m going on about my life like I never had kids.”

“My daughter is dead to me.”

“I’m thinking about pursuing my daughter-in-law for parental alienation.”

These are paraphrased examples of the posts I came across in both public and private groups, the vast majority of which were made by women. In one, a mother wondered if she could sue her adult child for elder abuse (the “abuse” in question was a period of no contact). In another, a mom wrote that she was looking for moving companies so she could send her daughter all her “crap.” “I want nothing of my kids in my house when I die,” she stated. Someone who replied to her post suggested she try a bonfire instead. Elsewhere, in a private group, a mom expressed regret over not having spanked her “lemming” children when they were young, as if that would have yielded a more favorable outcome.

Not all the discussions were inflammatory. Many participants simply congratulated themselves and each other for stepping away from their adult children. Most seemed to believe that they were entitled to their grandchildren while dismissing any need or desire for a relationship with their own children. Some exchanged advice about how to pursue their goals through legal channels (known state-by-state as grandparents’ rights laws). Almost all of them had someone, or something, to blame. In their eyes, it was manipulative therapists, overly soft school programs, social media brainwashing, conniving spouses, poor astrological arrangements, and what they diagnosed as “narcissism” that had torn their families apart. Not once did they suggest it might have been them.

It was oddly addicting to read these posts. For the couple of days I was in the groups, I pored over them in bed at night, and then again in the mornings. During work breaks and at traffic lights, I was scrolling. Like the stranger who brought us into this world, I’d become an undetected interloper, unable to peel my eyes away.

What I didn’t see was the one thing I was searching for: anything that might explain why some parents so easily walk away. In my case, a single text after a minor argument in which I reminded my mother that I needed emotional support far more than I needed blistering criticism was all it took. Her eight-year silence following that moment has made it more than clear: If she couldn’t speak to me exactly how she wanted to, and with the same venom that her own mother had directed at her, then she wanted nothing to do with me. How does a mother allow it to come to this?

In lieu of an answer, all I saw were hearts, likes, emojis, and reassurances from parents sharing sympathies. No one challenged each other. No one suggested therapy, or that these groupthink dynamics might be antithetical to healing the issues and relationships that had brought them there in the first place. No one suggested that the parent-child relationship was an inherently imbalanced one—a relationship built on emotional power dynamics that don’t just evaporate when the child becomes an adult. Almost all of them seemed to feel that the estrangement had occurred suddenly, without warning, like a lightning bolt out of the blue.

That last sentiment was especially difficult to wrap my mind around. I spent years trying to get my mother to hear me, and to care about the parts of our relationship that I struggled with. My estrangement from her didn’t just “happen”—it was a long and painful process she was present for. But she, like the other women in these groups, did not want to be held accountable. It was easier for her to pretend that her children held all the cards—and that the outcome of our relationship was out of her hands.

To her credit, my mother’s posts were not nearly as bad as some of the others. Mostly, she griped about being shut off from her grandchildren, and posted nostalgic pictures of them. She cheered other women on for walking away from the families they created. She stated how she looked forward to a life of post-motherhood and post-grandmotherhood, and how that choice was squarely in the interest of her mental health.

As I scrolled through her conversations with other women, I found myself oscillating between incredulity and relief. Her relatively well-behaved presence and lack of extreme participation made me wonder, at least at first, if there was a spark of hope left for our relationship. After all, she didn’t bad-mouth my sister or me, at least not in the way I expected. She didn’t openly wish emotional or physical harm on either of us. In fact, Mom didn’t mention me in any of her posts at all. Like a surviving family member intentionally omitted from an obituary, I was left out of the discussion.

And that’s the piece that offered a level of clarity that I wasn’t expecting: I didn’t exist anywhere within the scope of her concerns. I can certainly speculate as to why: I live far away, and our estrangement does not involve grandchildren. Our relationship offers her no grandparent-related bragging rights, babysitting, holidays, milestones, or, in my mother’s case, leverage. I also never played well with the troubling dynamics that shaped our family long before I was born. I went off and lived my life, and traveled great distances to do so. Somewhere along the way, I made it clear that after 40 years, there were certain things about our relationship that I was no longer able to tolerate. After that, I had nothing my mother needed or wanted. Maybe that was the answer all along.

I left the groups after a day or two, but I still see content about parental estrangement on my social media feed (that links to, yes, more Facebook groups). Every now and then, I dive back in. I can’t help but imagine my mother saying to me what these women say to each other, about what they are owed from their selfish, manipulative adult children. Their unfiltered perspectives—unchallenged in the echo chamber—make the unknown a little more knowable. I’ll never know exactly what my mother was thinking, but like an incomplete puzzle, they help me fill in the missing pieces.

I do not begrudge anyone who seeks virtual community in trying to come to terms with estrangement. Therapy is hard for a lot of people to access, and effective therapy is even harder to find. In fact, I completely understand why people would opt for online support groups over therapy, even if they did have access to licensed professionals. I went through five therapists before I found one who was a good fit for me. The very first therapist I ever met gasped, brought her hands to her mouth, and looked on with horror when I described how, when I was 8 years old, my mother pretended to give away the family cat while I was at school. When I came home after school, she watched me walk from room to room as I called out for my pet. When she didn’t appear, my mother told me that she had given her away. This was about two years after my parents gave away our family dog, also while I was at school, and also without warning.

I remember breaking down into sobs as I flung myself to the living room floor, my face buried in my tiny fists. And when I felt something furry against my arm, I realized it was all a ruse. My cat was alive and well and still at home with us. When I asked my mother why she had done this, she simply said, “To see how you’d react.” It would be nearly 40 years before I allowed myself to bond with another cat, and another decade before I attempted therapy again.

During the time in between, Reddit first helped me understand and then come to terms with my relationship with my mother. I still access those communities that I discovered a decade ago, when I first realized just how rocky my relationship with my mother really was. Despite years of therapy and learning how to occupy a healthier headspace, my own online communities still do something for me that other spaces don’t. More than a therapist’s office, and perhaps even more than a friend group, there is a real kinship between people on social media. What could be more comforting than thousands of people who understand your most primal pain? I’m not immune to that allure. My mother isn’t, either.

Whether or not people seek professional help to process their experiences with estrangement, it makes sense that these communities have become so popular for both sides of the coin. We—estranged children and their parents—both believe we are right. We both believe that we’ve done all that we can do to salvage the relationship. We diagnose each other with personality disorders. We both believe that social media is, in part, responsible for the toxicity surrounding our estrangement and its impasse. We both assign a lifetime of blame to each other. We both try to rid our personal space of any evidence that our loved one ever existed.

My mother sells our belongings on social media. I’ve given her gifts away. Our relationship as it exists today is a byproduct of our mutual trauma; of a mothering that neither of us received but both desperately deserved. I guess that’s the one thing we have left in common.