I can never anticipate when the agony of missing my parents is going to hit me.
It might be when, full of pride, I am clapping for one of my four sons at a school concert and they’re not sitting beside me.
I certainly felt it when my eldest aced his A-levels and I couldn’t ring to tell them.
When my husband was drowning in depression and I needed someone to give me a hug and a safe space to cry then, too, I found myself struck by the sadness of their absence.
That’s the funny thing about grief – you can never anticipate its arrival.
And yet the fact is, neither of my parents are dead. The reason they are not in my life is because I have chosen to exclude them from it.
Cutting contact with close relatives and parents is increasingly common among people in their late teens and 20s, we are told. Theirs is a generation quick to put their mental health first and do away with anything that affects it.
But I am 54. My mother is 81 this year and my father will be 83. Unlike the impetuous young, who have their whole lives ahead of them to work things out, for me and my parents, time is running out.
If I look back on my relationship with them, it has never been easy. My father was a war baby who was further scarred by his adored mother’s sudden death from a stroke when he was in his late 20s.
He hated his own father. He once told me he felt happy when he died. I wasn’t shocked. That was the kind of thing my dad said.
My parents met in Southend, Essex, when Mum was 15 and he was 17. Instantly they were what we now call ‘co-dependent’, each so reliant on the other, their relationship must quickly have become unhealthy.
My mother was the bluestocking daughter of two Oxford graduates who dreamed of a university education herself.
I am 54. My mother is 81 this year and my father 83. Unlike the young who have their whole lives ahead of them, for me and my parents time is running out
When she fell pregnant at 17 with my older sister, Helen, now 62, she didn’t let that stand in her way. She left her baby daughter with her mother-in-law and off she went to Sussex University.
It was the first in a string of decisions that showed her daughters just where we stood in the pecking order.
Of course, some measure of benign neglect was par for the course in 1970s parenting. It was normal to be left in the back of the car with a bag of crisps and a pineapple juice while your parents spent hours in the pub and then drove you home with no seatbelt on.
But with my parents it was more than this. Both were physically violent towards us.
My sister told me that when I started in nursery school, the teachers called social services because I arrived with perfect handprints bruised all over my thighs. In turn, I remember my dad pushing my sister down the stairs for failing to bring him his coffee in the morning. She was 13 at the time.
I was terrified of getting a beating but I think the mental abuse was worse. My parents went through a ‘self-sufficiency’ phase in my early childhood, keeping goats in our back garden. Dad also ran an antique furniture business but this was a kind of Good Life experiment.
One of the goats had a kid and my father said she was mine to take care of. I christened her Flopsy (she had long ears), helped to bottle feed her and fell in love. Then one terrible night he said he was going to slaughter her to eat but that he would make me a purse from her skin as a keepsake.
I accept this is the reality of a self-sufficient lifestyle but the thing that still haunts me is the look of glee in his eyes when he told me, as though he enjoyed breaking this news to a four-year-old child.
This is just one of an infinite number of examples of his mental abuse. As a teenager, he told me he would thank any boy who would take me off his hands because I was so ugly I’d be lucky to get anyone. When I had just given birth to twins at 37, he told me I looked like an ugly, fat pig.
When I went home in tears after losing my first ever job on a magazine, he wagered I’d never get another. When I split up from my first husband in my early-20s, he hurled abuse at me explaining no one else would ever want me. He would then call my ex for hours commiserating with him.
He was always inappropriate with me and my sister. Walking around nude and endlessly commenting on our appearance. And when I left to go to university, his parting gift to me was the collected works of the Marquis de Sade – hardly an appropriate present from a father to a child.
I both feared and disliked my father in equal measure for my entire life.
When I was young, I used to dream of my parents getting divorced. Their rows were incendiary and loud. Mum would often rouse me and my older sister in the early hours and stomp off with us along the dark country lanes around our house in rural Essex.
Despite her own shortcomings, I clung to my mum when I was little, extracting as much love as I could from her
She would cry that she was finally going to leave him. But we never got further than the end of the cold, dark main road without her turning back.
My father was cruel to everyone and my mother was too weak, or blinded by love, to stand up to him. I still remember her telling me a story about some friends whose son had taken his own life because, as she cheerfully told me: ‘They just loved each other so much there was no room for him.’
I can’t say I felt that different in my own home. Whenever my father did something awful, rather than protect us, she defended him.
There was always an excuse for his behaviour. He was tired, ill, had had a terrible childhood. She painted a delusional and rosy picture of him and insisted that we go along with it or we were the problem.
Despite her own shortcomings, I clung to my mum when I was little, extracting as much love as I could from her. It was tricky as my father was jealous of any relationship she had. He cut her off from friends and family – she has been estranged from her two siblings for years as a result.
Despite all of this, I never imagined cutting my parents out of my life. It wasn’t until I had my own children that I really started to question my family history.
I have four boys, Alfie, 22, George, 20, and twins Dylan and Arthur, 17. I clearly recall holding Alfie’s pudgy little hand as we walked up to his nursery and feeling absolute horror at the idea of beating a child this small so hard that you left bruises.
As I stared into my babies’ eyes, I knew I would go to war for them, so why had my mum never felt the same for us? As my boys grew up and I saw how much children need their parents approval, I couldn’t imagine always saying the one thing guaranteed to destroy their confidence.
I finally began to see how damaging my relationship with my parents really had been. But I still soldiered on. I didn’t want to deny my sons their grandparents.
Even when my three-year-old boy came to me sobbing, saying my father had made him cry and he was scared of him, I cuddled him and told him not to be silly.
Even when my mother was the first and only person to smack my sister’s two-year-old, in front of my own tiny son, still, I believed the bonds between parent and child should never been broken.
But then, weeks before my 40th birthday, came the beginning of the end. I was an exhausted mother of four boys – the twins were just under two, George, five, and Alfie, seven.
It was 2am and my phone dragged me out of a deep sleep. Mum was on the line sobbing that she was leaving Dad. I rushed to her flat – she was living in London by then – to pick her up.
She told me she had finally had enough and wanted to get away. I took her home, put her to bed on our sofa and went back to my own bed in shock.
Over the next few months it came out that Dad had never stopped his abusive behaviour towards her and she had finally snapped. My sister and I helped her to find a flat and a divorce lawyer. Despite both having our own young families, we were there for her whatever she needed. This opened up a torrent of abuse from my father. I have a folder full of the most vitriolic emails from him.
Once I had to phone the police to get him away from my house. He emailed my employers and made wild claims against me. He parked outside the boys’ school and I had to warn them not to let him near them. He stole my mother’s car from outside her house.
It was terrifying and exhausting but I wanted to be there for Mum. To help her get free and enjoy the rest of her life.
I will admit I felt a glimmer of hope that we could forge a new family from the ashes. That maybe she could become a cherished grandma. She talked about starting a college course and finding a job. She had always worked with my father, so had never had her own career.
Then, one day, when I was expecting her round to play with the twins, she didn’t turn up. I was worried about her and frantically tried to ring. Then she sent a text. She was at the airport. She was going away with my father to patch things up.
She had never been out of contact with him and had been lying to me and my sister throughout the separation.
I have never known such pain. It was as if my parents had been wiped out in a few lines of text.
Over the next year, I suffered a nervous breakdown. The grief was all-consuming. I had insomnia, depression, raging anxiety and was barely functioning. The overriding feeling, perhaps oddly, was shame.
And then, the final straw. My mum emailed me to tell me how boring she had found me as a child and how, far from finding my help during her separation supportive, it was bullying and controlling.
At last, I had to face up to the fact the problem was not my father alone. My mother was just as toxic.
Even so, it was far from a clean break. It is 12 years since I received that message from my mother and we have tried many reconciliations.
When Alfie, my eldest, was 15, he wanted to meet his grandparents again. Coming from a loving family, he couldn’t understand how it was possible for a mum to lose contact with her child.
We went to their sheltered housing in London, a scant few miles from my own house. He met my parents and my father tried to show him some very inappropriate ‘saucy’ drawings.
When I was introduced to their neighbour, she reeled back in horror and started to berate me for being such a terrible daughter and abandoning my parents. As I cried all the way home, Alfie said perhaps he didn’t want to get to know them after all.
At the beginning of 2024, my father went into hospital, having collapsed at home. I only found out when my mother accidentally called me, thinking she was ringing my dad’s brother.
I rushed to try to help. It was an horrific time. My mother was desperate to get him home but the medical staff could see the cuts and bruises on them both.
She admitted he had been violent and abusive at home and his own injuries suggested she had fought back.
His aggressive behaviour continued in the hospital – he put one member of staff into A&E while he was there.
In the end, it was decided he must go into a care home and I helped push through his transfer. Throughout, Mum blamed me for what was happening.
To be fair, they both have dementia now, so I tried not to take it personally, but it was still painful. It took 12 weeks to get him into a care home as he was such a difficult case.
He moved in mid-2024 and I have seen him there once – at a hearing to ensure he wasn’t sent home. He and Mum had been demanding his return, but Mum also admitted she was too scared to care for him alone, while staff in his care home said he had to have two support workers as it was too mentally draining for just one to look after him.
This is the reality of what happens to abusive people when they get older.
This Christmas, I sent Mum a card but I didn’t phone or visit. I haven’t seen her since that hearing.
I would love to say that I have closure but, at 54, I still ache for a mum to share a cup of tea with, to call when life shines on me or kicks me in the teeth.
My sons are the joy of my life and not being able to share that with my mum still breaks my heart. There is never a second when I don’t feel guilty and as if I should be able to find a way to fix things.
I sometimes wonder if it will be better when they are gone, because it feels like no one understands what it is like to endure the living grief of estrangement. Perhaps I could finally stop feeling guilty and move on.
It helps that my sister is even more adamant that she wants nothing to do with my parents than I am. We are a support group of two for one another.
By this point in my life, I know that my relationship with my parents will never recover and I am as at peace with this as any child can ever be.
I tell myself that lots of friends have lost their parents but then I see them grieve and I am disturbingly envious. They have lost something I never had: a loving parent. It is, truly, a wound that never quite closes.
All names have been changed.