Member-only story
Sorry for Party Rocking
Unsent Letters from Parents to Estranged Children (And Vice Versa)
When I was about three years old, my family moved from Canada (my birthplace) to Bolivia, with a built-in month-long stay in the Peruvian Amazon. We stayed in wooden huts elevated several feet off the forest floor by tall wooden stilts in anticipation of heavy rains.
My brother, a mere eighteen months older than me, had a green Scooby-Doo suitcase and was extremely upset about leaving home (all he had known in his short life). One day, I watched in distress as my brother announced that he would return to Canada with or without us. He turned his little back and set off into the jungle, the Scooby-Doo suitcase rattling behind him.
My dad looked to my mom and said, “Let him go, He’ll be back sooner than you think.”
I wasn’t so sure.
We receive countless letters of sons or daughters having chosen to go “no contact” with the people who raised them. We receive an equal amount from parents to their estranged kids. Family estrangement — the process by which family members become strangers to one another — is still somewhat taboo. But according to a survey conducted by Pillemer in 2019, twenty-seven percent of Americans are currently estranged from a relative. If you are not one of them, you probably…
