What it's like not speaking to your parents.
A reminder that you don't have to have the 'worst' story to make a big call.
On my 40th birthday, I wonder if my dad will message me to say Happy Birthday.
It wasn’t a constant distraction from the lovely things that happened that day. Like my girlfriend spoiling me or being showered with love from my friends. It’s more like a stain on the couch cushion. You think of it sometimes and in the back of your mind you know it’s there and you should deal with it, but it’s easier to flip the couch cushion over, muffling its memory under 20cm of foam and feather down.
There was no positive outcome anyway. If Dad didn’t message me, his first child to turn 40, then that would be a bit of a bummer. It was a big birthday. But if he did message me, I expected it to make me feel awful anyway. Because I hadn’t spoken to my dad in four years, and it hurt him. He likes to remind me how hurt he was, in the texts I got from him perhaps once or twice a year.
I spent many years after the first time my parents and I stopped speaking with a surge of dread running through my body at the sound of a text message. That was in 2004, when I accidentally outed myself to them and they told me to get out of their sight, their lives. As technology evolved to include messaging options outside of text message, I tried to keep my parents to a specific platform with a different message alert sound, so that funny group chat notifications, memes from my friends or notifications about my 2Degrees bill wouldn’t be tainted. I’d had too many horrible messages from them – in truth, not even that many, but one is enough to leave its mark. I couldn’t live with that amount of epinephrine coursing through my body with every beep and boop and chime. Still, my phone ringing would send my body into flight mode far beyond what’s normal for even a phone-call-shy Millenial – remnants of trauma from when my mother had been the end of the phone, drunk, telling me I ruined her life. Over the next 15 years I managed to get this kneejerk reaction more under control, helped by the cooling of my parents’ rage and the hesitant ways we worked our way back towards each other. Mostly enabled by me, playing the perfect daughter role, keeping things light and never pushing them too hard to acknowledge what they’d done. Or even who I was.
But this system got messed up after I released my memoir Not That I’d Kiss a Girl and blocked my dad completely on Viber, after receiving the predicted tirade of messages about how I had thrown my family under the bus for the sake of a good story. You thought the story about how you kicked me out of home when you found out I was gay was a good one?? Thanks dad, couldn’t have done it without you, literally!
Blocking him on Viber after my book came out and deciding I needed to set boundaries with them for the first time only meant that one day, I received a text message from him instead. Or maybe I had decided to message him ‘Happy Birthday’ or ‘Merry Christmas’ in a moment of guilt, and the channel was open again. With so many methods of communication these days, it’s so hard to truly block someone.
Deciding to go no-contact with your parents is not a one and done. It’s also not usually as clean-cut as no communication whatsoever. It’s grey, even when you try and make it black and white. And you live with the decision weekly, if not daily. The weight of certain days press down on your heart each time they come up. June 3, mum’s birthday. July 14, dad’s. December 5, their wedding anniversary, Christmas, Fathers' & Mothers’ Day. I think of what Donna Tartt wrote in The Goldfinch: ”It used to be a perfectly ordinary day, but now it sticks up on the calendar like a rusty nail.”
I go to bed the night of my birthday with no message from my dad.
But the next day, my dad calls me. It was the first time I’d talked on the phone to him since early 2020, and I got a shock to hear his voice. Not because he had actually called, but because I could barely understand him. Dad has had Parkinson’s for about 12 years, and although I’d heard second-hand through family members about his falls and his freezes over the last few years, it was the first time I really understood how much this disease has ravaged him. His voice was slurred and after a few minutes I realised it was more than that, a small disconnect that wasn’t about the things unsaid between us but because he wasn’t quite the same man. The conversation was difficult, but not because of distance. I could literally barely understand him.
I found myself talking to him through shallow breaths, choked up with a complex grief that included the pain any of us feel about our parents aging, as well as how I was helpless to do anything. Even if I had stayed in his life, increased my calls and texts to daily contact, I think he’d still be where he is. I would have been banging my head against the wall these last few years, coaxing him to consider therapy, begging him to do physio, worrying that he’s not using his brain, doesn’t seem to have any deep friendships. And I would be getting back the same thing every time: I’m fine, don’t try to change me, I like my life as it is, I don’t want to hear it.
We had a pleasant enough conversation over the phone, which I’ve learned surprises people who know my history with my parents, but don’t know them. They don’t understand how they are the masters of keeping it surface; how they’ve locked things away so deep down that they don’t seem to understand how we got to this point. When are you going to fix things with your mother? Dad has said this to me in 90% of the handful of text messages he’s sent me since July 2020. I can’t believe we’re not speaking on Christmas, he writes, not calling me on Christmas.
Our call ended abruptly.
”Yes, okay, thanks for calling to let me know,” Dad had said to me.
‘Huh?’ Before I could register what was happening, he hung up.
Then I realise: he was calling while mum was out, and she’d just arrived home. He was trying to cover up that he was talking to me by pretending I was the utilities company or something. Since the book came out, he’s hidden from her even the minuscule contact with me that he has.
Over the last 20 years, people have told me: ‘They’re the parents, it’s their responsibility to fix things.’ It’s taken a long time for me to soak this in because this has never been my reality with them. I’m the one who’s always had to compromise, to twist myself into impossible shapes to make myself pleasing enough for them. Until I released Not That I’d Kiss a Girl, and refused to play that role anymore. I’m not sure if they’ve realised yet. They’re so confused that I set a boundary, and stuck to it. It reminds me of that trick where you draw a circle around a cat and they think they’re trapped, unable to step foot across a boundary that is nothing more than a line in the sand (not my cats, who recently walked across a sticky, freshly-painted deck despite my yelling). Unlike when I was 19 years-old, this time I was the one that chose to go no-contact with my parents. Kind of.
The thing about setting a boundary is that although you’re closing a door, I think you’re hoping that the other person will go around the side of the house and knock on the back door. Or maybe check for the window with the catch that’s a bit loose. You want them to respect your boundary, but you also want that boundary to make them realise they have to try things a different way. Perhaps to take a moment and reflect, to understand that you want to break a cycle, to stop and think about their responsibility in what has led to this. But the bottom line is, you still want them to try.
What I’m saying is, I would let my parents back in, for short figurative visits, if they were making an effort. My boundary is not “Don’t speak to me”, it’s “Don’t speak to me like that. If you do, we can’t speak.” My boundary isn’t “I don’t care about you and I don’t want to know anything about your life.” It’s “I love and care for you despite everything, so the way you treat me hurts,” and it’s, “You can know me if you welcome all of me, not just the sanitised parts,” and most importantly it’s “Our relationship is not my problem to fix, because our problem is all the broken parts in you that you never fixed.”
But my dad just sits in his circle on the ground, meowing plaintively. There’s no self-reflection, no effort. I don’t think my mum even knows I set a boundary. She’s just turned away completely. I think she put my dad in a different kind of circle drawn on the ground many years ago too, one that he’s never had the courage to leave. She’s so far beyond my comprehension. But I still love her. That’s why it hurts so much.
One of the criticisms of Not That I’d Kiss a Girl is a lack of analysis around why my parents are the way they are; why they reacted so badly to my sexuality. I get that. If I was a reader, I would have wanted more too. It was the key conflict of the book, and it’s never resolved. Guess what? It’s the key conflict of my life, and it’s never been resolved. When I was writing Not That I’d Kiss a Girl I deleted probably 10,000 words of what would have been the final chapter. Because instead of an analysis of my relationship with them, instead of a narrative that included some kind of message, or meaning, or at least a tying into the rest of the book – which I see as a story of empowerment and self-actualisation, not tragedy – it became just a series of anecdotes of all the hurtful things they’ve done and said. That’s not what people want from a memoir.
One of the common wisdoms for any kind of personal writing is to wait until you have emotional distance. Until the sting has subsided and you can look back on events with some clarity; find a way to make it digestible, understandable, palatable. (TBH I’m probably breaking that rule right here, apologies). It’s ultimately why I ended the Not That I’d Kiss a Girl the way I did. That ending took me months and months to figure out. How do you find an ending to a situation that will be ongoing for the rest of my life, or at least theirs? I didn’t write more about my parents’ motivations because I didn’t understand them. I didn’t analyse their psyches because that’s not my job to do. I don’t think it will ever be done. All I can do is make peace with where we are, and navigate each new turn in the road the best I can with the tools I have.
I often get asked by people at events what my relationship is with my parents now. Most of them expect me to say we’ve patched things over, I think. There is a good amount of surprise when, stumbling to capture the complexity in one sentence to a stranger, I say something inadequate like ‘We don’t really speak any more’. Many people are mad at my parents about this. Some, I’m sure, think I haven’t tried hard enough to do the patching myself.
But I don’t want to.
It’s hard to explain the grief I carry. How it sneaks up on me in small moments. When I spend time with other families. When I realise I’ve put my hands on my hips like my mum, or am breathing heavily when I’m concentrating like she used to when she’d brush my thick hair into a ponytail as a child. Or seeing the short older man at Parkrun who reminds me of my dad. So many things remind us of people we love, especially when they’re not with us anymore, which doesn’t always mean they died. I thought of Dad recently when I was playing backyard cricket with my mates and did a massive ‘Hollywood’ shot across Grey Lynn Park into the bushes. My dad was a good cricket player. On weekends when I was a kid, my family and a bunch of others would sometimes traverse the winding roads of the Banks Peninsula to Orton Bradley Park and spend hours playing cricket, surrounded by the song of summer cicadas and the creek burbling over rocks nearby. Dad would hit balls soaring into the air in a way that would make the kids gasp in awe, often aiming them towards me, his eldest daughter, so that I could be the one to claim his wicket.
A couple of months ago, I got another phone call from Dad. I was at the pub so I went outside to answer, shoving my finger in my ear to try and hear him.
“Hello?” I said.
“We need your help,” he replied.
Once again I’m taken aback – by the phone call at all, let alone how he has chosen to open it.
“Your mother and I are practically incapacitated,” he continued. “We need you to come down and look after us for a few days.”
“Uhh,” I stuttered. Where do you go after a statement like that, with the history you have?
“Are you okay, like right now?” I say, “Is this an emergency?”
No. But he and mum are both struggling to run the house, are struggling to get around, and are frightened. He doesn’t say that last part. My sister, with me behind the scenes, have been trying to coax Dad into assisted living for a while now. I’m sure this is a scenario many others have been through. They won’t go. They’re not old. The facility is grim. They’re not leaving their home.
”I’ll look after your father, in our home, until he dies,” my mother says, morbidly, to my sister one day. But she’s not looking after him. She’s not making sure he takes his meds, yes, but mostly I don’t think she’s giving him emotional support. I truly think she isn’t capable of it. That’s the closest I’ve gotten to an answer about my own relationship with her, too.
My next question is, “Does mum know you’re calling me?””
“N-no,” he sputters. “She’s in bed. I’ll deal with her later. We just need you to come and help for a few days to get on top of things.”
Although my heart is breaking for them, I’m annoyed too. That he can just blow over the last 20 years like they never happened. That he would have me show up at the doorstep of his home and has absolutely no care for how that might affect me. It’s the same old story, and part of the reason I’ve had to put the wall up.
“We’ll pay for the flights,” he says. He always thinks it’s about money. Or he wants it to be, because that’s easily fixed.
For one of the first times in my life, I stand up to him; tell him that he can’t expect me to drop everything. I have a life, a job, a family of my own. One that I chose and who chose me when they didn’t. I say it gently, but I’m churning inside.
Dad changes his tune quickly. He’s not here to beg. I try to offer other solutions, but he’s resigned now, like he had a momentary madness but now the air is out of his sails. So instead I step back into my old role as the rational problem-solver. I tell him he needs to get a medic alert, and stop making excuses. That he needs to start taking assisted living seriously, and get things in place for his future. I tell him that tomorrow I’ll try and find him a carer to come to his home.
He seems relieved that I’m back to the person he’s familiar with. Perhaps he realises that the fact I’m aware of what’s been going on with my parents’ health means that I do still care.
He hangs up with a promise to sort out his medic alert and to start charging his phone consistently, and also to give my sister more power legally so she can help them more with finances and admin. We both know it can’t be me.
I’ve covered a lot of ground in the five minutes we had on the phone. It’s a strange tipping point when you become the one to lecture your parents. Stranger, still, how easily I slot back into my family role. Afterwards, mostly I feel incredulous about his ask, but also there is a relief that he did ask for help. I’m also a little frightened – how bad is it that he rang me? And of course, there’s that deep, deep grief that’s always with me, roiling underneath it all.
By the end of the next day, I think I’ve found a carer who can come to visit my parents in their home. Their beautiful, beachside house with dangerous stairs in an isolated part of the country, which has no public transport, let alone a hospital. That’s totally not going to come back and bite them in the arse one day soon.
The last thing I said to my dad during that call was this: ”I’ll always be there for you when you need me, you know, Dad. I’m glad you called. Please call again if you need me.”
I’m trying to tell him that he can step outside the circle. That although I closed the front door, he can come around the back.
Some related stuff:
You can read The New Yorker article “Why so many people are going ‘no contact’ with their parents” here - add 12ft.io in front of the URL to get around the paywall.
The essay I wrote about the fall-out of publishing a memoir for The Spin-off.
Okay so this is not the post I intended (and told you) I would write, but in the spirit of going with the flow and not over-editing for Group Email, this is what came out! Soon you will get used to the whiplash, I hope.