This happens with our son. It happens with our daughter too at times, when she needs to figure things out for a little while, I think. It makes sense to me that the kids will need times of rebellion. When they will need to take a kind of time out of time to do the growing up they could not do while practicing their addictions or while, as happens with our daughter sometimes, they are not thinking in healthy ways.
Our son is angry right out loud during his times of ~ of whatever this is, this thing we are all involved in with our children. His silences last for a very long time. Last summer, for those who were not here then, our son refused to allow me to have his address. I mean, I had it, but I had not brought any of our addresses with us when we had come North that year. (Actually, D H had packed those items having to do with such things. He truly could not know that the addresses were written into the calendar I keep in my office. This matters to me, because I try to watch closely to see that I am not sabotaging my children or myself.)
Just in case I am my (abusive) mother.
I don't want to do those things to my children that were done to me.
In any event, when I told our son what had happened and wanted his address so I could send the cards and etc that I send for our grands, he refused. I respected his wishes in this.
I could have gone online, could have found the address elsewhere, but I chose to respect his wishes in this.
In his own time, our son came back to me, and to us. It was after we were South again. I had the calendar and the addresses, and sent Hallowe'en cards. It did not seem like cheating. I had not gone behind his back to find the address. It was where I had told him it was, and I was there and used my own, legitimately acquired-from-the source, address.
And our son was happy that we did that, but there between us was the knowledge that, since I was no longer doing money (NO MONEY), he was seeing us by his choice, not ours.
I think that is a piece of what happens when they choose not to see or contact us.
I am sorry I cannot be clearer.
It is a messy circle. I am making the sense of things that I can. I think that when the kids need not to see us, when they need to declare that kind of independence from us...I think then they need time to realize they love us. For so long, everything got all twisted up in enabling and victiming and justifying why we were bad parents if we did not send money and not that they were in shameful places because they were not strong enough, maybe, to admit what their addictions were doing to them.
I am sorry this is not clearer, Tanya.
I am feeling my way through all of it, too.
With our daughter, the times of silence are way shorter. Like, a week or maybe, two. And when she calls? She is so funny and sweet and outrageously apologetic about what she thought while she was working through whatever it was.
And, since we did not know that was what she had been doing ~ since we did not know, at first, that we were not hearing from her on purpose ~ we would be like, "What, honey?"
Ha!
Being a screwed up family is amazing, in the real of it. It's like a battle in a way, where everyone wants every other one to win.
And then we all have dinner together or something.
At least, I hope we do.
Tanya, this is what I know for sure because we have been at this for such an impossibly long time: Your son loves you. He cherishes you in a way you (and I) cannot even imagine. I don't know what the cherishing looks like to them, to our children. I do know that what we say, the words we use and the images we hold of our children, matters more than we know.
So, this is a pretty confusing post.
I wish I could be clearer.
Cedar
