Estrangement, Abortion, and Bad Mothers

A conversation with Monica Cardenas, PhD.

I had a fascinating conversation with Monica Cardenas about her estrangement from her mother, and parallels between the way estrangement and abortion both get judged by “the culture,” parallels which surprised us both.

A bit about Monica: Dr. Monica Cardenas holds an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research on maternal ambivalence in the 20th century novel and the evolution of reproductive rights in the U.S. is central to her novel-in-progress The Mother Law, which was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish College Fiction Prize and runner-up in the Borough Press open submission competition. On the day of our interview, Roxane Gay published her essay, “It’s Better This Way,” on The Audacity newsletter. Her work has also been published by Literary Hub, Litro, Catatonic Daughters, and Sad Girls Club Lit. She is chair of the Democrats Abroad UK Women’s Caucus, and author of the Bad Mothers newsletter. Originally from Washington, D.C., she now resides in the Chiltern Hills just outside London.

Here is Part 1 of our conversation.

Tell me about your familial estrangement.

I am estranged from my mother, and have been for about 20 years. There have been blips of contact in that time, but we haven't had a relationship really of any kind since I was about 23. She initiated the estrangement. For a long time, she struggled with the responsibility of raising me. I also have three younger sisters who are all estranged from her. The four of us lived with my mom after my parents divorced. She was a good mother in the respect of looking after us, feeding us, making sure we did well in school, and celebrating our birthdays. She did all those things, but I think it was really hard for her, harder than she was willing to admit to anyone. When I was in my early twenties and my sisters were all teenagers, we were all still living with her, and she told us all to leave. We didn't speak for several weeks initially. She wouldn't take phone calls or anything. Then it was sort of back and forth for months. After a while, everybody stopped trying. I decided, eventually, it was too emotionally draining for me to try to have any kind of relationship with her. That was 20 years ago.

I'm really sorry. I think a lot of people will  resonate with aspects of what you're saying. Can I ask about your work? Your academic research was on maternal ambivalence in the 20th century novel. Could you speak about whether you see any connection between your work as an academic  or as a creative and your estrangement from your mom?

I've always been interested in maternal ambivalence because I've never had an interest in having kids. I'm sure there are a lot of thoughts that psychology-minded people might have about how that's related to my childhood and my relationship with my mom. But, I have no memory ever of wanting kids. Even from a young age, I never played with baby dolls. I feel that's just the way I am. As I got older,  I started thinking more about how people who are ambivalent about motherhood, how they dealt with that decades ago, in the sixties and seventies, when it was just a given that you, you get married, have kids, and that's what women did with their lives. So I've been interested in that aspect of it. 

In the back of my mind, I have thought maybe my mother was a victim of that as well. I know, at least, she loved having babies and loved being pregnant. I don't think that she loved having older daughters with lots of opinions. But I don't really know how she felt because it's not something we ever talked about. 

The way I first got in touch with you is you made a comment about a New Yorker article that I had written about in Estranged. In my post, I shared some strong opinions about the way legacy media outlets have covered estrangement recently. In my view, many articles have adopted a narrative that seems to assume that familial estrangement is more common or happening for more trivial reasons now than it did in the past. But your reading of the New Yorker article was different from what I saw. So, tell me, when you read the piece, what was your initial reaction? 

When I first read it, I thought that there must be better examples of children who are estranged from their parents. The example presented in the article [an adult daughter who was given the pseudonym “Amy,” who cut off her parents] seemed petty to me. I suppose I had kind of a knee-jerk reaction to Amy, that she maybe acted too quickly to cut off the relationship with her parents. Subsequently I read your reaction to the article and I realized that I was being unfair. I think I probably had that reaction because in my case, I'm not the one who initiated estrangement, my mom is. So I probably am a bit more defensive than I should be. 

I appreciate that you reflected on your reaction, but I also think you were a bit set up by the article’s framing. The big problem I had with the New Yorker piece is this sense that some unnamed group gets to sit in judgment over adult children and decide who has a “good enough” reason to choose estrangement, and who doesn't. That just isn't a productive way to think deeply or broadly about why family relationships fall apart. 

An overly simplistic way to understand estrangement is by focusing on a scenario like, “Oh, well, my dad sexually abused me. And so now I don't talk to him.” Nobody would challenge that choice. The New Yorker article deviated from that clear-cut abuse narrative, which I thought was important since there are millions of estrangements that don't follow that narrative. But then the writer, Anna Russell, turned around and judged “Amy” for her choice to cut off her parents.  It made me think Russell picked Amy’s story just so she could pick it apart and wonder aloud whether Amy was justified. When I read it, I immediately noticed this and thought, “Why are you getting to decide and to judge, Anna Russell?” 

Well, I realized this through talking to you,  because at first I did judge Amy. 

And that’s where your expertise comes in, because another aspect of your academic research is reproductive rights. And you realized that this judgment about estrangement parallels the public conversation about abortion in a really weird way.

So, right now, the winning narrative in the fight for abortion rights is a story of a pregnant person who wanted to be pregnant, who wants a baby, but finds out about some kind of fatal fetal abnormality that puts the pregnant person's life in jeopardy. Consequently, that person either gets very sick or dies because they can't access abortion care. Those are the “clear cut” stories that move people to support abortion access. No one would judge a person in that circumstance who needed an abortion. 

But that's always bothered me because that pits one reason for abortion access against another. Another reason for abortion might be, “I don't want to be pregnant.” It might be as simple as that, but those stories get swept aside in favor of the “clear cut” ones because those are what persuade people. I have strongly argued over many years, as have lots of other people, that abortion rights should be about women's autonomy, women's choice. So the fact that you need to offer a “good reason” or explanation, either for having an abortion yourself, or even for supporting abortion access for other people, is really troublesome to me. And I think that “bar” is the same thing that I was subjecting Amy to. I was judging her reason as not “good enough.” Just like with abortion, your reason is yours and personal and doesn't need everybody else's approval.

Yes! I think this is such an interesting insight and I can't wait to share this on Estranged. In both cases,  it’s a given that some sort of morality police, judge, and jury in the culture has the right to weigh in on what is a very personal decision. In the New Yorker article, it's the journalist herself who muses about whether Amy has the right to cut off contact. 

Yet, the decision to cut off contact with a family member, like the decision to have an abortion,  has absolutely nothing to do with what people think they know about a situation. It's for the people in the situation to decide. Or it should be. 

At least with estrangement, there's no law against it. But both decisions are so personal. So deeply personal, no one else could ever understand. Yet the judgment thing stands in both scenarios. I judged Amy, in part, because the article points out that her parent does want to reconnect and has asked to. I guess my perception of estrangement has been that both people in the relationship don’t think it’s possible to have a relationship, otherwise there must be a path to resolution. Again, it doesn’t matter what I think. 

Well, that’s worth unpacking a little bit. Russel also interviewed Amy’s parents, who say they want to reconnect. But I think this brings up something that is not well understood about family estrangements in adulthood:  the person who has been cut off often will say they're willing “to do anything” to reconnect. But the truth is that even if they say they are, they're actually not. This is discussed in Karl Pillemer’s book, Fault Lines. They're not actually willing to do anything, because “anything” would require a sustained change in behavior. So, even if they try to move forward, if the person who's been cut off continues to be emotionally abusive or manipulative or whatever it was that caused the cutoff in the first place, then that person isn’t really willing to do “anything.” Because they either aren’t willing or aren’t able to do the one thing that could make the relationship possible.  So in the case of the parents in the New Yorker article, they say they want the relationship, but are they willing to change their behavior going forward? It's not clear.

This is an overtold narrative: that first people just blow up. And then they just give up. But that’s not how estrangement works. Cutoff happens as a result of a pattern of behavior.

Yeah, it's really dismissive of all of the thought and emotion and pressure that goes into making a decision like that. I think that's another parallel with abortion is the story we hear about people who choose abortion for reasons other than because there's something terribly wrong happening in the pregnancy. If it’s another reason, then the judgment is always, you know, the person seeking the abortion is too selfish or lazy or negligent, or something else that is their fault. They didn't plan enough. They weren't thoughtful enough. We judge that these decisions are just made lightly. 

Yes! The response to the decision is very telling. With estrangement, it’s stuff like,  “You’re just tossing aside your family!” as though the person choosing cutoff is just making some cavalier decision. Such similar rhetoric is used against pregnant people seeking abortion. “You’ll regret it,” and so on.  

When I was younger, and I would say I didn’t want kids, I would hear all the time, “Well, you'll change your mind when you're older. You'll see.” And all of that is just so dismissive of women as like individual humans, right? Who know their own mind. But we have this expectation placed on us that having children is something that we're meant to do, that we're innately good at. And if we don't want it, then there's either something wrong with us or we need an extremely good reason. That's actually what my Substack, Bad Mothers, is about.

People love to tell women what to do. Or what they’ll regret. “Have you thought about this?”

 [Monica laughs] “Oh, no! I never thought of that! Thank God I ran into you!”

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Hope you enjoyed Part 1 of our conversation. Let me know what you think in the comments! Part 2 is coming soon.

Maggie