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Estrangement news from around the Internet

Folks, we’ve made it to Christmas Eve. As I shared a couple of weeks ago, I’m taking time off, beginning today. I’ll be back at full capacity on January 22. 2025!

Here at Estranged, you’ll continue to receive a post each week, including two guests posts in the new year I’m very excited to share with you. Meanwhile…

Here are some estrangement-related items to read, watch, and listen to.

Short listen

“Blocking Your Mom” from It’s Been a Minute podcast. I love host Brittany Luse so I was glad when a reader alerted me to this podcast’s existence by sharing this episode with me. Luse’s guests were a therapist who has conducted some past qualitative research on estrangement, and the writer Kui Mwai, who wrote a first-person essay for Vogue last spring about her estrangement from her dad.

This was a thoughtful conversation that was only about 20 minutes long (15 if you listen to podcasts at 1.5x speed! which I do.) Listen to it in the car on the way to holiday dinner! 😈

Long read

Going no-contact with MAGA parents by Amanda Marcotte. Marcotte was the first “big” blogger I ever heard of way back in the day. I’m glad to see she still rocks, because this article is a great survey that avoids many of the worst tropes of The Deep-Dive Estrangement article.¹ Despite the headline, Marcotte uses political differences only as a jumping-off point, then presents a much deeper piece about parental estrangement in adulthood.

Early on, she quotes a PRRI research poll from Dec. 13 of this year that finds that Democratic voters are five times more likely to have reported that they will be spending less time with certain family members because of their political views. Which is interesting!

The more important statistic from that report, though, I think, is that overall only 12% of American voters said that politics will affect how much time they spend with family this holiday season. Although 12% is significant, it’s far from evidencing a “widespread” trend, so I appreciated that Marcotte shared that finding, too. The other thing that’s interesting about that 12% is whether people categorize their estrangement as because of politics.

As Marcotte diligently reports, politics is rarely a standalone reason for estrangement. “I don't know anybody who's gone no-contact with their family just because of politics,” Marcotte quotes Ellie, one of several estranged adult children whom she interviewed.

Ellie’s point made me think of how many conservative parents have disowned their children because of their sexuality or gender identity. If those parents were asked in the PRRI survey, would they respond that they have cut off their children for “political” reasons? My gut says no. Parents who make these kinds of choices would probably cite their reasoning as moral or religious, not political. If I’m right, that means they would be underrepresented in that 12% number. (We need so, so much more data and research here!)

But let me just wildly speculate that religious conservatives cut off their non-conservative religious family members far at least as often as non-conservatives cut off their MAGA family members.

Short video

@sunnydaejones has a great Instagram reel that makes this point. Conservative parents have been exerting financial control and manipulation for a long time as a result of their political views differing from their adult children’s. So it’s interesting that when adult children go no-contact parents, the decision seems to garner so much scrutiny.

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What I liked about both Marcotte’s article and Luse’s podcast is that they pointed out that when adult children choose no-contact, it’s often (not always! but often) not a tactic of manipulation or control. In fact, adult children choose estrangement because they are releasing their attempts to control. The cutoff is necessary for them to let go of battling their parents. From Marcotte’s article:

“I was spending hours of my day, every day, just thinking about this argument we were having," Robert said, adding that he felt ill whenever he received emails from his parents. "It was pushing me into depression and honestly to the point where I was having suicidal thoughts," he said. He cut off contact, which he saw as an act of self-preservation.

Another quote from one of Marcotte’s interviewees: “‘If this is the type of toxic relationship you wouldn't tolerate from a romantic partner,’ then she also shouldn't endure it from a parent.” In her podcast, Brittany Luse also makes a parallel between adult children going no-contact and divorce.

And that! Is a whole other can of worms. I have an upcoming essay about whether comparing the choice of divorce with the choice of adult children to go no-contact is an apt comparison. I have thoughts.

So look for that after I get back in 2025.

For now, though, I’ll leave you with those links to chew on. Have a very good holiday week. “Rest and digest” if you can. Take a breath.

If you have kids or young children in your life, here’s a gift you can give them, from Janet Lansbury. Click the image to see the full slideshow.

janetlansbury

A post shared by @janetlansbury

XO,

Maggie

More by Maggie:

A Drop in the Dry Season, my debut poetry chapbook is for sale here. Thanks to everyone who has already purchased a copy.

1. See my Substack post, Anatomy of the Deep-Dive Estrangement Article.