Estrangement and the Lost Family Tree

I have been estranged from my family for almost a decade.  During that time, many life-altering decisions have been made that have shaped the person I presently am, and the life I have chosen to lead. One of the biggest events that has happened during my period of estrangement is that I now have children.  Children that my family don’t know exist and have never met.   It's such a loss to them because my children are wonderful, special, and the brightest spots in my life.

As my children have grown, I have known that the day would come when they would want to know more about their immediate and extended family members from my side of the family.  My husband is extremely close with his family, which makes the comparison to my lack of family contact all the more noticeable.  I’m ashamed to admit that previously, I failed to handle their questions well.  Distraction, avoidance, and changing the subject were my initial go-to methods, but over the past couple of years I have tried honesty in measured doses.  The hesitation about talking about my family and opening that door to the past is multifactorial.  One, it will inevitably lead to questions about the estrangement.  Painful questions with uncomfortable answers will reopen my semi-healed wounds and will cause my children to come face-to-face with the reality that sometimes the people that are supposed to love you unconditionally can hurt you so badly that the relationship is best not existing.  And secondly, and I’m embarrassed to admit this, there are many family members whose names and relationships to me I can’t recall.  My parents were not close to their family members as everyone was dispersed geographically, but also because my parents had difficulty maintaining a positive relationship with most of them for various reasons.  And so, we never had large family get togethers during holidays.  The 4 of us in our immediate family operated as a single unit, essentially isolated from the remainder of any family members.

Now that the years have passed, I struggle to recall names, place faces, or remember how we are related.  How am I supposed to explain that to my children?  I have purposely restricted myself from social media for the sole reason of making myself as undiscoverable as possible from any family members.  And while that has accomplished its intended purpose, it also means that I haven’t searched for any family members myself.  Out of desperation last year, I completed a genetic test for ancestry hoping that I would find extended family members covertly, but that didn’t pan out.  I have even gone so far as to contemplate hiring a private investigator to find out anything about long-lost relatives.  I struggle with embarrassment that this is where I am in my life.

Sometimes when I think about my life, it exists in two phases:  pre-estrangement and post-estrangement.  And as the years pass, the pre-estrangement phase becomes fuzzier, details are getting lost, and people and places that “should” be important no longer have significance.  As I grow older though, I want that lost knowledge.  I want to know that I belonged somewhere to a family that had long-standing roots.  Right now, if I were to draw our family tree, there would be a lot of gaps that I just can’t fill in.  And it makes me feel lost, disconnected, and alone. 

I write this so that anyone else experiencing these feelings knows that they are not alone.  It’s taken me many years to conclude that no contact is the right decision for me.  Now the question is whether I’m brave enough to restart my family tree rooted within myself and hope that future generations have the compassion to understand why.