When Is it Appropriate to Go Low Contact?

The trauma of reducing trauma due to toxic family members.

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Dear Red Cabbage Heads,

When it is the beginning of a New Year we are often asked to think about being better and make ourselves a more glorified version of ourselves. But sometimes we need to look backwards not forwards, to pull up the walls of our boundaries and do things that don’t make us better, don’t move us forward to a happier place, but are the right thing to do. This is the tale of one such decision.

When is it the right time to go low contact, or no contact with toxic family members? I mean, obviously it’s very different for each situation but I’m going to regale you with my personal experience. If you’ve read some of my back catalog you probably noticed that I refer to my step mother as the stepwitch. And maybe, noticed a little bit of animosity towards both her and my father. This is how that happened.

Once upon a time I had a mother and a father, and despite my father being a tad cold and controlling he was well balanced by my mother. Once I married and had children my father mellowed, the decades of work my mother had put in taking hold when he held his first grandchild. We had 6 years of goodness. 3 grandchildren, many visits, and some rather good times.

There was a time when my father was hands on with the kids

There was a time when my father was hands on with the kids and I rejoiced in this new man, so different from the father I grew up with. He was gentle and soft with the kids, laughing, and accepting them as they were. This was pre my mother’s death, which unsurprisingly broke him for a while. My mother doted on the kids and spent so much time talking to them, playing with them, very definitely a hands on grandmother.

My mother with the kids

When she died suddenly when I was 35 and the kids were 6, 4, and nearly 2 it was obviously devastating. My father was heartbroken and seemed inconsolable; so when he moved an old girlfriend into the house 4 weeks after the funeral we were all very surprised and a little bit angry. She left her then husband, he obviously very recently widowed. We’d been making arrangements for him to come live with us during the week and visit the family home at the weekend to sort stuff out with us there (we lived only an hour and a bit away at that point) until he felt strong enough to live there alone. So we were incredibly shocked to realise what he’d been arranging behind our backs. Her adult kids, 6 of them, stopped talking to her. My siblings stopped talking to him.

We, though, didn’t cut off communication even though we wanted to. I had a frank discussion with R and we talked about how this would affect the kids (the only grandkids on both sides at that point) and decided that it would be too much for them to lose both grandparents so quickly, so we bit our tongues and ‘went with it’ for the children’s sake. I don’t think my siblings ever understood nor forgave us. For the first year it was strained but okay, she didn’t actively engage with the kids, saying she would wait for them to come to her, but the aura she gave off meant they rarely did, approaching her with caution. She judged them and they felt it. Then gradually her children began to talk to her again, and my siblings did too, and we were ousted on our ears. Our purpose fulfilled. And yes, I believe it was as cynical as that. We were useful up to a point to show that we supported and accepted them, and then when the others came round, especially her kids, we were shuffled out of view.

Eventually my brother had children, and these children were readily accepted whereas mine were ignored. Invites for Xmas etc always went to my brother and never to us. We were kept separate. At a family party we weren’t invited to, my sister actually asked the stepwitch why she treated my children so differently from my brothers - asked in front of my father, and she readily admitted it was because they knew my mother. He said nothing and the dye was set. My children didn’t/don’t even remember my mother. It’s all film clips, photos and my stories about her. The eldest had a vague memory that she was nice that was all.

Anyways, we toddled on, keeping in contact as we were duty bound to, constantly being told off for not doing it right, constantly being left out of things, the stepwitch tried to divide and conquer us siblings, telling us each different things all the time. And we kept going. We attended what we were invited to, I kept the phone calls and emails up, we sent presents and flowers and whiskey, and did all the things we were expected to do. And it made no difference. Our kids were always excluded.

I could moan on and on about individual instances, but I won’t today. The final nail in the coffin came when the kids were 11, 9, and 7 so only five years after my mother died. They were married by this point and living in a massive 6 bed house. We were in the Falklands at the time and needed to visit England for a week and I asked to stay with them. Apart from a haggle over there being ‘no room’ I managed to sweet talk them into it.

We arrived after an 18+ hour journey with only meagre airplane food all that time and were greeted lukewarmly. The kids were offered one cheesy snack pot each for their main dinner.

Just one. That was it. We ended up asking permission to get a pizza and cook that for them, which was met with annoyance at not being grateful enough for what they had been given. We spent the week trying to be out of the house as much as possible, only eating breakfast there, and trying to be as quiet and unobtrusive as possible. We did ask the kids to be polite and say goodnight etc. and that was when it happened. Completely independently of each other the eldest two came to me and said ‘*stepwitch* just views us as a side effect of being married to Grandpa.’ that was the 11 year old. Later I watched as the 9 year old went to give the stepwitch a goodnight hug and noticed her visibly flinch away. As I tucked them into bed they said ‘I don’t think *stepwitch* likes us, let alone loves us.’ And they were both right.

Up until then I’d tried to smooth it all over and keep a relationship going with my father at least, I’d taken the kids to see him etc, but his adamant refusal to stand up for me or my kids was his downfall really. From that visit onwards I asked them if they wanted to accompany me to visit, if they didn’t we either didn’t go or R stayed home, if they did it was normally because my brothers kids would also be there - these occasions were increasingly rare.

At one point I worked out my father hadn’t seen the kids, despite me asking for them to visit, and us never being invited there, for around 7 years. There are no pictures of my father with my kids from after a couple of years after mum died. My dad died when my son was 23.

I saved my kids from the trauma of seeing how badly they were treated. I was probably a little too late as by the time they said what they said they were already aware. I suppose I always hoped he, at least, would come around. He never did. But the trauma of having to cut contact so drastically hit me. The man I’d been scared of in childhood, the man who made teenage hood incredibly difficult, the man who finally softened as he aged and I hoped would finally connect with me, no longer existed for me. There was no chance at reconciliation, no chance whilst she lived. And then he died first.

I stayed in very low contact with him until his death. I didn’t ever go no contact for a few reasons. I needed to make sure she didn’t poison him too much against me as well, I refused to let her win and I wanted to make sure she didn’t steal the inheritance, the objects that were purely my mother’s and part of my childhood - something she promised would happen but when he died tried very hard to renege on. I learnt to be a grey rock around her, to not rise to the jibes, to try to listen and consider before answering with a carefully measured and neutral response. I found this very traumatic myself. I took that trauma to protect my kids.

I saw that my brother and his kids were, until my dad died, considered her grandkids too. But not mine. I saw that my father would visit my brother (passing near by my house on his way but not dropping in) and saw the photos where they were obviously getting on and chatting, and with the kids. That never happened with my kids.

Since his death, I’ve been over the times we had with him, tried to work out way he didn’t care. It’s still a work in progress. But I am completely sure I did the right thing to protect my kids. And they were the most important ones to protect.

Allegorical photo, me and my chicks.

So, that’s all folks, til next time….

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