The death of an estranged parent can conjure complex feelings.

Even if you never planned to reconcile, once your estranged parent dies, the knowledge that there are no more chances can bring up unexpected feelings of sadness and grief.

The relationship is truly over. There is no longer any opportunity  for forgiveness and understanding. These feelings may also be mingled with relief, especially if the relationship was abusive.

Yet that parent still lives in your memories, good and bad, a ghost of your past. They may be gone, but the hurt, anger or rejection may resurface, along with memories of happier times, and sadness that these were lost.

If you can’t attend the funeral, it can leave you without a safe, supportive place to reconcile these feelings.

If you can attend, it can feel both healing and alienating, as you are mourning the death of your relationship with that parent, as well as the death of your parent.

I know this because my own father, from whom I was estranged for most of my adult life, died on 25 July 2022.

Our estrangement began from the moment of my birth. Although my sister and I grew up under the same roof, each was claimed by a warring parent. My father claimed my sister Juliana when she was born, and 14 months later, when I was born, my mother claimed me.

And although Juliana and I sat in a twin pusher, played together and were often dressed alike when we were young, our opposing allegiances meant we were trained to not trust each other.

The situation was normal, even if I wasn’t, as soon after a birth I developed a swelling in my right leg, later diagnosed as Milroy’s Disease, a rare form of congenital lymphoedema.

“Just tell them you were born that way,” my mother said, when people stared and whispered.

Growing up with Milroy’s disease is the B story in the book. Initially, I wasn’t going to include it. I’d spent my life hiding my “big leg”, as my mother called it. I wasn’t going to write about it.

But my editor, Brooklyn-based Australian author and developmental editor Virginia Lloyd, insisted it was a key part of the larger story. (More about this in a new post coming soon).

When my parent’s tumultuous marriage ended after 20 years, I went with Mum and my sister stayed in the family home with Dad. Six months later, my mother discovered a love letter from my father to her wealthy widowed sister.

Hurt and betrayed, my mother cut off all contact with the rest of the family. From then on it was The Monster and the Gigolo versus The Ma and the Kid, as she dubbed us all.

I didn’t see my sister for 20 years, and my cousins for 40 years. And although I tried to reconcile with my father four times – once every decade – he eventually wrote and ended our relationship in 2013.

According to Dr Kylie Allbias, a social worker and academic at the University of Newcastle, and author of Family Estrangement, A Matter of Perspective (Routledge, 2016), one-in-25 Australians will be estranged from family at any one time.

This is an eight per cent jump since the previous research in 2003, when a survey of 1215 Australians by Relationships Australia revealed that 17 per cent of respondents were estranged from at least one family member, most likely a sibling.

“Estrangement is often fuelled by conflicting perceptions of betrayal, family roles, secrets and abuse…” Dr Allbias said in a 2017 SBS interview.

Yet little is written about it. Shame and stigma prevent many estranged families from revealing or discussing the situation.

 I was a journalist for 33 years, yet I’ve only written twice, very briefly, about this issue from a personal perspective.

Instead, on Father’s Day, I remained silent when friends gushed about their fathers. I remained silent, too, when friends talked about shopping, going to movies or celebrating birthdays with their sisters. Despite my initial reunion with my sister after 20 years, our relationship remained cordial but not close, marred by our divided loyalties.

The book that changed everything

In lockdown, I sat down to finally write the story I’d been meaning to write all my life – about the dreadful betrayal of my mother.

But after I submitted my first attempts, my editor, Virginia suggested another angle.

“I think this is about the sisters,” she said.

“No,” I insisted.

It wasn’t about my sister. I couldn’t even tell my sister I was writing this book. She wouldn’t understand. After all, she was Dad’s ally.  

But in writing it, I discovered Virginia was right. The story wasn’t about my mother or my father – or the family war. It was about the sisters who were lost in the battle.

The book, when I finally completed it, brought Juliana and me together in a way our parents had never intended, nor could have imagined.

If my father had died two years earlier,  she would have been handling his funeral alone. I would not have been invited.

I wouldn’t have felt comfortable attending anyway, other than from curiosity about what other people might have said about him. I would, however, have fulfilled my mother’s wish, which was to “dance on his grave”

Instead, as I listened to the eulogies from other family members, I wept for my father and for all the things I never knew about him, including that one of his favourite songs was Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling  – a favourite  of mine.

You don’t need a kindle or an e-reader. CLEAVED is a PDF document that can be downloaded directly to your computer. $1 from every download will be donated to the leading international organisation for lymphatic research, the USA-based Lymphatic Education and Research Network, to fund its campaign to find a cure for lymphatic disease.

Here’s what others have said about Cleaved:

 “…a brave and candid memoir written with journalistic rigour and journalistic compassion…an extraordinary story, vividly told…” 

– Angela Savage, author Mother of Pearl, (Text Publishing, 2019)

https://angelasavage.wordpress.com/

“…The compassion of a fine writer with the ability to break destructive patterns and seek the truth…a candid and compelling read, laced with humour.”

– Hazel Edwards.

Hazel Edwards is best known for her children’s book There’s a Hippopotamus on Our Roof Eating Cake, reprinted annually since its publication in 1980. Hazel has published than 220 books for adults and children, fiction and non-fiction, on a diverse range of topics, including her own memoir about her literary life, Not Just a Piece of Cake – Being and Author (Brolga Publishing. Also available on AUDIBLE, Kobe, Booktopia, Scribd and Google Play)

https://hazeledwards.com/book/not-just-a-piece-of-cake-being-an-author/

Want to read more about my story? Contact me at jane.cafarella@gmail.com

Share your story.

Are you estranged from your father? How are you feeling this Father’s Day? Leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.

The USA Supreme Court decision to overrule Roe v. Wade, eliminating the constitutional right to abortion after almost 50 years in a 5-4 ruling, has divided the nation and is a dark day for women everywhere – not least for the swiftness and eagerness with which the ruling was taken up by those states which instigated “trigger” laws.

One woman, who had made an appointment for an abortion, was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “When I went to bed, I had my appointment and everything was set. And then today it’s like pre-1973.”

As NBC News noted, “Never before has the court granted, and then taken away, a widely recognised constitutional right.”

Power

The issue of abortion has never been about preserving lives. It has always been about preserving power over women and their lives. History has shown this to be a preoccupation of men throughout the ages.

In her 1992 ground-breaking book The War Against Women, Marilyn French said that “the drive to control female reproduction is a silent agenda in every level of male activity”.

As French noted then: “The drive to criminalise abortion is unremitting. The criminalising campaign forces women to fight the battle over and over again, when they would prefer to spend their energies on other struggles for women’s rights.”

“No treatment of a man’s body, including castration and fatherhood burdens him equally for the rest of his life; he does not bear children for whom he will be responsible for decades. Men can therefore compartmentalise their experience in a way that women cannot.”

Backlash

Re-reading French’s book three decades later in the current political climate is a sobering reminder of how the war against women is never over, as each new generation of women faces a backlash for the gains of the previous generation.

In that same year, (1992), as the editor and reporter for the Accent pages of The Age newspaper, I interviewed Susan Faludi about her new book, Backlash – The Undeclared War Against Women (1992 Chatto and Windus).

Faludi described that particular backlash as “an insidious and invasive campaign against equal rights for women, and particularly against the gains women in Western countries have made since the 70s”.

Back then, Faludi wrote that women were told the fight for equal rights was both over and unnecessary, and that the price for women had been loneliness, burnout and infertility.

Backlash proponents drew together these contradictory messages to conclude that women had been enslaved by their own liberation. But, as Faludi, said, it was their continuing lack of equality that enslaved them.

The solution, she said, was for women to mobilise.

“The trick now is to translate that anger into political action by capitalising on demographic strength – which is quite phenomenal. Women in most countries are more than 50 per cent of the population. In areas where we have won our battles, it’s because we have banded together,” she said.

But women are not a homogeneous group, and as the Supreme Court decision has shown, they don’t always share the same views (although they always share the consequences of such decisions) so mobilisation is not as easy as it sounds.

As The New York Times reports, “Demonstrations continued to roil across the country” and Americans are “steeling themselves for a fight – whether for further restrictions OR to elect politicians in the mid-term elections who favour abortion rights.”

Still, as Susan Faludi would be pleased to note pro-choice women in America are banding together, and with the support of the Western States, which have vowed to “fight like hell to protect our rights and values”.

In a rallying tweet Cori Bush, a Missouri Congresswoman who spoke out about her own abortion as a teenager, declared:. “Abortion care IS health care. It was so before this. And it will remain so after this. We don’t care what a far right, extremist supreme court that is in a crisis of legitimacy says. Your racist, sexist, classist ruling, won’t stop us from accessing the care we need.”

I hope she’s right.

Marilyn French’s last line in The War Against Women, now feels sadly familiar and circular: “After millennia of male war against them, women are fighting back on every front.”

Still.