My son wants nothing to do with me

I haven't seen my son for the last 13 years. He wrote to me and said he wanted nothing to do with me and felt nothing for me. I have written, left voice mail messages and e-mailed him. I don't blame him but it hurts so bad. I had a childhood of neglect and sexual abuse resulting in PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, and agoraphobia. I overcame the agoraphobia because the thought of being homebound forever scared me. But because I never received love and emotional support as a child, I had no idea how to be a mother. I made sure he was fed and clothed nicely and had all the new video games but I had no clue how to just be there for him. His father was an abusive alcoholic and verbally and physically abused me and I spent Eric's first 13 years just doing what I had to do to survive. In the 1970's no one knew of Battered Wife Syndrome. But my son paid a higher price than I did for my cowardice in not leaving sooner. My ex said he would kill me if I left and I believed him but if I could do it over I would leave long before I did and maybe I could have found someone to show me how to love and be a mother.

Eric and I had what I thought was a good relationship until a few years after his father committed suicide after shooting his 3rd wife. Then somehow all Eric's problems became my fault and while I freely admit I was not a good mother I wish he could see I did the best I could. I want so badly to talk with him and to know how he is doing, but he ignores me. He lives 150 miles away and I have no idea what his current address is or where he works.

I feel like a total failure as a mother and as a human being. I don't know what to do. All the therapists and psychiatrists I've seen have said not to live in the past but go on from today but how do you put something like this behind you?
I wish I had never been born or at the very least been born sterile so I couldn't mess up someone else's life like I obviously have done.

I searched this site for others like me but couldn't find any which is even more depressing since to me that says no one else has ever been such a worthless person. I remember reading somewhere that if you fail as a parent you've failed at life. That's me.

Can anyone please help me?

I do understand, I was never loved as a child. I don't think I was good enough mother something I regret bitterly.
I should have left my abusive 'husband' many years earlier.
My son does contact me now and again, but we are not close any more. He blames me for everything.
I wish I had never been born or at the very least been born sterile so I couldn't mess up someone else's life like I obviously have done.
I think this too.

Gee, I don't see how you can really put something like this behind you either. You seem really aware of what your limitations are/were and sorry for what happened. You've apologized to your son, right? What more can you do? I'm so sorry about your situation.

I found his current address and phone number by going on Peoplesmart. I've sent him an e-mail, text message and letter. I can do nothing more although I keep thinking I should. He's moved to the next state. He's an adult (at least chronologically) and I guess I have to concede he has the right to do whatever he thinks is best. Maybe I just feel sorry for myself because I was rejected by my original blood relatives when I was young and now the last living member of my immediate family is also rejecting me. I can only apologize so many times and I'm weary. If things happen in this life so we can grow and learn then I should be a freakin' genius by now shouldn't I?

My son has gone through periods where he refuses to speak to me for months at a time over something I have said or done. I don't usually know what it is, and he refuses to tell me. It breaks my heart. I know that feeling. Luckily, he has great love and admiration for his sister, who usually talks him out of these long periods of rejection.
It is quite possible that your son has PTSD as well and that just the thought of you triggers him. It could be that he just wants to leave his painful past behind him and not think of it again. Selfish, yes, but consider where he got half his genes...
If you know his address, you could look it up on Google Earth just to get a vague idea of how he's doing. Worry is always something that consumes me whenever my son goes "no contact". Seeing what kind of neighborhood he's living in might also give you some clues. Maybe he's living in a nice neighborhood, in which case you can't be a complete failure because you created and nurtured him to the best of your ability and he turned out OK. On the other hand, he could be living in some ghetto, strung out on drugs to escape his reality. In that case, the separation might be more because he doesn't want you to see that he's failing to cope in a functional way.
Blaming one's parents for one's difficulties is a normal part of being aged 15-26/7/8 for buys (they mature slower than girls in this area, too). The fact that he's taking it to extremes isn't surprising given the extreme environment you both lived in, but there will likely come a time (if drugs aren't interfering with his a ability to reason), that he'll come to see that you did the best you knew how with what you had to work with.
I am very sorry for your loss of all these years with him. You're not the only one, not by a long shot!

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He may have more of his father in him than you would care to believe.

Sorry you have this heartbreak to live with. A letter written on paper and sent via snail mail may have more impact than the emails have had. You could just say that you are sorry and leaving the door open, in case he changes his mind.

He may feel that you've never really taken responsibility. Abused kids don't want to hear, "I did the best I knew how." When you think about it, that's granting yourself a kind of absolution. Neither can you accept a relationship that requires you to beat up yourself for ever. People do make horrible mistakes. Your advisers may be right about how you can't live forever in the past.

I would say you're right about the PTSD. His father never touched him, but he never paid attention to him either. Not until after the divorce then suddenly he was Superdad. I doubt if Eric uses drugs unless it's a development that happened after the rift. He didn't drink, use drugs, or smoke when we had a relationship. Actually he was pretty tight with his money so I can't see him
wasting it on drugs. I did Google Earth his address and the house was in an area with trees and what looked like ranch homes. Certainly a decent area from what I could see. He has a Master's degree in mathematics but the last I talked to him he was working in a nursing home as a patient care tech. I suspect he, like me, has low self-esteem and that was a more comfortable job that the competition in his field. Thank you for the kind words. I really needed them.

I have apologized, owned it, and I do wish I could have a do-over. I apologized once again in the letter I sent this morning and offered to just listen without saying anything while he told me everything he felt. But if he won't even communicate, I have nowhere to go from here. I've told him I love him and I will be here but I can't keep reaching out and being rejected over and over. Is that cold? I don't want to make things worse, but I can't sleep and
cry a lot so I'm unsure where to turn. I've sent him a CD and books about mindfulness when he said he was tense all the time--too much interfering?
He no doubt just pitched them in the trash anyway. I guess I'm just one of those people destined to be clueless in life.

He does have a big say in this, and, ultimately, you have to respect that. It may be that you have exhausted all you could do to mend the breech between you and your son. I would advise that you do not set yourself up to be rejected over and over. Maybe you are making things worse by keeping up the advances toward your son. Sometimes people will be quicker to come around when we sort of leave them alone. Though you can't back off expecting that outcome.

At the very least, try to more and more shift your attention to what is going on in your own life that you can move forward on. Be very attentive to the relationships that you do have and cultivate them. If you don't have any, try to form them. You need people in your life.

I wonder if your son has someone in his life who is influencing him to reject you. That's not to say you could do much about that. But it might make things more comprehendable. If he has a spouse who dislikes you, that could be the real cause of the alienation right there.

My son has said to me, "Look how many lives you've created and destroyed with your selfish need for a companion who couldn't leave you." of course, he got this information from me when he asked me why we had so many kids if we didn't have the money to give them nice things... I was honest. I had my oldest in high school. Yes, on purpose. A girl from our school who came from a really poor family was getting all kinds of family attention and support because she was pregnant. I wanted my family to get behind me like that, but that wasn't what happened.
My boyfriend (who I really shouldn't have even still been with because head already cheated on me and hit me at least once before) became much more abusive emotionally. I caught him making out with a girl he had cheated with previously and I must have gone blank. Apparently I walked right out in front of someone's conversion van in rush-hour traffic (for a town of around 1400 at the time...), and it just so happened to be someone whose disabled daughter and young son I sat with regularly while she and the middle daughter participated in Girl Scouts with my mom. So she told on me.
Lots of conversations happened I think with people at school and at home, and I ended up locked up at Northwestern University Hospital after my mom took me on a fake mother/daughter bonding/acceptance outing to buy maternity clothes and a coat. I was already in the car. There wasn't really much I could do. I don't know what they ever found out in that place. The only words I recall from some family conference were "idealist" and "hopelessly optimistic". I don't know how long I was there. 2 or 3 weeks, maybe? It was actually a pretty cool place minus once manic goy's scary outbursts (looked an awful lot like my mom in a rage, only he was happy instead of angry but frightening and ~I didn't know the word for it then~ quite triggering!" the actually took people's blood back then and TESTED it for the missing elements doctor's just guess about today. Progress, huh? Oh well. I digress...
Agreeing to have an abortion, which I never actually had or even intended to have (though they nearly trapped me there, too) got me out of there pretty quick. Luckily, a sensitive nurse got me off the hook at the abortion appointment (that my dad drove me to) with an ultrasound date that showed that I was too far along. I think they had a 12-week cut-off time back then. Oddly, my due date was moved ahead a month, later on in the pregnancy. I think she knew I was being coerced. A guardian angel if ever one existed! Not only for my oldest, but for me as well, because I surely would have stopped functioning in any capacity and just starved until I died. It's true, what I told my second youngest... I did get pregnant on purpose because I needed someone in my life who would love me unconditionally, as I had never had that from a human being before. Everyone else's affections were performance-based and easily enough withheld if i failed to perform as expected. ESPECIALLY my mother's! This is the same trick my 20-year-old (the one who said I should have had less kids and stopped with him because I already had perfection) uses on me when he refuses to communicate with me in any way. I don't think he can help it. His biological father was found guilty of extreme and repeated mental, physical, and emotional cruelty toward me in the dial draft of our divorce. I took great comfort in that because it was the first sign of any "official" validation that what he was doing to me was wrong. And he had his parental rights revoked, permanently. That was a nice victory, but cut short when his parents (where they had to stay for their safety from his attacks on me and my family while this all got sorted out) stopped letting me have visitation or even speak to them on the phone because his stalking kept causing me to lose jobs which made it impossible for me to pay child support. That story is too long for this post.
The short of it is that I have given birth to six human beings: two sons from my first husband, a daughter and two sons from my second, but only got to fully raise 3, and one of those was birthed by my husband's ex... The 20-year-old was born into the relationship between my husband and myself, but conceived by ex#2. We were going to tell him after he knew the actually physiology of where babies come from. I mean, how do you explain genetics to a child too young to comprehend THAT? But he found out. At my mom's house (naturally) on a two-week summer visit. apparently she s all into genealogy that year no left some family tree work out. If you knew my other like I do, you'd find it very hard to believe that she left a task without putting everything away. Whether it is or it isn't, that incident feels like sabotage in my mind. I think my dear, sweet, but so painfully honest boy is hurt that we'd feel the need to have a child that was genetically ours together when we were already raising the ideal family together. And I'm pissed at my mother that he found out in a way that hurt him when he was alone with neither of us to talk to (he was 8). All he had was that "treasured" little brother. He really needs more therapy, too...
The point is, please PLEASE lean on the others of us who have experienced the loss of a living child, and we'll lean on you, too

If it's not rude to ask, what did you put I your correspondences with your son?
And how old is he? I was raised I the 70's! LOL does he have a family of his own that you know of? Tell me if I get too nosey. I am a little socially behind

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Oh my goodness, it's been nearly 9 months since I joined and finally I've found people who can truly understand what I'm feeling. The first sign of this is your statement about "if you are a failure as a parent you are a failure at life", well, as you can see, my name here is failureatlife and stems in large part from being a failure as a parent. The second sign is Faking sane's "loss of a living child" which is the reason I feel I'm a failure as a parent. In my case it is my daughter and my world was shattered three years ago this month. I'm thankful for finding you all at this time though because it is when all the anniversaries of unhappy events begin again. This year I also have added failures such as the 25th anniversary of a loveless marriage next week and the loss of my job two weeks after that. My job is being eliminated, it is mostly the only reason I leave my house and I need to be able to push myself to find another job.

My brother was beaten up and mocked verbally by my dad. For some reason now he blames my mom for everything, even though she's always the one who runs to his aid when he's stuck or needs money. Evetytime she says anything to him, however innocent, he starts to rail at her, telling her how bad she is as a person. My dad doesn't help him when he's stuck, mom does. But when he's back on his feet he sticks with dad and treats my mom like crap.
He cheered when my stepmom left my dad, like she was some horrible person. I know dad made her out to seem that way. It seems like he's loyal to his abusive dad who doesn't do squat for him and hates everybody else!

Hey don't you go saying you are the most worthless person on this forum, I assure you I am more worthless. I am not good enough to be in a marriage, you were, you were good enough to have a child and raise it. Me I just want to die. How pathetic is that. Ive tried to kill myself 8 times. Im a failure in life and a failure in death. You atleast reproduced, passed on your genes, you raised your son well enough that he can live on his own. Thats amazing, Im still dependent. And you believe in love, how precious

When he moved to Cincinnati, he became involved with a woman who claimed to be a witch and she didn't like me. It was after that involvement started that he started to become distant and then broke off contact with me after writing me a series of letters detailing how I ruined his life. They're no longer together but he hasn't changed his mind apparently. Before that we had an amicable relationship as far as I could tell.

I only told him again I was sorry and I missed him. I also told him I remembered how when he was at Miami of Ohio U he would come home and we would go to McD's and just talk for hours and then when he was in grad school in Kansas I would call on Sunday and we would talk for hours. I only ask that he let me know how he's doing. Personal contact is up to him. Eric
is now 44 (this month which is what started my current depressive episode). I don't know if he ever married. He always said he would never marry--probably because of his childhood. And even though I am now remarried for almost 30 years to a wonderful, kind, gentle man who doesn't drink at all and treated Eric like a son from the day he met him. He was 31 when he decided I wasn't a good mother--before that he seemed to like and respect me. The woman he got involved with at that time disliked me and I have always thought she instigated our trouble. But she's history now as far as I know. Oddly enough I am best friends with his girlfriend he had in KS even though she lives 1200 miles away we stay in touch regularly. We never have discussed him or their breakup and I told him so. I doubt that would bother him but perhaps it did. He has a history of treating women badly--first he spoils them, then he starts to be verbally abusive and they leave him. Again, I am sure it's his childhood and the fact that although his father spent the evenings after work in a bar finding other women and his weekends with his best friend getting drunk and riding his motorcycle, Eric always adored him and tried to copy his every mannerism. I was the one who took him to movies, out to eat every Friday evening, and played card games with him while he father chased other women, got drunk, then came home to throw things around and yell how worthless we were. If I even looked like I was going to protest that meant a punch or slap. Once he locked me out of the house in winter with no coat for hours. No use in the 1970's calling the police since they considered all that to be a "domestic matter". We lived in a very small town and the only policeman was also a drinking buddy of his so there would have been no point in calling him. He used to point his loaded 357 magnum at me when he was drunk. He shot his 3rd wife with a rifle when she left him. His second told me after she left him that he used to put the gun in her mouth when he was angry. So why would a child continue to think such a dark entity was worthy of emulation? I'll never understand that.

I'm sorry your son thinks you had no right to have other children. I do hope they are supportive of you. My father knew my much-older brother was sexually abusing me (from age 4 to 11) and he didn't stop it--he just called me a tramp, slut, and ***** when I was too young to even know what those words meant. I married my first husband to get out of the house but I was faithful and kept trying to make it work which was an exercise in futility. No one in my family ever showed any affection for each other. I have no memory of ever being held, hugged, or kissed. We were just 5 people who shared the same space in time. I am the only one alive now and the only one I miss is my mother and I was probably in my 30's before we forged a close relationship. She had no more clue how to be a mother than I did so I guess it goes from generation to generation if nothing happens to break the cycle.

I know how you feel. Before I started the thread, I though I was the only person that wasn't in a movie that was estranged from her child. I told only a few people in my life because I felt that I would be judged a horrible person. And I only have 3 friends and one lives 1200 miles away. One knew my ex and Eric as she was our neighbor and she knows what we lived with. The other isn't very empathetic to anyone so I don't talk of personal stuff much with her. If I mention something, she always knows someone who had the same thing and it was no big deal. But if you have a friend who will listen call and/or meet for lunch (even if it's a burger at McD's--it's getting out) and hopefully you'll feel better I, too, tend to crawl into a shell when I hurt but it never helps for long. Good luck with the job search. I always hated doing that.

I think he finds it safer to be in the abusers company, than in his path. Its a defense mechanism gone wrong. If he plays the part long enough, he will become the abuser.

If you feel your letters are not being read and its to painful to continue to send them, I'd suggest keeping a journal of the things in your life, thoughts, and feelings that your would like to tell him. I think it would help you by giving you a place to release all those feelings, and if he ever does come around and wants to try and reconnect, you can give him the journal, showing him that you never disconnected completely, whether he knew it or not, you were always thinking of him, and a dated journal, handwritten, is hard to dispute.

I'm the same way. I don't let people get close to me, because it will bring up the loaded question, "How many kids/grand kids do you have."
I am so fortunate to have just recently made contact with a cousin on my dad's side who went through almost exactly the same thing as me! She's much older than me(her dad was in his 20' when my dad was born), so she's got years more wisdom under her belt. What a great support to have found

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I'm really glad this topic got started. Now we all know we're not alone. We have each other!

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I am estranged from both my children. Long story short.....my ex husband was emotionally, psychologically, and financially abusive. He thought he was a great husband. The kids loved him. They despised me. I wish I had left years before I did. I apologized to both children for "whatever" I did. To this day I cannot figure out how I failed as a parent. My son disowned me right to my face. My daughter just one day stopped speaking to me. My son says he has no use for me. My daughter has told her dad if she sees me she will assault me. So, I feel at least some of your pain. But, I had to put it behind me. I could not bear the pain any more. It still saddens me. I have forgiven them. I have moved on (I think). But, it still pains me. You are not the only one who has been hurt by those who should have been supportive. Myself, I now have big issues with abandonment, rejection, betrayal. It hurts. I know.

I am going to come at this from the perspective of the child although I believe our situations are quite different perhaps my perspective can help.

Firstly I would like to say good on you for at least acknowledging your part and trying to apologize. It can't be easy.

My father was the emotionally and physically abusive one and I now haven't spoken to him in close to two years (in part because of his refusal to accept the damage he's done). A fact I actually feel guilty about.

Now my mother- In my case my mother is clearly "not all there" in the emotional stakes which has lead to its own tensions with her but in relating her to my father she may have been the one to step in when he got physical but it still comes down to the fact that he was carrying out this cruelty for 8 years before she actually did anything to put a stop to it. (Leaving.)

She saved me but she was also the one keeping me in that situation.

On top of that often the fights between my father and I began because I was trying to defend her. He would verbally abuse her and she would ignore it leading to me trying to protect her.

No child should have to feel they need to protect a parent. That's not how it's supposed to work.

Perhaps with his fathers death is has really come down to needing someone to blame and you're all that's left. Maybe he feels guilty that he was unable to help his father and needs someone to lash out at.

Or like someone else said maybe he just wants to cut that part of his life out. I know that's a feeling I get often and that a part of me would willing cut my mother from my life if she didn't need me.

I really hope everything works out for you and that at the very least you can find some peace. Good luck

pj4101,

You mentioned he wrote you letters saying what you did that hurt him. Did you just apologize or did you "validate" what he said as things that would hurt someone?

If your approach was "I am sorry, poor me for not being able to leave an abusive relationship etc.", he will not respond. And to be honest, he is showing you the only thing he did learn too, making sure he had necessities and learn how to thrive without close loving relationships. Think about it, do you really expect him to just "know" how to do something that was not really given to him, shown to him, instilled in him? Which parent offered him a role model? If he leaned toward his father "the tough guy", then all he did is try to find ways to "protect" his low self esteem, not to develop healthy self esteem.

You cannot turn back the clock. All you can do is at least be a parent now, but that is allowing yourself to validate "his" hurts without expecting him to validate your reasons for your mistakes, and that can be hard. What he needs from you is "validation" and what you need to do is say "yes, you grew up in a dysfunctional home, you were often abandoned emotionally, that was wrong for you, that was unfair to you". And stop there, don't add in the "but I didn't know, or any poor me's". He doesn't want to hear about "you", and he is consistently expressing that to you. He only wants to hear "his needs, what he needed and was not given", he doesn't need to hear excuses or that you need him to "love you" when you really never did that for him growing up.

I am sure you are genuinely "sorry" and remorseful and have realized your own short comings through therapy and time. You are not alone with being challenged the way you were either, as you can see, others have come forward to let you know that.

You need to forgive yourself for just not knowing too. It is certainly not easy to get away from an abuser either, it certainly sounds like your ex was unpredictable and dangerous.

It sounds like that relationship could have a lot to do with underming his connection to you. Maybe he just needs more time away from that woman.

I don't see where there's a lot you can do, other than just wait and hope. That must be awfully hard to do.