COVID-19 has forced our attention to matters big and small. From big, penultimate issues like making meaning of our lives and facing our mortality. To “smaller” issues such as how robust our emergency savings accounts are. Or ways in which we’ve neglected or tended well to our health. Or family estrangement, and whether we need to reach back out to our families of origin.
This has, as far as I can tell, felt collectively hard for most of us.
And for some, in addition to all the other hard issues COVID-19 has brought to the forefront, there may also be a heightened awareness of another hard issue typically on the back burner of the mind: the family strain or estrangement you live with and the looming question of how and what to do with those relationships and the situation given the times.
Moving through the times of COVID-19 is a complex, multifaceted experience.
And if one facet of your experience has included feeling triggered by being estranged from (or strained with) your family and confused as to how to proceed, today’s post is meant to speak to you.
To support you, to see you, to provide you with tools, inquiries, and some words of comfort.
Major life matters may test the boundaries of our family estrangements.
COVID-19, much like other big and challenging life matters, brings our reality of family estrangement vividly back into our awareness.
Often, those who have estranged themselves from a parent, a sibling, a grandparent, or other family members, can go about their lives aware, of course, of the dull ache of the estrangement, but with the experience relatively normalized.
It hurts, yes, but, with time, there’s a certain acclimation to the hurt.
Normalcy to it, again, over time.
After the acute pain of the estrangement has passed, you get up, go to work, hang out with friends and your SO, cook dinner, watch Netflix, scroll through Instagram and fall asleep.
Getting up the next morning to do it all over again.
It’s not like your awareness of the strain and estrangement with your family of origin (or in-laws) escapes you, it’s not like you forget, but it’s also not at the very forefront of your attention as you move through everyday life.
But in certain times and with certain events, the dull ache becomes an acute pain again, triggered vividly back to the top of our mind.
I’ve written about this before but, in my personal and professional experience, many concrete and also abstract events can catalyze this: weddings, family-centered holidays, anniversaries, birthdays, funerals, new babies into the family.
These external, calendric and life stage events can force the reality of our situation back into our awareness, the dull ache becoming acute or at least more of a throb.
Abstract events, too, can force this same kind of shift in our awareness: aging, illness, catastrophes, and crises big and small, whether this happens to you or the other person, these more abstract events can likewise bring the family strain and estrangement we live with back into our attention.
