Is it normal to not feel love for your family?
She cut contact with her family four years ago. She thought distance would make her miss them.
It didn’t.
For most of her life she had blamed herself for why her mother was hard to love. She carried it into adulthood, into marriage, into the hospital room where she met her daughter for the first time. Her mother came to see the baby. She made a joke. Everyone heard it. No one said anything. The woman had just survived fifty-five hours of labour. She looked around the room for someone to step in. No one did.
That is when the invisible part became unbearable.
We learn early who we are allowed to become in a family. The child who apologises for existing. The one who smooths every tension. Those roles do not dissolve when we grow up. They follow us into the rooms where we hope things will be different this time.
Her daughter cried constantly. Nothing worked. Her mother told her she deserved it. Her husband did not tell his family to step back. She had gone from being the invisible child to the invisible wife. Now she had a baby who needed her and no energy left for people who had never learned to see her.
We think love is supposed to override everything. That blood makes up for years of being unseen. We do not say out loud what happens when it does not. When the people who raised us show up after we give birth and make us feel smaller. When a husband keeps the peace because it has always mattered more than keeping us whole.
She stayed in the marriage longer than she should have. She knew that part was hers. But no one had ever stood up for her. Not her mother. Not her husband. Not the people in the room who heard the joke and said nothing.
Four years ago she stopped waiting for them to.
Is it relief or is it grief? The answer is it can be both. She does not miss them. She thought that would feel like freedom. Mostly it feels like proof that the version of family she was taught to want was never going to include a version of her that took up space.
The estrangement was not a single rupture. It was two decades of low contact that kept everyone comfortable, and four years of none that finally let her breathe. The hardest part was realising how little changed. They did not reach out. They did not ask why. They just let her go, the same way they had let her stay invisible for years.
We are taught that family is the people who will always show up. What do we do when they showed up and still managed to miss us entirely?
Sit with:
Who are we trying to love the way we were told to, instead of the way it actually feels?
What would it mean to stop waiting for someone to finally see us?
If the love we were supposed to feel never arrived, where does that leave us?