Do you know why your child is estranged?

By Jonah A. Thorne III, author of To the Man I Called Father

I see stories and posts every day about estrangement — parents, mostly mothers, venting online about how awfully their children have treated them, children who no longer speak to them.

Many of these posts, and the groups they live in, focus on what the parents feel they are owed, or how ungrateful their children are for treating them this way.

I understand them, to a degree. I understand their pain — their deep sense of loss, their anger—their confusion.

What I don’t understand is the absence of accountability—the way entitlement, and often narcissism, permeate these posts to the core.

These are the people who raised these children. How can they not know why their children have gone silent?

I’m sure there are cases where a parent is genuinely at a loss. But not to this degree. Not this often.

My own son rarely speaks to us anymore. He is twenty-two years old, estranged from the only family he ever knew.

It is heartbreaking.

But it is not without reason.

Just like all of these parents of estranged children, I know the world my son grew up in.

Our house, like so many, was full of love and laughter. The best part of my day was walking through the door after work — to my wife, to my children.

Then, on a random Tuesday in early July, when my son was ten years old, he had a reaction to a routine prescription, one he had taken many times before.

We were in the children’s hospital for two days before the diagnosis came: Toxic Epidermal Necrolysis — TEN, for short.

I know what you’re thinking. We had never heard of it either. But there it was, right on the bottle — on every bottle of medication, in fact — written plainly for anyone to read: May cause severe rash.

Nothing is more frightening for a parent than to be handed a diagnosis in one breath and, in the next, told by the very same doctor not to look it up online.

My wife and I began taking shifts at the hospital — never leaving his side. It was hard on our twelve-year-old daughter, so she went to stay with my parents for the summer. It was a relief, at least, that she wouldn’t have to witness what was coming.

For nine weeks, every day after work, I relieved my wife so she could go home and rest.

My son’s eyelids had fused to his corneas — common in TEN —, and he could no longer see. I read to him every day so that he could hear my voice. Every night, I slept sitting up in a chair beside his hospital bed. I eventually came down with walking pneumonia.

A reaction to a medication fractured our family. My wife and I saw each other in passing, at shift change. We’d try to eat dinner together in the cafeteria before she ran home to take care of the dogs. My son lay in his bed, blind and wasting away, with little understanding of what had happened to him, or why. Not knowing how close to death he came. My daughter was three states away with her grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, trying to have a normal summer.

Getting my son home and healthy — getting my family back together — occupied every thought I had that summer.

It did happen, eventually. My son came home from the hospital. My daughter came home from my parents’ house. But it was never the same.

For the next four years, my son would undergo more than forty procedures to save his sight.

He was placed in a program called Homebound for the first year — he was so light-sensitive that he couldn’t leave the house without extremely dark glasses. When he was well enough to return to school, his new teacher confiscated his glasses on his first day back, doctor’s note or not. He was sent to the school nurse because the migraine was so intense.

When my wife picked him up from school, she asked where his glasses were. The glasses that were meant to protect his eyes from light and additional damage were sitting in the top drawer of his teacher’s desk.

They almost had to restrain my wife.

We pulled him out of public school permanently that day.

At thirteen years old, my son’s eyes were so bad and in so much pain that he begged us to have the right one removed.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even fathom it. All I could see was the regret my son would feel ten years later.

Instead, he was forced to endure procedure after procedure and years of feeling as if someone had dumped sand in his eyes.

We did everything any parent could do, and it eventually paid off. But those years were hard on him.

At around the four-year mark, my wife and I were finally glimpsing a light at the end of the tunnel. My son was fourteen; my daughter, sixteen. Our lives had been consumed by a medical crisis that was finally stable enough now that we could turn to other things—but those four years had taken a toll in ways we could not comprehend.

It’s funny how when you are deep in a crisis, you keep telling yourself, We just need to get to the other side—everything will get better.

We had seen the changes in our daughter. We didn’t understand them. We told ourselves she was seeking attention — that with so much of ours fixed on her brother’s illness, she was reaching for what little was left.

That was when we learned the horrible truth that would shake our world to its core. While our attention was on our son, my father had turned his attention on our daughter. He had been grooming and abusing her since she was eleven. Our medical crisis had become the door he used — and it had gone on for years.

We had been so close with my family. We spent weeks with them every year, visiting, vacationing, trusting— love and trust were the perfect cover for his crimes. In a million years, that thought would have never entered my mind.

The light at the end of our tunnel collapsed under the weight of my daughter’s disclosure.

The next five years would be spent locked in a fight for justice for our daughter — against one of the people who had meant the most to me in my life: my father. It divided the rest of the family, too. Many took his side. Within months of the disclosure, my wife, my children, and I lost nearly every relative we had ever loved.

My mother. My siblings. Aunts, uncles, nephews, nieces. All gone. My children lost the grandparents they adored, and the cousins who had been like brothers and sisters to them. The losses kept piling up, for all of us.

My children spent their entire teenage years inside a combination of medical and legal trauma. Their mother and I did everything we could to get through each day while living inside the same wreckage—nearly a decade in survival mode.

We were still neck-deep in the criminal trial when my son, just turned nineteen, came to us and told us he was moving out — not across town, but halfway across the country.

I remember thinking: I missed it. The window had closed. Our time was up.

All the moments I had promised myself I would make up to my children were gone — gone like their childhoods. Lost to trauma in the decade we could never get back.

My daughter eventually got justice — as much justice as any survivor of sexual abuse ever really gets. But the cost was steep, for all of us.

We were all robbed of time.

But my son was robbed of something the rest of us weren’t: closure. He didn’t get a verdict, or an ending. He just lost nearly everyone he ever knew and loved. And that loss settled over one of the most important stretches of his life.

I am estranged from my family because of what my father did — the truth they couldn’t face, the sides they took, or the fact that some decided to take no side.

I am estranged from my son because of the pain and suffering he bore in our presence for nearly a decade.

I reach out to him regularly, without fail—a note here, a call there. Weeks and months go by without a response. If he disappeared off the face of the earth tomorrow, I would never know.

We packed up his room recently, and I found books on CPTSD; even he recognizes the truth of what we have all been through.

Whenever I think about him, I want to wrap my arms around him and tell him how much I love him — that everything will be okay.

His absence will always be heartbreaking.

But I know the reason.

I stood by his hospital bed for every painful moment. I woke him up every two hours for three years to put medication in his eyes. By the time he felt well enough for us to do things together again, I was in a five-year legal battle for my daughter and justice—and lost in my own trauma.

Yes, I know the reason: our house, my wife, my daughter, and I are all reminders of the decade of pain he wants to put behind him, but mostly it’s because he felt so alone those last few years.

I don’t know if or when he will ever come back to us, but I am his father, so I painfully wait for his return.