Summer 2026

 

Welcome, welcome…

Here we both are, together-ish on two ends of a screen. Whatever meandering way you might have arrived here, a surge of gratitude goes out to you for your presence, your company. 

 

My name is Deborah S. Perron. Here I am, midlife, a cherisher of privacy who has abstained from all social media since its debut. Staking this Stuart-Little-sized parcel of real estate in the online world is my radical act. Because this blog will not consent to go unwritten.

 

My husband Noah and I are living what I have termed a co-infection of cutoff. Viewing my title page, you grasp that we are the cuttees. Over eight years ago, two of our adult children severed ties with Noah in an act that knocked life as we knew it off its axis. This event yielded an unclassifiable pain that, year one, left us both undone.

 

Over four years ago, a sister ten years my elder underwrote her adult child’s request to cut me out of family get-togethers. Noah’s and my membership, revoked.

 

Exclusion has been the Swiss Army Knife of my family's relational legacy traits. At holiday and milestone celebrations which are a vital part of the human experience, we are decreed unwelcome. In a plot doozy from our life, the parental distress of the first cutoff laid the groundwork for the second. 

 

Four lived years of this co-infection, at present. Heartache, rejection, loss and grief. At times surreal and always depleting. Deleterious to all dimensions of health.

 

Immaterial though it may be — to my family of origin or to my daughters — the grief inside my body does not distinguish between two separate administrative cases. I accept it as a given that these conditions are having a little talk with my longevity.

 

I have now spent these four years in thrall to the inner murmurings that, somehow, we deserved to be handled as throwaway relationships. Not once, but twice. Somehow deserved to be regarded as unworthy of repair process — whether it be that which we have futilely offered in the first rupture, or that which is withheld, in the second. 

 

The act of mending what is torn: denied, and denied.

In this one transient life of mine, I write on behalf of our dignity. Noah's and mine.

 

Also: I am heeding a moral imperative that some good arise from all of this. I am writing for you as well. You might be a fellow cuttee, be it by adult children or your family of origin, in which case I offer you kinship.

 

Or perhaps you are a therapist seeking a window onto lived experiences such as my own. I admit to those of you in the mental health field that there is no true sense of wholeness for me amid all these ragged tears.

 

I will not sanitize away the anger at what these eight years have cost us. Within this massive bramble, the anger has its rightful place.

 

You might be someone whose family has ostracized a family member, and though you fall short of being an upstander, you are troubled. You might also be someone who has severed a family member and who reads whatever you come by on this subject.

 

You might be a weaver of cloth who landed on my domain name. In which case my blog will be the wrong subject area, but maybe thematically relevant to your life. Weavers of cloth are no more inoculated against this devastating experience than others, as far as I know.

 

By way of orientation: 

The portrait of this life will emerge one semimonthly memoir-ish blog reflection at a time, though not through any strictures of linear chronology. I will take pains to not disorient you.

 

I have fictionalized all names. 

 

My posts are sorted into two collections:

Blue

Green

 

Within Blue, find the portrait of this life of family cutoff and parent-adult child estrangement. Of how relational rupture radiates its way through interwoven relationships.

 

Within Green, find short posts that are intended as breathers to Blue, both in the act of writing and in the act of reading. I am a native Mainer who returned to my piney place of origin after three decades away. Within a month of my relocation, my Unwelcome status got enacted at the Maine family hub.

 

In time I received this particular clarity: sometimes on the lowest of days, the source of comfort is a chipper groundhog. Or a catbird fledgling. Or an elderly black cherry tree. These Maine-centric posts belong here. Nothing in my life is not twined. 

 

View me here in all my humanity. Please.