Lighthouse

According to some imperfect calculations, it has been 3,107 days since my daughters *Eva and Chloe severed my husband Noah from their lives, rupturing mother-daughter relationships amid all the devastation. That was eight Christmases ago, eighteen daughter birthdays ago, one family pet death ago, one pandemic ago, four daughter graduations ago, four family deaths ago, and one wedding ago.

For the magnitude of pain and loss contained here, where vastness is the only possible setting, you and I must begin and end this visit alongside the northeast Atlantic.

My elder daughter Eva’s midwestern wedding, three years ago. The pain of not being present there — of having been unwelcome — inhabits every molecule of me. I accept that I will heal from it never.

Three years into parental heartbreak, Noah and I had relocated our life from the Midwest to my native Maine. In a stunning sequence shortly thereafter, I learned that via a niece-induced cutoff I was no longer welcome at family gatherings, and that Eva had announced her engagement on social media.

It took the twenty months leading up to her wedding date to figure out how I was going to endure this day. Two dear midwestern friends, serving the role of family here, flew to Maine to be of comfort, and we passed my daughter’s wedding day at the beach of my childhood. With mother Atlantic. An autumn day, misty and dove gray; an empty beach, aside from our presence. The rhythm of the surf, a palliative.

We walked those three miles ever so slowly…the childhood visions of my own mother and eldest sister Elaine, in cheerful beachwear circa 1980, were to be found all along the way. Here I was, turning to one of the most joy-filled settings of my Maine childhood as a broken mother. It was Mom and Elaine’s presence in this place that anchored me.

Every ordeal of parent-adult child estrangement bears its own signature maker’s mark (to subvert that term). I hope to distill certain insights that I have fought for over these three thousand days and, in the process, provide you with a first view of what has made this ordeal distinctly ours.

Out of college, I got married to Brent, an upbeat and gregarious fellow graduate with a scientific mind and a Pacific Northwest personal idiom. On account of certain commonalities within our sheltered upbringings, he had been utterly recognizable to me from the first moment. There was an at-home-ness to it all. Brent had an innate musical ability which I greatly admired, and which ended up traveling with his DNA.

Our daughters Eva and Chloe entered this world two years apart, on the two best days of my life. When they were newly three and one — an enterprising toddler and a baby with large soulful eyes — a blindsiding event took place. I was informed by Brent that he and I were not going to make it.

As for the option of working to overcome our individual suites of immaturity and maladaptive behaviors, our young marriage had no spokesperson in Brent. He closed up shop and took up with a fellow grad student, Carla, now his wife of decades. They seem well suited to one another.

It was twenty-ish years ago that my husband Noah and I united, bringing four children together under a midwestern bungalow roof: his two sons, my two daughters.

I’d like to introduce you to Noah. My husband grew up in an urban midwestern setting, where he shared a hardscrabble childhood with three younger brothers. Food scarcity at home led Noah to be territorial about food; mammalian. The boys’ formation took place under a harsh authoritarian stepfather, and the three living brothers recognize how this shaped their contours.

Noah’s plans for college derailed, and to this day he very much works with his hands (which is to say, with his brain). Aching and worn-out joints have no dominion over his degree of resolve. He is an autodidact with a restless mind. Rockhounding is a favorite pursuit.

Noah: rough-hewn. Notoriously blunt. When we were newly dating, I had experimented with an unpromising shade of purple eyeshadow. Across from me at the restaurant, Noah asked whether I was developing a stye. To this day, I giggle audibly at the recollection. His bluntness and total lack of artifice delight me. I realize this can be a niche taste, humor-wise.

He struggles mightily with impatience. When impatient, he will often bark. Writing his own report card, he marks this area Needs Improvement. With fat-tipped marker.

Noah’s version of generosity is to give when it pinches.

He does not know what a grudge is…the other version of his generosity.

Years ago, a new city ordinance permitted me the joy of keeping urban chickens; four sweet buff-colored hens. To my great distress, the most petite hen suffered a prolapse, which then motivated the others to peck away at her. My husband brought Ophelia to his bathtub and tended her on his own until she expired. Here in our Maine backyard, Noah rescued a porcupine afflicted with a pitiful infection.

When Eva was high school age, Noah (sapped after construction work) sacrificed rest so that she could practice her musical instrument at night. When my daughters spent weeknights at their other parental household, Eva needed a way to practice music somewhere else, lest she disturb her half-sibling’s bedtime. With Noah’s support, she returned to our place for nighttime practice sessions, within hearing range of Noah’s sleeping recliner.

These acts are not isolated illustrations. They are the way that Noah conducts his life. Via a terrible rupture, I have witnessed the flattening of Noah’s character to only his worst traits, nothing more.

Eight years ago, college-aged Eva invited me to meet up at a local coffee house. Over her beverage, she delivered the announcement that she and Chloe were severing Noah from their lives. The tone landed as clinical, almost. He was toxic…the damage between them was irreparable.

This event felt like nothing if not an ambush, a perception that doubled as soon as I comprehended that my daughters’ stepmother Carla, a person in the mental health field, had served as mentor and assistant coordinator.

In the course of the surreal interaction with Eva, certain terms were ventured. As long as I essentially bifurcated my world — a daughter world and a husband world, the one divorced from the other — I could proceed with a version of continuity amongst the three of us. For example, I could hypothetically continue to enjoy the blessing of my daughters’ presence on a family holiday as long as Noah was sent off premises.

This did not come to pass. In truth, my husband and I reeled — fell — remained fallen for months to come. I was punitively denied access to two general stadium seats at Eva’s college commencement, a setting of over 45,000 people, lest I include Noah, the cuttee.

Noah, viewing himself as a human throwaway, gradually sank to a frightening low. He couldn’t function at work, he dropped several pounds, he wept. His primary physician wanted him to be admitted for inpatient mental health care, but the copays were prohibitive. It was months before he stabilized.

The next five years, during which time I lost both of my parents as well as my one brother, took me right down to the marrow. After the time of my brother’s 2022 death, I entered into the current low-contact correspondence with my daughters, in which I send emails, cards, and gift money on special occasions. Including the wedding.

Noah and I both participated in clinician-guided self-examination; he signed on with a female therapist youthful enough to be in the general neighborhood of Eva and Chloe’s ages. An intentional choice, for the window onto her perspective. In her care, Noah made his way through the process of drafting an Amends letter.

It was painstaking on all levels. A self-doubting writer by nature, he sat with sunken posture and stared long into the screen, venturing a sentence followed by undoing most of it. He so wanted this letter to worthily bear the weight of his sorrow and remorse.

In his accountability, Noah wavered not. The work with the therapist had deepened some insights and yielded others. In the cast of Eva and Chloe’s parent figures, Noah alone was un-degreed. There was my bachelor’s, and then there were Brent and Carla’s doctoral degrees.

There was a certain teen-girl sniffiness towards his authority (and lack thereof), and for Noah, this cut deep. He had met sniffiness with harshness and jackassery. And he was not proud. It was in all humility that he asked Eva and Chloe to please take up his offer of amends.

With the therapist as guide, Noah had worked through the agony of Chloe’s assertion that he had at times violated her physical boundaries. As an illustration, I had been witness to an occasion when Noah, in a display of familiarity common to both our childhoods, gave Chloe a smack on the behind as she passed by.

We learned, in a moment of on-the-job training, that this was very offensive to Chloe. I, as mother, bear full responsibility for not having developed my own awareness. I too was behind the times. Butt smack-type physical familiarity needed to get retired, same as the Kool-Aid borne sugar intake and helmet-free bike rides of our childhood. Devastated that he had caused Chloe such immense discomfort, Noah longed to convey his remorse and bring healing to a ruptured family.

This blog exists because mending was denied.

Noah and I are pro-repair. It is the way we are living and the way we will die.

At the outset of this post, I foretold of insights. This heartbreaking rupture did not happen in a vacuum.

An African proverb has illuminated the truth that it takes a village. And indeed: it took an entire village to help raise this ordeal to its present dimensions. What follows are the words that I would say to some of these members, were I in actuality addressing them. Which I am not. Please let this serve as a window.

To my family of origin

Within months of Eva and Chloe’s severing of Noah, my daughters expressed via email that most of you had, for all purposes, disowned them. Emotional support is not a zero-sum game.

Supporting Noah and me did not need to come at the expense of supporting two twenty(ish)-year-olds in need of their people. The Perron family essentially punished Eva and Chloe for cutting Noah; I beg you to reflect on how ironic this is, given that our clan is cutoff central, as role models go.

It is my belief that, for the past eight years, my daughters have been in need of others’ compassionate willingness to serve as lanterns, or footbridges. The four of us, Eva and Chloe, Noah and I, are so very lost to one another. In a dark wood, oftentimes. There is a great need of lanterns.

To Carla and Brent

These past eight years, you have neither offered nor consented to a single dialogue with Noah and me. Five full years after Noah’s severing, he sent you, Carla, a brief note, written under the influence of an entire cask of courage, given that he grasped your mentorship surrounding this act of cutoff. The timing corresponded with his letter of Amends to Eva and Chloe.

You sent your reply: snappish, heartless. Thus squashing a vulnerable and courageous act of repair-seeking. What struck us above all was what has, in fact, always struck us about you. That you so often seem deeply invested in others’ worst possible motives.

When you search for the worst possible interpretation, you will find it. I have perceived the earmarks of binary thinking. I wonder whether this is a strange way for a mental health professional to move about the world.

The ways in which you have chosen to undergird this parent-adult child estrangement have landed anywhere on the dial from boundary-crossing (contacting my close friend to vilify me as a mother) to perhaps ethical overreach.

If you were to say that Eva and Chloe are your priorities, I believe you. Which is why I invite you to treat their mother and their mother’s husband as full human beings with basic dignity, worthy of consideration. In treating us unjustly, you do not do right by your stepdaughters. You do not do right by the future generation, whose biological grandmother I will be.

The insidious harm is exacting its toll. How long until the bill comes due for the next generation?

To Chloe’s (trauma-framework) therapist

You do not know me and I do not know you. But I perceive your intellectual fingerprints on this, the tragic state of things between my daughters and me. Chloe has expressed that I failed to protect her from Noah’s behavior. In these matters perception must carry the weight of fact. Hard-won insight.

Two years ago — six full years into this ordeal — a letter response from Chloe delivered a moment of floodlight-lit clarity. In this email, she made it known to me that I am categorized as an Unsafe mother. I had not protected her; thus I am unsafe. A mother whom she would be unable to hug. A ghost might be typing at this keyboard because the Deborah that I know died the day that she read of her un-hug-worthy condition as a mother.

You have placed your credentialed weight behind reducing me to a category, a Scarlet Letter. How does that serve Chloe?

Therapist, walk this walk with Noah and me for a month. Gain a sense of proportionality. Gather a sense of all the collateral damage that ought to be included in your future calculus. The pain of the rupture has a metastatic property.

When Noah got severed, the gouge affected an entire weaving — of which Chloe and her sister were part. Who are you serving? Chloe? Or your school of thought — in the name of her mental health?

My anger here is my gift to you. Please use it well — in service of your other Chloes, and their parents and families.

Reader, my personal archives reflect that I wrote letters to my daughters in 2018, 2022, 2023 and 2024. At present, in daughterly communications, I feel all written out. If today did in fact bring on a letter correspondence, here is what it would need to express.

Dear Eva and Chloe,

Forgive me. I would have liked for today's letter to offer you far more. Both this heartache and four years of Perron family cutoff have been drawing from the selfsame reservoir, and replenishment has not been so good.

Noah is so deeply sorry for words and actions which brought you such pain. I am so deeply sorry that I did not protect you in the way that you needed from me. Our offers of repair will be there for you, always.

Noah is my family too. This marks my eighth year of living in an untenable position. I remain unable to make him unwelcome in a huge swath of my life…so as to make me welcome in yours.

I can humbly offer the following counsel, seeing as it is what I had counselled my own self, seeking repair from the people who have wronged me, my family of origin.

Reject the behaviors.

Keep the humans.

Love always,

Mom

You and I conclude this visit together at a special lighthouse site on a peninsula in Bristol, Maine. Pemaquid Point, another sacred pin in the geography of my childhood. This is a place of extraordinary geology, where bands and folds of metamorphic rock pleat their way right to the open water.

I come here, too, for solace. I take comfort in the memories of childhood visits here with my own parents.

And I picture my current self, inside this functioning lighthouse. Waiting out these years, keeping vigil. Transmitting a very particular light to my very own faraway daughters, which says: I remain here for you.

I am not the one captaining the ship that may or may not bear you to this nearby harbor. I am not the one whose navigation will get you there, or not. That is beyond my control. All I can do is remain steadfast.

*All names are fictionalized