My Villain Origin Story

The origins of my villainy begin in early February 2020 when I drove to the other side of the state to stay with my parents for my mother’s birthday. This was a trip I did regularly, often alone. It felt like something of an escape, a place I could go and not feel the weight of everyday responsibilities. For the most part, I got along with my parents, though later I would see how much of that had to do with my people-pleasing tendencies and my eternal desire to be seen and accepted by my mother.

I have written the story of what happened the last night I saw her many times. I have told the story to therapists, to friends, and to other family members. For a long time, I believed I had to hold onto my version in order to justify the aftermath. Today I no longer believe that. The significant facts are these: my mother is an alcoholic and my stepfather is an enabler. I had a difficult childhood. I am the eldest daughter. During my last visit, my mother said some inexcusable and hurtful things to me while she was drunk. I left early. I got home in the afternoon.

As luck would have it, my husband moved out that evening. It wasn’t completely unexpected, but I was devastated, and having just left my judgmental mother after a night of being subjected to her drunken judgments, I burned with shame. Here the story expands, contracts, breaks down, gathers the threads of a global pandemic, sees me deep in depression and divorcing after sixteen years together.

As I dealt with my world falling apart and all the other bullshit, my mother continued to text and call me. I was still too wounded from her behavior and mortified by my separation to talk to her, but I tried to be thoughtful via text. When she’d call me—which was always after six pm, so always when she was drunk—I’d ignore it, then let her know that I wasn’t ready to talk but that I was okay. This wasn’t enough for her.

In late March, her insistence that I talk to her and get over what happened reached its peak, and I’d had enough. I didn’t want to be unkind or disrespectful. So I carefully crafted a text that explained how overwhelmed I was with everything. I hadn’t processed my hurt from her behavior on her birthday. I explained that her drinking was upsetting to me and that I didn’t know how to deal with it right now. I asked for time and space.

This is where my villain origin story really begins. It begins with me being honest and setting boundaries for the first time in my life. Which is, as you’ll find in many other estranged adult children’s stories, where it almost always begins.

My well-crafted, meticulous, boundary-setting-and-honest-but-still-restrained text message enraged her. I received a fiery, manipulative response designed to hit me where it hurt. She also reiterated the lie that we’d been told for decades, that her nighttime behaviors were side effects from medications she had to take at night. How dare I call her an alcoholic.

For the rest of the year, I alone managed the divorce and the sale of the house as well as sole responsibility for the household, children, and pets while my ex lived in our travel trailer outside of his buddy’s house. I bought a place on my own, moved in on my own, and navigated the pandemic while working full time. I also dealt with constant nagging from my stepdad.

There’s too much to say about my relationship to my stepdad prior to 2020. We were very close. I called him my dad. I excused his codependent and problematic behavior by considering him a selfless man who was trying to do the right thing by staying with and managing my mother. For a while, he could do no wrong in my eyes. It’s possible I would’ve kept believing that if he had responded differently. But he didn’t. He guilt-tripped and begged and insisted I make up with my mother. His manipulations got worse and worse, and I began to reevaluate how I saw him.

I never thought that I was on the verge of cutting them off for good. I thought I just needed some time and space and we’d return to “normal.” That summer, I decided I should just suck it up and make nice. I sent an email to both of them. I apologized for being distant and tried to explain how hard things had been over the past few months. I took responsibility for everything, offering to wipe the slate clean, and start fresh.

In response, my mother said she didn’t know how she’d ever forgive me. To be clear, what she needed to “forgive” me for was being distant. I was still responding to every text, being polite and kind, and saying the right thing. Though her response got to me, I decided to ignore it and keep trying. Soon, texts from her would become intentionally cruel. Once, she sent a picture and the birth details of a cousin’s new baby, but added, “It’s a shame you don’t care about your family.”

There is so much more I could say about the years-long process of becoming estranged. So many details I could provide, stories I could recount, difficult feelings I could dredge up. But the main thing is this: as I was being punished by my mother all those months, I was also in therapy. I’d been in therapy a lot as an adult, but I’d been doing deep work with my therapist since before my mother’s birthday.

In fact, shortly before the birthday incident, I’d been talking to my therapist about my biological dad, who I had a very strained relationship with. My mother’s second husband adopted me when I was eight or so, became abusive after, got divorced from my mom a few years after that, and wasn’t someone I had any contact with after their divorce.

I reconnected with my birth father on my own when I was eighteen, much to my mother’s dismay. And although I kept a relationship with him all through adulthood, I always blamed him for abandoning me, for all the terrible things my mother had told me he did. And, even though I knew it was illogical, I blamed him for letting me be adopted by a man who would abuse me.

But at some point, through the therapy and healing and the ways my life was changing post-divorce, everything I thought I knew about my relationship to my parents changed. The understanding slowly rolled over me, illuminating my past and the memories I’d tried to abandon. I’d never tried to understand the context of my adoption before. Suddenly, I couldn’t unsee the way the puzzle pieces fit together. I realized my mother had, at best, misled me and, at worst, lied about it all.

I also began to really think about the long-term effects of my childhood—particularly my teenage years—and how it all tied into my terrible marriage, incessant people-pleasing, low self-esteem, and mental health. For the first time ever, I allowed myself to acknowledge just how bad things had been. How being lost for most of my adult life wasn’t because I was broken or lazy. Essentially, because my mother and stepfather pushed and nagged and wouldn’t listen to me, give me space, or apologize, I was reckoning with my past and what I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself.

That’s what a great villain would say, right? “You made me this way.”

For a while I tried low contact. I sent my mom flowers for her birthday, cards for Mother’s Day. I blocked her number sometimes; sometimes I unblocked it. I moved a few states away. I tried, several times, to explain things to my stepdad. I tried to open up about what I was feeling and how the past had caught up to me. My explanations and my pleas were ignored. I was told to get over it, make up with my mother, move on, go back to how I had been. But once you change, once you really see the toxicity for what it is, there’s no way to go back. Even if I wanted to, I wouldn’t know how.

The years leading up to going fully no contact were agony. The guilt and the grief that I felt was horrific. Each holiday—the winter holiday season, their birthdays, my birthday, Mother’s and Father’s Day—reopened the wounds, and I’d spend up to a few weeks on either side of those dates in a deep depression. I continued therapy, prioritized my wellness, supported my kids, and built a new life in another state. And at Christmastime 2022, I decided to stop torturing myself. I sent one last email to my stepdad, very clearly laying out my feelings, what I’d learned about my adoption, and how I felt about their behavior the past few years. I told him I was blocking him and done. I haven’t heard a peep since. But knowing how that family works, I know that there’s plenty being said about me. Most families, but especially toxic ones, seem to tightly cling to the idea that “family is everything,” which seems to just mean that maintaining the perception of a cohesive family unit is the most important thing. Anyone who dares disrupt the illusion is the villain.

No one in my extended family has reached out to me in the past four years. My aunt once forwarded me info for a family get together and added a sentence telling me I had until summer to make things right with my mom, but that wasn’t outreach so much as a reminder to fall in line. My sister has called me selfish and uncaring. She has ignored every attempt I’ve made to explain myself.

If I were a comic book or movie villain, my voice would be my weapon. I would scream like a banshee. Being unheard and ignored for so many years has been a special kind of torture, and that is where my villainy would be borne from. In real life, I’m just the villain in my family’s story. This is another common feature in estrangement—the person who cuts contact, no matter their reasons, is considered the problem. Choosing not to engage with a family member who is abusive, toxic, or harmful is considered worse than setting boundaries. Then there are what’s known as the Missing Missing Reasons. It’s easy to find examples in estranged parent forums, the article highlighting this term suggests, where cut-off family members spin their own tales, conveniently leaving out key information in an effort to paint themselves as a victim. I’ve seen the Missing Missing Reasons referenced many times in estranged children forums, where the stories of other estranged adult children often seem uncannily similar to my own. If my estrangement isn’t blamed on mental illness or selfishness, I imagine my family’s story is full of missing missing reasons. Undoubtedly my mother’s alcoholism is never mentioned—that’s been an open secret for more than thirty years.

I do have sympathy for my mother, despite everything. I wish her well and hope that one day she’ll seek professional help. I’ll never share the details of my mother’s past because that’s not mine to tell, but I do recognize how our ancestral trauma has been passed down. But I am a cycle breaker, like many other estranged people—that’s the part of our villain origin stories the storytellers are leaving out, I’m sure.

Their stories also don’t include the happily ever after for me: I am a better parent, better partner, better friend, and better human because I am estranged. I am more myself than I ever was before. I have an entire family on my dad’s side that cares very much about me, and I have finally been able to get to know them and allow myself to experience their care. I have healed more since pushing send on that email in December 2022 than I did in the three years before that. The truth is, I never fit in with my mother’s family anyway. I’d been an outsider my whole life. Part of me regrets that I cannot maintain a relationship with my sister, but I was never able to be who she wanted me to be anyway.

Sometimes it’s hard to know there is a group of people who know me only as the bad guy, but it’s never enough to break me. After all, I’m the hero in my story.