Mom trauma, makeup, and the generational parent wars

Why adult children choose to go #nocontact

The other day I went to my friends M and A’s house so that M could do my makeup while, it turns out, we talked about all our respective family traumas.

Lynette first met M and A when she was walking Gus, then still a puppy, and he jumped straight into M’s lamp. M, who’d been lounging in the park, was into it, luckily, and she, Lynette and A (M’s partner, now her husband) became fast friends. “Gus knew,” M would say later.

M arrived in the UK in 2019 as a refugee newly granted asylum. She was born and raised in Saudi Arabia, where she spent her 20s throwing wild parties for other young women in her family’s building because they weren’t allowed to go out. She was barely allowed to host the parties at home, either, but M is an extraordinarily charming and persuasive person; she made it happen.

M told me that distance has helped her let go of anger towards her family, with whom she’s still in touch, despite the appalling level of abuse she suffered growing up. She knows that her parents were deeply damaged by trauma inherited from their own parents. She understands why they failed to keep her safe.

I’ve been estranged from my own mother for over a decade now, and I have no interest in seeing or speaking to her ever again. But talking to M, I started to wonder which of us is more at peace.