Thank you for this thread, I found the comments from Fethiye58 very profound.
In brief I had my 61st birthday on Saturday which is another date in the yearly calendar for reflection.
When I was married to my first husband I had two children, he was bordering on being misogynistic and 4 weeks after having given birth I returned to work after each baby. As I did not have ANY family support my only option was to return to work full time on night shifts which left me working all night on a busy surgical trauma ward then looking after the children, home and everything else during the day.
This went on for 16 years when stress and serious sleep deprivation led me to have a massive mental breakdown which went untreated.
The long and the short of it was that my marriage broke down and an estrangement resulted with my son and daughter now aged 31 and 33. I have not seen them in many years and any small bits of information I have about them has come via social media. Indeed my daughter emigrated about 7 years ago without a word to me.
I have a great capacity for love, compassion and kindness and how things ever came to this I just don't know. Like all the people that find themselves here I have gone through the greatest amount of pain and anguish.
That said, I have become more detached and resilient, I am not now looking for any kind of reconciliation and I value myself more than to be walked over and passed over again by them.
I wish everyone who finds themselves here as much peace in their hearts as they can possibly find.