Thank you for the welcome and sorry not to respond sooner - this thread moves fast!
Marg, you asked me:
Just out of interest and this is not to judge, I am just interested, how do you broach the subject of non contact with your parents and/or in laws to your children and why they aren't seeing, in some cases, the whole side of their maternal and/or paternal family whichever the case
It's just my mother I'm NC with. My father passed away a long time ago. I'm on good terms with my ILs. Actually, reading through some of the other posts, I realise that at various times in the past it's she who has broken contact with me, so this is not a one-way street. I was thrown out of the family home in my teens for a breach of expectation I'd rather not describe directly because it might identify me to anyone who knows me in real life. But suffice to say, 40+ years on and as a mother myself, I can honestly say it was no reason even to be angry never mind to throw me out on to the street. It was just that she wanted me to do something different, something that more exactly matched the future she had imagined for me.
Over the years, my failure to meet her expectations has always been met with a period of estrangement, or something like it - perhaps a period of being very rude, dismissive and sniffy of me and my life, until I redeemed myself by doing what she wanted. At the time of our latest estrangement, which I regard as permanent, I had been her primary carer. She is now very elderly but lives 'independently' - except to say that her definition of independent involved me devoting every waking hour to meeting her needs, on top of work and having a family of my own. When I say she was making me ill, I mean physically, in that she was running me ragged, but also at a deep psychological level - I was 'heartsick', if you like. Nothing I was doing was good enough - or even just enough. I was at the end of my tether - a 50-year tether with a great deal of criticism, unrealistic expectation and nastiness attached to it. If I dared to not put her first even for a moment, she would hurl abuse down the phone at me, or to my face. Only in private, though, never in front of anyone else. The only time that stopped briefly was one day when I put the phone down on her. She cried and apologised (well, said she 'was sorry she seemed to have upset me so much'), demanded to know what she had done wrong, but apparently learned nothing from the episode, because everything went back to 'normal' for another two years after that. I suppose you could say I learned nothing too, because I let it. But standing up to a parent is really hard, especially when you've been trained from the earliest age to understand that the sky will fall down if you do. Eventually, I just couldn't take it any more. I told her some home truths about the way she was behaving and treating me, she asked me to leave her house (not my home), and I did. We haven't spoken since. I say I am NC with her because I know I will never see or speak to her again, but perhaps she would say she is NC with me.
To answer your question, Marg, my children (who are still at home but no longer small) have seen all of this unfold and know for themselves how awful it's been. Of course, you try to protect your children, but they know just how many times I have had to leave the house in a hurry because of an 'emergency' that turned out to be anything but. They have seen and heard her outbursts, and know how cruel her tongue can be. They know how she has played 'favourites' between my sister and me, and have felt how it feels when she tried to do the same with them. I haven't, in all honesty, had to say much to them, except that when they've asked about my own childhood, I've answered honestly (age-appropriately, obviously). They don't miss her. I understand she tells other family members she misses them, but she has made no effort to contact them. (She could, they are old enough, and I wouldn't intervene.)
What is harder than the children, who, sadly, have been privy to a lot of the madness, is just people generally, who seem to think it's awful to be not in contact with your mother. I feel that nobody knows what I've been through and that they shouldn't judge if they haven't been in my shoes. But explaining what it's been like in my shoes is very, very difficult when what I would be describing is a corrosive, attritive process, rather than a single, awful, precipitating event.
Anyway, I don't know if I am on the wrong thread perhaps. It seems as though most here are on the other side of the net. And yet, estrangement is a strange and difficult business whoever you are.
for you and thanks for your honest and touching posts.