I did a deep dive read accounts of adopted children in the 50s/60s Magdalen Laundry era.
Followed up by extensive reading of the more recent accounts of the now adult children born via gamete donation and/or surrogacy.
What hit hard was how much they had in common with me, in terms of grief and long term negative baggage to lug through life.
Our circumstances of distance from a parent came about very differently. But the source of pain appears located in very similar areas. Deprived of one parent. By the other.
I at least can reconcile that my alienating parent was in the turmoil of intense pain, betrayal and fear. A case of impulse poorly resisted, setting up a context where the gravity of the untruth meant the lie had to be perpetuating, or the consequences would be enormous. She didn’t do it to me on purpose, calmly, just to justify her wants as a priority over my needs. Whereas the accounts I read of those who are created to be alienated don’t have that.
It’s a very strange situation to find yourself in. Feeling lucky, after 30 years + of suicide ideation, that at least your parent didn’t do it to you on purpose, with a clear head.
Not all now adult children from different forms of alienating circumstances will have the same perspectives.
But I did notice that what quite a lot of us, despite the differing circumstances, had long maintained a “didn’t do me any harm” position.
Which dissolved decades later, when the pressure to maintain a happy defence of the parent was no match for the pressure of a wound left to fester until it’s infected too many chunks of your “soul”.
My remaining parent and I found out that “you can only be as happy as your least happy child” was true in our case. God knows we’ve both paid an insanely high price for a feeling based, knee jerk choice made when in turmoil. If I thought it had been done with a clear-ish head and time to think it over, I’m not sure the forgiveness that eventually came would have happened in the same time frame, or at all.