ORI’ll call you today to say hi how are you. You’ll call me in five days: it would be nice to have lunch together on Sunday, you tell me. We’re busy, sorry, maybe we’ll do it later. But then that “after” never comes. Indeed: you call me back when a month has passed and ask me why I disappeared, what happened. It happens that people disappear even among family membersHere you are.
And it happens to you and me, or rather to a daughter like Mara and her mother Lisa. Mara, 38, cut ties with Lisa five years ago after that invitation to lunch that was never accepted. «There were feelings of guilt but look around», he tells me, «do you know how many people live like this? I had to move away to save my family from his obsessive search for attention.”
Parents and children who no longer speak to each other, families who no one Kintsugi – the Japanese ceramic restoration technique that highlights fractures – would be able to repair. Broken. And it happens little by little. One day it’s for work, the next for tiredness, then for the organized trip, the children’s commitments, for that small resentment, that intrusive gesture, for depression, stress, or for a selfish need for lightness: we have a thousand excuses to walk away and realize, in the meantime, that deep down if we don’t feel we feel good anyway. Maybe better. The reasons? The real ones generally remain submerged: reading Daniele Novara’s latest book – I will not be your copy (Bur) -, they also have to deal with a precise educational script that they underwent as children and was replaced by adults, perhaps in a clumsy way. In any case they are infinite.
Family Relationships: No family is perfect
And then call them “distancing” chronicles. Or rather “estrangement”, to put it Lucy Blake, English psychologist who has been dealing only with this with his university research for years. He has written No family is perfect to study these realities so widespread in his country to the point that – according to two studies conducted on university students and adults, and published in the Journal of Marriage and Family – the 17 percent of the former have disowned at least one close relative and 12 percent of the latter no longer have contact with their children. But we are in Italy, where according to Istat, in twenty years childless couples will exceed those with children and already today we are the European country that registers the most singles (33.2 percent). In short, families will perhaps go out of fashion but perhaps not “familism”, that national concept according to which everything done in the name of the family unit is always good.
Absent fathers, a very loud silence
Mara’s story confirms a trend, but it is not the only one. The opposite can also happen: why doesn’t my father look for me anymore? You ask yourself. You write to her but she doesn’t reply, so you live with the question but not with the pain because as a child she convinced you that “pain doesn’t exist”. Go ahead. Until one day you write a book which is an essay on absence but also a personal “invention” of this father who preferred silence: it’s called Pain doesn’t exist (Mondadori) and the author is Ilaria Bernardini. «I think I have always harbored this book as a need. It’s not a diary, I just wondered what we do with these absent fathers and these gaps in life» he confesses.
Pain does not exist by Ilaria Bernardini, Mondadori180 pages, €18.50
«I wanted to talk about an absence that is actually a very strong presence and I wanted to do it without the rush of everyday life. When I realized that this silence was a place to explore, I sat down and found a world with which I began to dialogue. It happened during the lockdown » Ilaria says that in the book she weaved a family story through the stories of grandmothers, aunts, sisters, and her mother who never argued with her father. She needed the story to look for an explanation for her disappearance after her parents’ divorce, and she didn’t find it.
«I’ve always thought about meeting him, but it’s also true that I’ve been training all my life to make him appear in my thoughts and then make him disappear. Distance is now part of my DNA. It is a pattern of distancing and approaching that I also replicate with my son when he goes to the father from whom I am separated, for example, and with those I love in general. Me and my father in front? We will remain silent. I wouldn’t ask questions, I don’t even ask them in the book. In the months in which I was writing, however, I discovered that there are many people who live like me. I think it’s also a generational issue. The generation after mine has parents who manage their presence differently and even become friends. The way of love and presence is learned from childhood, here’s the truth »he concludes.
Family relationships, if distance saves
However, there is another truth, which is that we are all condemned to distances, if you think about it. In the family they then become always active centrifugal forces that everyone manages as they can. It will be released on April 4th Robot Dreamsan animated film by Pablo Berges that celebrates sharing and detachmentfeelings that always leave their mark.
And the history of music offers many examples, from Daddy by Coldplay a Letter to my father by Ermal Meta. Yet, beneath the signs there is much to analyze. «Every time you decide to break off family relationships, there is something that you couldn’t say and that you can’t talk about.. Then we move into action and make dramatic gestures: definitive distancing is one of these” he specifies Laura Pigozzipsychoanalyst and author of Toxic loves (Rizzoli). «There are personality disorders that lead to isolation due to which, for example, a parent moves away without realizing it. But it’s easier for a child to no longer want to talk to a parent. I have had as a patient someone who hadn’t called their mother for a year because her life in that silence was less chaotic, with the rules found by themselves and for themselves, and never received. The maternal minus causes as much damage as the maternal plus, little or too much love are the same thing »she adds.
Abandoning children, absent mothers
In any case, there are many adult children who burn ties with their mothers. They do it with the “abandoned” ones, that is, those who were not taken care of during childhood because they were dedicated to their career or something else, for example. “In these cases the anxiety with which one grows up, that of not counting for anything, ultimately pushes the former neglected child to abandon the adult. Or the daughters sever the connection with a woman incapable of being a grandmother, that is, to offer limited care, as its function would require, because it almost wants to replace the daughter who has become a mother. And that by acting like this, she is only doing harm. Not to mention how many manipulate children by painting the other parent as a negative person and create serious damage to the children’s growth” adds Pigozzi.
When words fail
In separations, estrangement can be used as a tool of retaliation or revenge. «Given that the breakdown of couple bonds is on the increase, the now hidden phenomenon will soon explode. Regardless of the relational impossibilities, which have been examined so far, the definitive cutting of contacts in the family is in fact the chasm where everything can be hidden. We run away because we are incapable of expressing our emotions, words are lacking. Here’s the thing. It is a relational difficulty so widespread that it deserves a specific term to indicate it, alexithymia. It is above all adults who have to deal with this, because children are ultimately able to “repair” their parents’ inability and absences by building in their minds a ghost of the adult who is better than the real figure but which still contributes to their psychological survival. For adults it is different. If you don’t face that “noisy” silence right away, you survive by suffering. I found myself reconciling many families, I believe that recovering is always the best thing. But there is a truth to deal with: when children no longer speak to their parents, the problem always depends on the parents. Or their maturity.”
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