REV. DR. JOHN KILLINGER
Dr. John Killinger, noted author, minister, and professor, has pastored eight churches, including the First Congregational Church of Los Angeles and Marble Collegiate Church in New York City, and has taught at such major universities as Vanderbilt, Princeton, and Chicago. His wife Anne was the author of A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families, the book that spawned the alienated parents and grandparent movement in America. He himself has written more than 70 books, including three volumes of From Poppy with Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See. He has appeared on numerous radio and TV programs across the U.S., and served for many years as a special seminar leader for chaplains in all branches of the American Armed Forces.
LETTERS TO OUR ESTRANGED GRANDCHILDREN
by Rev. Dr. John Killinger
One of the side-benefits of publishing a book is the people who find the book helpful or enjoyable and write you to tell you so. A few days ago I had a long letter from an attorney in Australia who wanted to tell me how much my book Outgrowing Church means to him. Apparently he has read it over and over, and finds that it helped him by articulating a lot of his as yet unresolved thoughts about church-going. Since receiving that letter, I received a Facebook page from someone with a photo of two books lying on a desktop. One was an open Bible and the other was my book Day by Day With Jesus. “My reading every day for the last 20 years,” said an inscription with the photo.
You can imagine how this makes an author feel. Authors don’t make much money. Most of us don’t, at least. I read somewhere that the average author in America earns maybe five dollars a day from his work as a writer. But the feelings we have, when people write us to say how much our books mean to them, are priceless. They’re way beyond money.
My most gratifying comments from readers these days are mostly from people who have read one or more volumes of my trilogy called From Poppy, With Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See. I began writing these letters because my wife and I were not able to see and be with our grandchildren, who lived only thirty minutes away from us. We had gotten to know our oldest grandchild, Ellie, until she was two years old and her mother dropped the curtain on us and didn’t want us to visit any more. I’m not sure why she did this, except that we had developed such a strong rapport with Ellie and she loved us so obviously that I think her mother wanted to scotch all this before the same rapport developed between us and the next child, who had just been born.
I don’t know why young mothers or fathers do this. It is obvious that many of them do, which accounts for the existence of two major organizations or movements in this country, Alienated Grandparents Anonymous, based in Naples, Florida, and Family Access, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, which together must have thousands of constituents, mostly grandparents who are totally in the dark about why their beloved children would permit their mates to stop all communication between them and their grandchildren. There is a phrase, “grandparent abuse,” that has entered common usage today because of how widespread the phenomenon is.
After the first volume of From Poppy, With Love appeared (“poppy,” incidentally was our first grandchild’s favorite name for me), I had a letter from a man named Jim who said he liked what I wrote about love in one of the letters. He cited the following passage:
I have lived a long time, my little ones, and seen and done many things.
I have read the great philosophers and walked in the steps of the world’s
great religious figures. In all of this, I have never found anything to match
in importance and consequence the simple act of loving.
Think of it in your own experience—how you’ve felt when you’ve
seen photos of mothers in war-torn villages clutching their babies to
protect them from harm, or watched two elderly persons hobbling into
a hospital hand-in-hand, knowing one of them is about to be left there
in the doctors’ care, and realizing what a wrenching experience it is
for both of them, the one leaving as well as the one being left.
Consider what love has meant in your own family relationships
—how you felt when your father or mother rendered you some
important service at what you knew was a sacrifice to themselves,
or when a sister or al brother reached out a sympathetic hand when
you were hurt, or even when a little dog came and licked your face
while you were crying over some injury or disappointment.
Love is beyond price, my dears. Nations have gone to war for it.
Scientists have worked in vain to reproduce it chemically. Even its
most ardent critics have been contemptuous or scornful only
because they wanted it so much and knew that they somehow lacked
and would never have it.
It is love, dear ones, that impels me to write these letters to you.
Each day, when I sit down to scribble a few lines, my heart is
wrenched again at the thought of your absence, and of the impenetrable
barrier that stands between us. Yet I can endure the wrenching because
I am concerned about your legacy—about your knowing at least a
little bit about the hearts of your grandparents who cannot see you,
cannot visit you in your schools or enjoy your picnics or see you in your prom outfits or participate in your daily hurts and laughter.
“That passage alone,” wrote Jim, “was worth the price of the book. How true it rings, and how eloquently it expresses my own feelings when I think about my two grandchildren that my son and his wife won’t let me see.”
“I’m glad you told that story,” said a correspondent named Frank, “about how your son’s first wife was so mean as she left him, stealing things that were his and leaving him broken-hearted until he met the woman who became the mother of his children. Kids often worry about what happened before their parents met, and you’ve helped them to understand that their dad wasn’t at fault.”
“I cried after I read it,” said a woman named Suzanne in response to a passage in the third volume of From Poppy, With Love, which contains the letters I wrote while the children’s grandmother was dying of cancer. I told how I had set up a potty chair beside the bed so Anne wouldn’t have to struggle to reach the bathroom, and how, one night, she had trouble adjusting to the chair and became short-tempered with me. I had reminded Anne that I was only trying to help her, and I pulled the covers up around her after she had returned to bed, then kissed her gently on the cheek before returning to my own side. I told the children that it was actually a beautiful experience, and the aura of it lingered through the night and was actually in the room when we awoke the next morning.
“I hope,” I wrote, “each of you will be as fortunate in finding a soul-mate as Grammy and I were. Our lives would be unthinkable as separate entities. Whatever we’ve done or become is attributable to the fact that we found love early and have stayed with it all our lives.
“We can do no more than wish the same enduring love and fidelity to each of you.”
“I didn’t just cry,” wrote Suzanne, “I bawled out loud. I thought how sad it was that those children didn’t even get to be with their grandmother during that time, and that you had to face your wife’s death without them at your side. I intend to copy those paragraphs and send them to my own grandchildren, whether their parents let them see them or not.”
I am very grateful for sentiments like that. They justify any effort I went to in writing the book. And I always say a prayer for the people who have taken the time to write or email me the way Jim and Frank and Suzanne did. They are going through pain in their own lives or they wouldn’t have been reading my books in the first place.
I’m not sure if writing those letters for my grandchildren to read years from now was the best way to go. But I didn’t want to put the children in the line of fire between their parents and us, so that they’d have to grow up with a strong awareness of the tensions between us. So the letters have been my best approach to a solution to the problem. I hope they’ll read the books someday, and that the books will help to make up to them some of what they missed by not spending time with their grandparents and feeling our arms around them.
It’s too late for Anne, but maybe there will still be time for me to get to know them and for us to be together a lot. I know their parents will probably raise hell if they find out the kids have the books and are reading them, but by then the kids will have developed their personalities to the point where that might not matter so much. And maybe reading the letters will allay the feelings about their grandparents that have probably been jaundiced by their parents.
A year or two ago, I had a phone call from a woman in Florida who identified herself as “a former girl friend” of my grandchildren’s father, who moved to the Naples area after divorcing his wife. She was aware of my situation, she said, because she babysat for my grandchildren whenever the parents brought them to Florida for a visit. She assured me they were great kids, and she was sorry my wife and I had been treated the way we were treated.
Finally, after two or three phone calls between us, I asked this woman what our son and his wife told their children about why they couldn’t see their father’s parents, who lived so close to them. “Oh, that’s easy,” she said. “They tell them you’re evil.”
I had to admire their ingenuity. I suppose, if I had been kept from seeing my grandparents and my parents gave that as a reason for our never meeting, I would have accepted that, at least in my younger years. It isn’t the sort of thing a child would be inclined to question.
But I wonder what my grandchildren will think when they have read the volumes of From Poppy, With Love. Will they realize that their grandparents weren’t evil at all, and that their parents only told them that in order to stifle any questions they might ask about us? And will they resent their parents for misleading them that way? Only time will tell. I don’t want them to really be angry with their parents for misrepresenting their grandparents the way they have. But I do hope and pray that that misrepresentation of their grandparents will be vanquished from their minds and hearts, and that there may still be a valid relationship between us.
MY ALIENATION EXPERIENCE
by Rev. Dr. John Killinger
Retired minister, professor, author of more than 80 books
I am not any kind of “expert” on parental or grandparental alienation because I studied it in school or have worked with it as a social problem for years, though I do try to facilitate a group of alienated grandparents in a local counseling center. If I have any real expertise in the subject, it is because I have experienced alienation in my own family for the past 15 years.
Ours was an unusually close family, and everybody was very happy with it. I was a graduate school teacher during most of our two sons’ upbringing, and had the freedom to spend more time with them than most fathers do. Three times during those heady, wonderful years, we spent a year abroad on research grants, living once in Paris, France, and twice in Oxford, England, and those were extraordinarily special family times, when we all felt especially close to one another and enjoyed days on end together in exploration and discovery. We all thought we were inordinately blessed as a family.
Even after our sons graduated from college, we all continued to be inordinately close, sharing our lives as fully as possible while living in different cities. When our sons married, I performed the services, as I am an ordained clergyman, and my wife and I made special efforts to make our new daughters-in-law feel not only welcomed into our family but loved and appreciated as well.
Then our youngest son and his wife divorced, and we were as devastated as he was. We understood his loneliness and lostness at this time, and responded to his plea to move closer to him by relocating to a home only 20 or 30 minutes away from him, so that he was able to join us for dinner several times a week and we were happy to be there for him as he pursued his career and began the dating ritual again.
We applauded when he became engaged, and looked forward to having another woman in our lives again. When they asked me to do the honors at their wedding, I was happy to be asked, and spent some time writing a special service that I thought related not only to each of them personally but to the unusual place where they had elected to have their wedding, Washington D.C.’s Museum for Women in the Arts.
Then came the first salvo from our son’s intended: She didn’t like the service, as she thought it wasn’t “personal” enough. She asked someone else to perform the wedding service. Then she didn’t like the wedding dress my wife bought because my wife did not buy it from the shop where she had obtained her own wedding gown—a specialty shop where the prices of gowns ranged from $5,000 to $10,000. She displayed anger about our choice of a place to have the rehearsal dinner, and about the fact that we weren’t eager to invite 300 people to a rehearsal dinner held at her own forbiddingly expensive country club. She and our son refused to attend our fiftieth wedding anniversary party because they were “too busy,” though they were both teachers and the party was scheduled for a week after their school year was over. Then it was another thing and another, until in the end we felt quite frozen out of their wedding and offered our excuses for not attending.
The rupture was complete. Our son didn’t want to talk to us, as humbly or repeatedly as we tried to solicit his favor. There was no communication between us for two years.
Then I had lung surgery that went awry. The surgeon was supposed to excise a bit of tissue from my lung to test it for something, and then, for some reason that remains a mystery, removed most of the lung, shocking my system and producing pulmonary embolisms that almost took my life. I asked my wife to telephone our alienated son and tell him I loved him and I might die that night. Actually, I was given only a 40 percent chance of surviving till morning.
Two days later, my son and his wife appeared in my hospital room in Detroit, having flown a thousand miles to get there. But we got the impression that their appearance was more about them than it was about me, because our son’s wife was very dramatically pregnant and they were very proud and happy about it.
I survived—obviously—and, on the strength of their visit to see me, we were able to cobble together something of a relationship as a family. Mainly, we became the always dependable babysitters after the child, a granddaughter, was born. Regardless of the pressure it put on our own schedules, we were always available, even at half an hour’s notice, to be at their home to look after little Ellie. Admittedly, we were usually treated as mere factotums who were allowed to see Ellie only because we were useful, but we were willing to continue living with their constant put-downs and indignities in order to enjoy our granddaughter.
Unfortunately, I suppose, she also enjoyed her grandparents, which didn’t set all that well with her mother and perhaps even her father, and when a second child, another girl, was born two years later, we were immediately frozen out of the relationship and no longer allowed to see either child. The mother had decided to nip everything in the bud, and cashiered us in favor of professional sitters.
We tried to see our son and his wife and talk about whatever seemed to be bothering them, and finally got an agreement to meet at a restaurant near their home for lunch and conversation. He showed up a few minutes late and she didn’t come at all. We kept asking our son, “Son, what have we done?” His answer was the same every time we asked: “You know, you know.” I don’t think he could summon a single answer, so he kept reflecting the matter back upon us. He left that meeting in unaccountable anger, there having been no excuse for it, slamming down money on the table to pay for his uneaten meal and exiting with unexplained haste.
That was thirteen years ago, or more. Ellie passed her fifteenth birthday in late December. Our son and his wife had two more children whom I’ve never seen at all, plus Ellie and Chloe, Chloe being the child born two years after Ellie, whom we never got to know at all.
During that thirteen-year-period, I made two or three attempts at some kind of intervention, going to my son’s school (he is head of the art department at a large high school) and catching him each time in the hall, but each time failing to get beyond his wall of assumed anger, busyness, and impatience. A friend who is employed at his school gave me his school email address, and I have often sent him little messages reminding him of my existence and my love, but he has never replied.
My wife Anne died four years ago. Some relative who knew she was dying apparently contacted our son and told him, because one night as his mother and I were sitting in the den watching TV the phone rang and when I answered it, he said, “Dad, I want to speak to Mom.”
I took the phone to her and sat nearby as they talked for about five minutes. She was sweet and kind to him, as she had always been. When the conversation ended, she told me he had said to her, “Now, Mom, this is a one-off. I’m not going to do it again,” and she could hear his wife in the background, telling him what he could and couldn’t say.
After his mother died a few weeks later, I sent him an email telling him about a memorial service we were planning for her and invited him to attend with his brother and me. In reply, I received a message of only three words: “I must decline.”
I’ve had a hard time processing his apparent indifference. This was the woman who went to bed for three months while carrying him in order not to lose him, the woman who loved him and nursed him and made him special treats all through his childhood, the woman who sacrificed so he could have a college education and a car to drive and a home to live in. This is the woman who would have laid down her life for him, and this was how he treated her?
How can I understand his remote attitude, especially when she was dying? I don’t understand a lot about brainwashing, but when I look at all the facts I can’t help listening to the experts who say that is what happens to a lot of sons who turn on their parents. Maybe it’s true of daughters as well, but, in my experience, nine out of ten times it’s a son.
Anne wrote an important book about this experience with our son. She had to. She too was trying to understand what had happened to this fruit of her womb. Ours wasn’t the only case she knew about. As the wife of a pastor, she had heard other women talk about how baffled they were when a beloved son turned on his parents at the behest of a woman he loved and married.
She had no idea that A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families would become the best-seller it has been. She wrote it as her own attempt to understand why her beloved son would turn on his family the way he did. The irony of the book’s popularity is a little like the way Martin Luther described his experience of starting the Reformation: walking in his sleep one night, he happened to grab the bell rope in the city square and woke everybody up ringing that bell for all he was worth. He didn’t plan to start something big. It just happened.
Shortly after A Son Is a Son was published, it was reviewed in the magazine Psychology Today, and when a woman in Florida who had had a similar experience with her son talked to her counselor, the counselor advised her to read Anne’s book. She did, and the magic began. Suddenly this woman, who goes by the pseudonym Amanda, saw it as her mission to reach out and help every parent who was dealing with the alienation problem. She started the AGA movement—Alienated Grandparents Anonymous—giving grieving parents an opportunity to gather with others going through the same experience. AGA chapters now exist in every state of the U.S. and in 21 foreign countries—all in only five or six years. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of us scattered around the globe. Maybe millions.
What is it about modern times that has created this sad phenomenon? What has gotten into our children today? Or is it an age-old problem that never made the headlines till now?
As it became apparent that many parents faced the alienation problem as we were facing it, I got involved in the movement too. We didn’t want to put pressure on our grandchildren by trying to take their parents to court or anything like that. The grandchildren appeared to be getting along well, as far as we could tell from a distance. So I began writing letters to the grandchildren, describing their grandparents’ lives and saying how much we missed seeing them. I didn’t send these to the grandchildren, as I knew their parents would confiscate them and destroy them as often as they appeared on their email or in their mail boxes. My plan was, and still is, to give them to the grandchildren when they’re old enough to leave home and go to college. I’ve published three volumes of these letters. They’re called From Poppy, With Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See. Someday, when the grandchildren read the letters, they’ll know they weren’t totally abandoned by their paternal grandparents.
Meanwhile, I yearn to see these children. I keep photos of them, which some wonderful soul was thoughtful enough to send us, on my work table, where I see them all the time. I wish I had had them around me when Anne died and in those awful months of loneliness after her death. It would have mitigated my suffering a great deal. But they weren’t there. They never got to know their grandmother—a world-class pianist, a marvelous cook and housekeeper, an author (she published four books besides A Son Is a Son), and a beautiful, loving woman.
Maybe, if she hadn’t been so outstanding, she wouldn’t have threatened our daughter-in-law so much and the daughter-in-law wouldn’t have felt the necessity of erecting a wall between our two families.
But that’s all beside the point now. What’s done is done. The question is, Where do we go from here? That’s why I’ll send them the From Poppy, With Love books, and we’ll see what effect they produce. Maybe, if I’m lucky, one or two of the children will look me up and we’ll get to know one another—a bonus in my old age. Meanwhile, I want to put my arms around other parents who are going through what Anne and I went through, and comfort them by saying, “You’ll get through this. I know you will. Let’s do it together.”
I remarried last year, and my wife Gloria and I are co-facilitators for an alienated parent/grandparent group that meets monthly in a local spiritual care center. Our group isn’t very large yet, but we are growing. Gloria and I weep with the grandparents who show up with their stories of separation and anxiety, and agree with them that they probably haven’t done anything at all to merit the kind of treatment inflicted upon them by their own child and his or her complicity with a jealous or separatist in-law. We try to rebuild their confidence and assure them that they will survive this awful period in their lives. We look at the analyses of the experts, and talk about them, many of them centering on brainwashing for lack of a better explanation. But mainly we stand shoulder to shoulder with these poor people and count on our very togetherness to bolster and encourage them during the darkest times some of them have ever faced.
by Rev. Dr. John Killinger
Retired minister, professor, author of more than 80 books
I am not any kind of “expert” on parental or grandparental alienation because I studied it in school or have worked with it as a social problem for years, though I do try to facilitate a group of alienated grandparents in a local counseling center. If I have any real expertise in the subject, it is because I have experienced alienation in my own family for the past 15 years.
Ours was an unusually close family, and everybody was very happy with it. I was a graduate school teacher during most of our two sons’ upbringing, and had the freedom to spend more time with them than most fathers do. Three times during those heady, wonderful years, we spent a year abroad on research grants, living once in Paris, France, and twice in Oxford, England, and those were extraordinarily special family times, when we all felt especially close to one another and enjoyed days on end together in exploration and discovery. We all thought we were inordinately blessed as a family.
Even after our sons graduated from college, we all continued to be inordinately close, sharing our lives as fully as possible while living in different cities. When our sons married, I performed the services, as I am an ordained clergyman, and my wife and I made special efforts to make our new daughters-in-law feel not only welcomed into our family but loved and appreciated as well.
Then our youngest son and his wife divorced, and we were as devastated as he was. We understood his loneliness and lostness at this time, and responded to his plea to move closer to him by relocating to a home only 20 or 30 minutes away from him, so that he was able to join us for dinner several times a week and we were happy to be there for him as he pursued his career and began the dating ritual again.
We applauded when he became engaged, and looked forward to having another woman in our lives again. When they asked me to do the honors at their wedding, I was happy to be asked, and spent some time writing a special service that I thought related not only to each of them personally but to the unusual place where they had elected to have their wedding, Washington D.C.’s Museum for Women in the Arts.
Then came the first salvo from our son’s intended: She didn’t like the service, as she thought it wasn’t “personal” enough. She asked someone else to perform the wedding service. Then she didn’t like the wedding dress my wife bought because my wife did not buy it from the shop where she had obtained her own wedding gown—a specialty shop where the prices of gowns ranged from $5,000 to $10,000. She displayed anger about our choice of a place to have the rehearsal dinner, and about the fact that we weren’t eager to invite 300 people to a rehearsal dinner held at her own forbiddingly expensive country club. She and our son refused to attend our fiftieth wedding anniversary party because they were “too busy,” though they were both teachers and the party was scheduled for a week after their school year was over. Then it was another thing and another, until in the end we felt quite frozen out of their wedding and offered our excuses for not attending.
The rupture was complete. Our son didn’t want to talk to us, as humbly or repeatedly as we tried to solicit his favor. There was no communication between us for two years.
Then I had lung surgery that went awry. The surgeon was supposed to excise a bit of tissue from my lung to test it for something, and then, for some reason that remains a mystery, removed most of the lung, shocking my system and producing pulmonary embolisms that almost took my life. I asked my wife to telephone our alienated son and tell him I loved him and I might die that night. Actually, I was given only a 40 percent chance of surviving till morning.
Two days later, my son and his wife appeared in my hospital room in Detroit, having flown a thousand miles to get there. But we got the impression that their appearance was more about them than it was about me, because our son’s wife was very dramatically pregnant and they were very proud and happy about it.
I survived—obviously—and, on the strength of their visit to see me, we were able to cobble together something of a relationship as a family. Mainly, we became the always dependable babysitters after the child, a granddaughter, was born. Regardless of the pressure it put on our own schedules, we were always available, even at half an hour’s notice, to be at their home to look after little Ellie. Admittedly, we were usually treated as mere factotums who were allowed to see Ellie only because we were useful, but we were willing to continue living with their constant put-downs and indignities in order to enjoy our granddaughter.
Unfortunately, I suppose, she also enjoyed her grandparents, which didn’t set all that well with her mother and perhaps even her father, and when a second child, another girl, was born two years later, we were immediately frozen out of the relationship and no longer allowed to see either child. The mother had decided to nip everything in the bud, and cashiered us in favor of professional sitters.
We tried to see our son and his wife and talk about whatever seemed to be bothering them, and finally got an agreement to meet at a restaurant near their home for lunch and conversation. He showed up a few minutes late and she didn’t come at all. We kept asking our son, “Son, what have we done?” His answer was the same every time we asked: “You know, you know.” I don’t think he could summon a single answer, so he kept reflecting the matter back upon us. He left that meeting in unaccountable anger, there having been no excuse for it, slamming down money on the table to pay for his uneaten meal and exiting with unexplained haste.
That was thirteen years ago, or more. Ellie passed her fifteenth birthday in late December. Our son and his wife had two more children whom I’ve never seen at all, plus Ellie and Chloe, Chloe being the child born two years after Ellie, whom we never got to know at all.
During that thirteen-year-period, I made two or three attempts at some kind of intervention, going to my son’s school (he is head of the art department at a large high school) and catching him each time in the hall, but each time failing to get beyond his wall of assumed anger, busyness, and impatience. A friend who is employed at his school gave me his school email address, and I have often sent him little messages reminding him of my existence and my love, but he has never replied.
My wife Anne died four years ago. Some relative who knew she was dying apparently contacted our son and told him, because one night as his mother and I were sitting in the den watching TV the phone rang and when I answered it, he said, “Dad, I want to speak to Mom.”
I took the phone to her and sat nearby as they talked for about five minutes. She was sweet and kind to him, as she had always been. When the conversation ended, she told me he had said to her, “Now, Mom, this is a one-off. I’m not going to do it again,” and she could hear his wife in the background, telling him what he could and couldn’t say.
After his mother died a few weeks later, I sent him an email telling him about a memorial service we were planning for her and invited him to attend with his brother and me. In reply, I received a message of only three words: “I must decline.”
I’ve had a hard time processing his apparent indifference. This was the woman who went to bed for three months while carrying him in order not to lose him, the woman who loved him and nursed him and made him special treats all through his childhood, the woman who sacrificed so he could have a college education and a car to drive and a home to live in. This is the woman who would have laid down her life for him, and this was how he treated her?
How can I understand his remote attitude, especially when she was dying? I don’t understand a lot about brainwashing, but when I look at all the facts I can’t help listening to the experts who say that is what happens to a lot of sons who turn on their parents. Maybe it’s true of daughters as well, but, in my experience, nine out of ten times it’s a son.
Anne wrote an important book about this experience with our son. She had to. She too was trying to understand what had happened to this fruit of her womb. Ours wasn’t the only case she knew about. As the wife of a pastor, she had heard other women talk about how baffled they were when a beloved son turned on his parents at the behest of a woman he loved and married.
She had no idea that A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families would become the best-seller it has been. She wrote it as her own attempt to understand why her beloved son would turn on his family the way he did. The irony of the book’s popularity is a little like the way Martin Luther described his experience of starting the Reformation: walking in his sleep one night, he happened to grab the bell rope in the city square and woke everybody up ringing that bell for all he was worth. He didn’t plan to start something big. It just happened.
Shortly after A Son Is a Son was published, it was reviewed in the magazine Psychology Today, and when a woman in Florida who had had a similar experience with her son talked to her counselor, the counselor advised her to read Anne’s book. She did, and the magic began. Suddenly this woman, who goes by the pseudonym Amanda, saw it as her mission to reach out and help every parent who was dealing with the alienation problem. She started the AGA movement—Alienated Grandparents Anonymous—giving grieving parents an opportunity to gather with others going through the same experience. AGA chapters now exist in every state of the U.S. and in 21 foreign countries—all in only five or six years. Obviously there are hundreds of thousands of us scattered around the globe. Maybe millions.
What is it about modern times that has created this sad phenomenon? What has gotten into our children today? Or is it an age-old problem that never made the headlines till now?
As it became apparent that many parents faced the alienation problem as we were facing it, I got involved in the movement too. We didn’t want to put pressure on our grandchildren by trying to take their parents to court or anything like that. The grandchildren appeared to be getting along well, as far as we could tell from a distance. So I began writing letters to the grandchildren, describing their grandparents’ lives and saying how much we missed seeing them. I didn’t send these to the grandchildren, as I knew their parents would confiscate them and destroy them as often as they appeared on their email or in their mail boxes. My plan was, and still is, to give them to the grandchildren when they’re old enough to leave home and go to college. I’ve published three volumes of these letters. They’re called From Poppy, With Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See. Someday, when the grandchildren read the letters, they’ll know they weren’t totally abandoned by their paternal grandparents.
Meanwhile, I yearn to see these children. I keep photos of them, which some wonderful soul was thoughtful enough to send us, on my work table, where I see them all the time. I wish I had had them around me when Anne died and in those awful months of loneliness after her death. It would have mitigated my suffering a great deal. But they weren’t there. They never got to know their grandmother—a world-class pianist, a marvelous cook and housekeeper, an author (she published four books besides A Son Is a Son), and a beautiful, loving woman.
Maybe, if she hadn’t been so outstanding, she wouldn’t have threatened our daughter-in-law so much and the daughter-in-law wouldn’t have felt the necessity of erecting a wall between our two families.
But that’s all beside the point now. What’s done is done. The question is, Where do we go from here? That’s why I’ll send them the From Poppy, With Love books, and we’ll see what effect they produce. Maybe, if I’m lucky, one or two of the children will look me up and we’ll get to know one another—a bonus in my old age. Meanwhile, I want to put my arms around other parents who are going through what Anne and I went through, and comfort them by saying, “You’ll get through this. I know you will. Let’s do it together.”
I remarried last year, and my wife Gloria and I are co-facilitators for an alienated parent/grandparent group that meets monthly in a local spiritual care center. Our group isn’t very large yet, but we are growing. Gloria and I weep with the grandparents who show up with their stories of separation and anxiety, and agree with them that they probably haven’t done anything at all to merit the kind of treatment inflicted upon them by their own child and his or her complicity with a jealous or separatist in-law. We try to rebuild their confidence and assure them that they will survive this awful period in their lives. We look at the analyses of the experts, and talk about them, many of them centering on brainwashing for lack of a better explanation. But mainly we stand shoulder to shoulder with these poor people and count on our very togetherness to bolster and encourage them during the darkest times some of them have ever faced.
SOMETIMES A GREAT SADNESS
by John Killinger
Sometimes a great sadness covers me, like an autumnal fog smothering all joy and happiness. When this happens, I usually go to the dining room table and play Solitaire. It is a good game for thinking, or, if one doesn’t feel like thinking, for simply passing the time, hoping that something will occur to break the rancid, debilitating spell.
I know what causes the sadness—actually, two or three things that cause it.
One is the death of my wife and the loss of the sixty years of life I knew with her. I have remarried since—three years of loneliness was all I could bear—and my new wife and I are very happy with one another. But sometimes I know she is in a similar mood, recalling her first husband and the happiness they enjoyed together for fifty-five years. We can’t help it if the past intrudes upon the present. It just happens. You can’t live that many years with a previous mate and expect it to be otherwise in your next marriage.
Another thing is the fact that my first-born son, who lived across town from his mother and me for several years, moved a couple of years ago to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe is a lovely city, but it’s about two thousand miles from where I live. His wife wanted it, I’m sure. Maybe he did too, but she was the driving force. She lived in California when they married, and has wanted to go west ever since they settled on the East Coast. I miss the reassurance of having my eldest child three or four miles away, and getting together for meals once a week or more. Now we see one another only twice a year, and I have to wonder how long that will continue.
And then there’s the matter of my four grandchildren, two of whom I’ve never seen and the other two whom I haven’t seen for thirteen years—not since their mother decided that their oldest child loved her paternal grandparents too much and dropped the iron curtain between us with a devastating clang! They don’t live on the other side of the country, or even as far away as Santa Fe. They live only thirty minutes away, even on a day when the traffic is heavy.
It’s unnatural not to see one’s grandchildren, to know they’re growing up and changing every day—the oldest one is now fifteen—and even though you’re the closest of kin you never see them or interact with them. There are some terms bandied about these days—“child abuse” and “grandparent abuse”—and this is both. There are lots of things I could be doing for my grandchildren, like sharing memories of living abroad and in Los Angeles and New York City or merely listening to their stories and encouraging their talents and their excitement about the future. And there is something even more important they could be doing for me. I’ll be eighty-five this summer, and I know I don’t have many years to live, if any. They could make me feel so much more fulfilled than I do now, simply by spending a few hours with me once a week or maybe every other week. I don’t ask for a lot. But I would love to be a part of their dynamic, growing young lives.
I can’t imagine that my son—my younger son, though he’s now fifty-four—could be so heartless toward his old father, who always loved him and showed that love in countless ways. His wife I can understand. Her home life wasn’t as rich and fulfilling as my son’s life was, and her parents are divorced and live a thousand miles apart from one another. She probably figures that her children would become more attached to me than they are to her own father, and she doesn’t want that. I can comprehend that, and I forgive her for being the way she is. But my son? The man I once played basketball with almost every afternoon when he came home from school, and supported in every way possible? The one to whom I told bedtime stories and whom I always encouraged if he was feeling down or neglected? The one I sent to private school and to the college where he met his first wife? The one whose first two cars I paid for, and whose first house I made the downpayment on? That one. That son who has forgotten everything his mother and I did for him and now treats me as if I were something he tracked in out of the barn. That’s the one, and I simply don’t understand it.
I know I’m not alone in this experience. Lots of kids grow up and repudiate the parents who raised them, who made sacrifices for them, who set them on their initial path to success. I know this because of the widespread success of Family Access and Alienated Grandparents Anonymous, organizations that have enrolled thousands and thousands of unhappy parents who now have trouble seeing their own offspring’s offspring.
It helps some to know this.
But the sadness is still there. It engulfs me, as I said, like some autumnal fog. I don’t know where to turn or how to shake the feeling. It will eventually pass. It always does. But right now, this morning, I’m really down under it. It seeps into all my pores, and makes me feel rotten.
I’ll go outside and do some physical work. That usually helps when I’m feeling down under. At least, it makes the time pass. Then it will be lunchtime and my wife and I will go out to get something to eat. We’ll talk about this and that, and I’ll manage to repress my sadness. Who knows, I might even sublimate it into some new project or concern for other people who are experiencing a hard time. God knows, the world is full of them.
But I still feel sad.
by John Killinger
Sometimes a great sadness covers me, like an autumnal fog smothering all joy and happiness. When this happens, I usually go to the dining room table and play Solitaire. It is a good game for thinking, or, if one doesn’t feel like thinking, for simply passing the time, hoping that something will occur to break the rancid, debilitating spell.
I know what causes the sadness—actually, two or three things that cause it.
One is the death of my wife and the loss of the sixty years of life I knew with her. I have remarried since—three years of loneliness was all I could bear—and my new wife and I are very happy with one another. But sometimes I know she is in a similar mood, recalling her first husband and the happiness they enjoyed together for fifty-five years. We can’t help it if the past intrudes upon the present. It just happens. You can’t live that many years with a previous mate and expect it to be otherwise in your next marriage.
Another thing is the fact that my first-born son, who lived across town from his mother and me for several years, moved a couple of years ago to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Santa Fe is a lovely city, but it’s about two thousand miles from where I live. His wife wanted it, I’m sure. Maybe he did too, but she was the driving force. She lived in California when they married, and has wanted to go west ever since they settled on the East Coast. I miss the reassurance of having my eldest child three or four miles away, and getting together for meals once a week or more. Now we see one another only twice a year, and I have to wonder how long that will continue.
And then there’s the matter of my four grandchildren, two of whom I’ve never seen and the other two whom I haven’t seen for thirteen years—not since their mother decided that their oldest child loved her paternal grandparents too much and dropped the iron curtain between us with a devastating clang! They don’t live on the other side of the country, or even as far away as Santa Fe. They live only thirty minutes away, even on a day when the traffic is heavy.
It’s unnatural not to see one’s grandchildren, to know they’re growing up and changing every day—the oldest one is now fifteen—and even though you’re the closest of kin you never see them or interact with them. There are some terms bandied about these days—“child abuse” and “grandparent abuse”—and this is both. There are lots of things I could be doing for my grandchildren, like sharing memories of living abroad and in Los Angeles and New York City or merely listening to their stories and encouraging their talents and their excitement about the future. And there is something even more important they could be doing for me. I’ll be eighty-five this summer, and I know I don’t have many years to live, if any. They could make me feel so much more fulfilled than I do now, simply by spending a few hours with me once a week or maybe every other week. I don’t ask for a lot. But I would love to be a part of their dynamic, growing young lives.
I can’t imagine that my son—my younger son, though he’s now fifty-four—could be so heartless toward his old father, who always loved him and showed that love in countless ways. His wife I can understand. Her home life wasn’t as rich and fulfilling as my son’s life was, and her parents are divorced and live a thousand miles apart from one another. She probably figures that her children would become more attached to me than they are to her own father, and she doesn’t want that. I can comprehend that, and I forgive her for being the way she is. But my son? The man I once played basketball with almost every afternoon when he came home from school, and supported in every way possible? The one to whom I told bedtime stories and whom I always encouraged if he was feeling down or neglected? The one I sent to private school and to the college where he met his first wife? The one whose first two cars I paid for, and whose first house I made the downpayment on? That one. That son who has forgotten everything his mother and I did for him and now treats me as if I were something he tracked in out of the barn. That’s the one, and I simply don’t understand it.
I know I’m not alone in this experience. Lots of kids grow up and repudiate the parents who raised them, who made sacrifices for them, who set them on their initial path to success. I know this because of the widespread success of Family Access and Alienated Grandparents Anonymous, organizations that have enrolled thousands and thousands of unhappy parents who now have trouble seeing their own offspring’s offspring.
It helps some to know this.
But the sadness is still there. It engulfs me, as I said, like some autumnal fog. I don’t know where to turn or how to shake the feeling. It will eventually pass. It always does. But right now, this morning, I’m really down under it. It seeps into all my pores, and makes me feel rotten.
I’ll go outside and do some physical work. That usually helps when I’m feeling down under. At least, it makes the time pass. Then it will be lunchtime and my wife and I will go out to get something to eat. We’ll talk about this and that, and I’ll manage to repress my sadness. Who knows, I might even sublimate it into some new project or concern for other people who are experiencing a hard time. God knows, the world is full of them.
But I still feel sad.
A CHRISTMAS WITHOUT GRANDCHILDREN
by John Killinger
It’s a dark, rainy day, and I’m still working at decorating two Christmas trees I started decorating yesterday. The reason I didn’t finish yesterday is that I spent a lot of time pausing over the ornaments and remembering when and where we acquired each one and what it meant to my wife.
Annie died this year, and this is my first Christmas without her. I cried some as I decorated.
We have four grandchildren who live only a few miles away, and they make continuing the Christmas traditions a lot easier. Or they should. Actually, I haven’t seen the older two, now ten and eight, since the eight-year-old was a baby in arms. I haven’t ever seen the other two.
My son is one of those countless children who grew up in a loving family, married a strong-minded wife, and then, for whatever reason, suddenly broke off all ties with his mother and me. Mysteriously, he became somebody we’d never known, speaking angrily to us and contending that we knew what the issues between us were, though, like so many parents in similar situations, we didn’t.
Somehow, we managed to get through these past years without the grandchildren. Other people shared their Christmas cards from our son’s family with the annual photographs of the children. We kissed the photos and regarded them wistfully, wondering if, when those beautiful children grow up, they’ll either seek us out or welcome our getting in touch with them.
For now, we realized, they were a closed book, one whose pages we weren’t permitted to touch or to turn.
Now, it would be very helpful if I could see those children -- could help to plan Christmas for them, participate in their excitement as the big day approaches, and be there to witness the wonder on their faces on Christmas morning. It would help to dull a little the enormous ache in my heart at facing that day alone, without my beloved wife of more than sixty years. I could think of them and smile, knowing that in some way they are carrying on the life that began years ago in Annie’s womb.
I know it’s going to be a hard Christmas for me. Even now, three weeks before the holiday, I’m feeling lost and sad without my beautiful wife at my side. Sometimes the whole universe seems empty and unfriendly, as if all its meaning was suddenly sucked out of it by her death.
I realize how many parents have been through a similar time in their own lives, and how many will be going through it for the first time this year, as I am. I am sad for them as well as myself. I wish we could all have a gigantic party somewhere and mix and mingle and hold one another for a few seconds as a token of our love and understanding of one another’s pain.
But we have to be brave -- if we can.
I’m not sure if I can. I’ll try, but I’ve never been tested this way before.
This is one of the hardest times I’ve ever faced -- maybe even harder than my wife’s death a few months ago. Then, I was grateful that she was beyond her awful suffering. Now -- well, now I’m alone and I’m facing what was always our favorite event of the year, even more than birthdays, anniversaries, and other holidays.
I pray to God for strength. And not for mine only, but for that of thousands of other parents facing their first Christmas alone, and doing it without their dear grandchildren.
Somehow, we’ll get through. But it’s going to be hard.
JOHN KILLINGER, retired minister, theologian, and writer, was married to ANNE KATHRYN KILLINGER, author of A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families, the book that was instrumental in helping SUSAN RANDALL decide to found Alienated Grandparents Anonymous. He himself is the author of From Poppy, With Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See, available in three volumes from Amazon.com or Intermundia Press.
A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families - Anne Kathryn Killenger
I know this is a curious title, and people who have never experienced the rejection of a son at his wife’s behest won’t understand it.
But those who have been through this experience—whose sons have married and turned against them as if they were dirt after all the years of love and care the parents gave them—will rejoice at finding this book and knowing they aren’t alone.
Actually, the desertion of parents by married sons is not uncommon. Would that it were! Almost every psychologist or counselor with whom I have talked knows of several instances in which it has happened. They speak of the great sorrow and agitation of the parents, mother and father alike, who can’t understand why a child has turned against them.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-13-6 paper, 230 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
Also available on Amazon Kindle
From Poppy with Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When Anne Kathryn Killinger’s A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families was published, it helped kickstart a growing movement called Alienated Grandparents Anonymous. Now Anne’s husband, John, has written this absorbing book of letters to their grandchildren in the hope that they will one day read it and understand more about the lives and dreams and personalities of the grandparents they were prevented from seeing. From Poppy, With Love is tender, thoughtful, wise, and loving, and will be of interest to many readers who have never had the problem that it deals with. As Rev. Paul Lowder says, “Don’t be fooled. This book is not only for grandparents who cannot see their grandchildren. It’s for children, adults, and seniors who need more wisdom in dealing with families.”
In this straight-from-the-heart book, Rev. Dr. John Killinger addresses his own pain at being excluded from his grandchildren’s lives. In letter after letter, he passes along the life lessons and loving stories he would much prefer to share in person. The book is a must-read not only for alienated grandparents, but for the grandchildren who have missed out on one of the most special bonds life can offer.
— Amanda
Founder and President of Alienated Grandparents Anonymous
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-28-0 paper, 188 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
From Poppy with Love 2: More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When John Killinger published From Poppy, with Love, a volume of letters for the grandchildren he isn’t allowed to visit, he thought he had provided all the information his grandchildren would need to understand their paternal grandparents and their feelings about things. He soon found that he missed writing to the grandchildren, however, so continued to jot down his thoughts. Before he knew it, he had another book-length collection of these letters.
In this second volume, he notes, he could touch on many things not dealt with in the first-new memories of their father as a child; musings on education; favorite TV programs; hearing from former first lady Barbara Bush; the death of their Great-uncle Jack, who was a vice-president of Sears; reflections on heaven and what it might be like; getting a new puppy named Toby; and enjoying another Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Even readers who haven’t had a problem getting to see their grandchildren will enjoy the naked sensitivity of these letters and the many subjects they touch upon. Collectively, they are about what it means to be deeply human and to truly care about one’s family.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-30-3 paper, 213 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
From Poppy with Love 3: Even More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When John Killinger published From Poppy, With Love, a volume of letters for the grandchildren he isn’t allowed to visit, he thought he had provided all the information his grandchildren would need to understand their paternal grandparents and their feelings about things. He soon found that he missed writing to the grandchildren, however, so continued to jot down his thoughts, which became From Poppy, with Love: More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See.
This third volume, he notes, would not have been written were it not for a Valentine card and a dream, which made such an impact that the grandchildren needed to be told. Herein are further adventures of Toby the dog, instances of great joy and tremendous sorrow, all conveyed by a master storyteller. An important part of this collection of letters addresses Grammy’s discovery of and treatment for cancer in a thoughtful, loving way, and then the sad news of Grammy’s death.
Even readers who haven’t had a problem getting to see their grandchildren will enjoy the naked sensitivity of these letters and the many subjects they touch upon. Collectively, they are about what it means to be deeply human and to truly care about one’s family.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-41-9 paper, 268 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
I know this is a curious title, and people who have never experienced the rejection of a son at his wife’s behest won’t understand it.
But those who have been through this experience—whose sons have married and turned against them as if they were dirt after all the years of love and care the parents gave them—will rejoice at finding this book and knowing they aren’t alone.
Actually, the desertion of parents by married sons is not uncommon. Would that it were! Almost every psychologist or counselor with whom I have talked knows of several instances in which it has happened. They speak of the great sorrow and agitation of the parents, mother and father alike, who can’t understand why a child has turned against them.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-13-6 paper, 230 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
Also available on Amazon Kindle
From Poppy with Love: Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When Anne Kathryn Killinger’s A Son Is a Son Till He Gets a Wife: How Toxic Daughters-in-Law Destroy Families was published, it helped kickstart a growing movement called Alienated Grandparents Anonymous. Now Anne’s husband, John, has written this absorbing book of letters to their grandchildren in the hope that they will one day read it and understand more about the lives and dreams and personalities of the grandparents they were prevented from seeing. From Poppy, With Love is tender, thoughtful, wise, and loving, and will be of interest to many readers who have never had the problem that it deals with. As Rev. Paul Lowder says, “Don’t be fooled. This book is not only for grandparents who cannot see their grandchildren. It’s for children, adults, and seniors who need more wisdom in dealing with families.”
In this straight-from-the-heart book, Rev. Dr. John Killinger addresses his own pain at being excluded from his grandchildren’s lives. In letter after letter, he passes along the life lessons and loving stories he would much prefer to share in person. The book is a must-read not only for alienated grandparents, but for the grandchildren who have missed out on one of the most special bonds life can offer.
— Amanda
Founder and President of Alienated Grandparents Anonymous
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-28-0 paper, 188 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
From Poppy with Love 2: More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When John Killinger published From Poppy, with Love, a volume of letters for the grandchildren he isn’t allowed to visit, he thought he had provided all the information his grandchildren would need to understand their paternal grandparents and their feelings about things. He soon found that he missed writing to the grandchildren, however, so continued to jot down his thoughts. Before he knew it, he had another book-length collection of these letters.
In this second volume, he notes, he could touch on many things not dealt with in the first-new memories of their father as a child; musings on education; favorite TV programs; hearing from former first lady Barbara Bush; the death of their Great-uncle Jack, who was a vice-president of Sears; reflections on heaven and what it might be like; getting a new puppy named Toby; and enjoying another Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.
Even readers who haven’t had a problem getting to see their grandchildren will enjoy the naked sensitivity of these letters and the many subjects they touch upon. Collectively, they are about what it means to be deeply human and to truly care about one’s family.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-30-3 paper, 213 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
From Poppy with Love 3: Even More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See
When John Killinger published From Poppy, With Love, a volume of letters for the grandchildren he isn’t allowed to visit, he thought he had provided all the information his grandchildren would need to understand their paternal grandparents and their feelings about things. He soon found that he missed writing to the grandchildren, however, so continued to jot down his thoughts, which became From Poppy, with Love: More Letters from a Grandfather to the Grandchildren He Isn’t Allowed to See.
This third volume, he notes, would not have been written were it not for a Valentine card and a dream, which made such an impact that the grandchildren needed to be told. Herein are further adventures of Toby the dog, instances of great joy and tremendous sorrow, all conveyed by a master storyteller. An important part of this collection of letters addresses Grammy’s discovery of and treatment for cancer in a thoughtful, loving way, and then the sad news of Grammy’s death.
Even readers who haven’t had a problem getting to see their grandchildren will enjoy the naked sensitivity of these letters and the many subjects they touch upon. Collectively, they are about what it means to be deeply human and to truly care about one’s family.
$18.95 ISBN 978-1-887730-41-9 paper, 268 pp. PayPal.Me/EricKillinger
I’m going to make some suggestions. Some of them will apply to you and some won’t. But they are suggestions born out of my own experience—I, who lives a mere 30 minutes from my own grandchildren and has not seen any of them, any of the four, in at least 13 years. And I don’t have any other grandchildren. These are the only ones.
Here are my observations and suggestions:
- First, I’ll begin by saying the obvious. Sometimes we can’t do anything about our pains and injustices in the world but stand by and try to hold on to ourselves. Some of you may be as old as I am and can remember World War Two. I was lying on the floor, looking at a comic book, when my father turned on the radio a few feet away from me and heard the news from President Franklin D. Roosevelt that the United States had been attacked at Pearl Harbor and we were at war. I was too young to understand what that meant, but I could tell from the anxiety in my dad’s voice when he told my mother that it was something pretty awful. Life for all Americans was immediately different. Many families were going to be subjected to difficulties and changes they had never experienced. But there was nothing we could do to avoid the thing that was happening. We learned what it meant. We learned to cope. But we couldn’t make it go away. We simply had to learn how to live with the new reality that had taken over our lives. In a smaller way, that’s how it is with those of us who are alienated from our sons or daughters and their children. It just happened. Now we have to try to hold onto our hope, our dignity, our lives in spite of the blow we’ve been dealt.
2. Now a bit of advice. Give up your children and grandchildren. Just like that. Surrender them to God and their own ways. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t try to change the situation. I’ll get to that in a minute. But be prepared to give them up. Accept that sometimes things work out this way. It’s not what we want. It isn’t the way we thought life would be. But sometimes things in life just don’t go the way we’d like them to, and we can’t do anything about it for a while, or maybe forever. So the sooner you learn to say “I’ve lost them” and learn to live with that, the better. When you learn to do that, your mind will be clearer for thinking about what you might do. An old man in my late wife Anne’s family had a saying that he often used to deal with the hard reality of life. “Fret not thy gizzard out.” He said that if that wasn’t in the Bible, it ought to be. “Fret not thy gizzard out.” Drop back from the line of scrimmage. Don’t keep trying to break through the line. You probably don’t have the power to do that. So stop it. Accept things as the way they are. In the long run, you’ll be more able to find creative ways of dealing with the future.
3. Learn to concentrate on other things. I know, that’s hard. Everywhere you turn, you see your children or grandchildren’s faces and want to cry because they’re not with you. But you have to look out to a bigger world than that one. You need to get involved with other people, and work to make things better for them. It’s the best antidote I know for our own problems and unhappiness.
I remember the first Christmas after we could not see our first grandchildren any more. We had been buying them presents all year. We had been in Canada to attend a theater festival in Ontario-on-the-Lake, a beautiful little town where we used to go every year for a few days of great theater, and there was a marvelous toy store there. We had bought several delightful things. I remember a beautiful little jewelry case we got for Ellie. It looked like a little English cottage, and the roof lifted up on either side to reveal spaces for jewelry down below. We had wrapped the presents and put them away on a shelf in the closet. But now we couldn’t give them to our grandchildren.
There was a young couple a few blocks from us who we knew were about to give up their house and move to a smaller, less expensive place because they were taking bankruptcy. They had three little children. We knew they wouldn’t be able to provide much for their children that Christmas. So on Christmas Day we gathered up our grandchildren’s presents and took them to that couple and their children. It wasn’t what we had planned for Christmas. We missed our grandchildren. But I still feel a sense of joy and satisfaction at what we did with those presents.
4. Learn to take refuge in groups. I mean, in bands of people who will become your friends. There’s a magic in groups, and if you haven’t learned that, you need to. My wife Gloria and I met one another in a group called “Spouse Loss.” We both went to that group because we needed a place where others could share our grief. This was two or three years ago. Most of our friends in this group—more than a dozen of them—are now handling their grief very well. In fact, when we are together the air is full of laughter. Gloria and I are the only married couple in the group, but we continue to go because we are all friends now. It is a wonderful group. We didn’t know that when we first attended. But that’s the magic of which I spoke. We are healed by being with one another.
This is why Gloria and I have started an alienated parent and grandparent group in our town. We can tell, though we have been meeting only half a year now, that it is very helpful to the grieving parents who come. We share one another’s stories and one another’s burdens. Life is easier because we are living it together!
5. Hope for some future reunion with your estranged children or grandchildren. Don’t ever give up on that. Live as if it might never happen, but, deep in your heart, nourish the hope that it will.
One reason for hope is that little by little, though the efforts of Elaine Cobb and others, state laws are being changed to favor the reunion of estranged children and grandparents. One of the couples in our little group has gone to court and fought for the right to be with their little granddaughter, who lived with them for two years before her mother decided to separate them and not permit any further togetherness. The court here in Virginia ruled that they could be with their granddaughter one day a week. And one of the unexpected bonuses of this arrangement is that the child’s mother has had to make adjustments in her treatment of the grandparents and now they all have a better relationship.
If you believe that things will be better in the future, you will find ways of investing in that future. For me, that has taken the form of writing letters to my grandchildren. Even if my grandchildren don’t read them and say, “We’ve been missing a lot because of my parents’ prejudices,” they will at least have a record of their father’s life that they didn’t know about, because I’ve been careful to tell stories about his childhood and stories about their grandmother and myself. That will be meaningful to them in spite of anything they’ve been taught or told about us and why they were not permitted to know us.
And you can also pray for your grandchildren and their future in this world where things are often difficult. Even if you haven’t been a very enthusiastic pray-er in the past, I suspect you will learn to pray a lot more if it means something about your children or grandchildren’s future.
6. Another suggestion—number six, if you’re counting—is not to do anything in excess. I’m not saying you shouldn’t pull out all the stops you can to see your children and grandchildren, but personally I decided to take a more measured approach. I’m there for my son and his children if and when they will permit it, but I’m not trying to force myself on them. The reason for this is that I put my grandchildren’s happy childhoods ahead of my own need to be with them, and I don’t want to mar their growing-up years by creating a lot of tension around them. Maybe I’m counting too much on their curiosity about their own pasts and they won’t ever exercise that curiosity and try to get in touch with their granddad. But these days, with smart phones and everything, I wouldn’t be surprised if my grandkids were already trying to learn more about me and how I figure into their personalities and make-up as individuals.
I don’t remember if I read this story or heard it from someone, but I love it either way. A teenage boy showed up one day on the front porch of his grandparents, whom he had not seen since he was a baby because his parents kept them separated. He wanted $200 from them to buy a pair of fancy tennis shoes, and said he thought they owed it to him because he had never had anything from them. They took him into a room of the house where they had faithfully kept all the presents they had bought him through the years for Christmas and his birthday, and he spent an hour or more opening them. When it was over, he asked his grandfather if there was any way he could work for him and earn the $200. I don’t remember if the grandfather gave him work to do or simply made a gift of the money, but I do know that they became good friends after that.
7. Keep a journal of your thoughts about your alienated grandchildren, or write letters to them, as I do. If you are musical, compose some songs about your situation. Contribute your time and effort to getting new legislation in your state that will make it illegal for grandparents not to see their grandchildren, on the grounds of both child abuse and grandparent abuse. Do anything that will allow you to compensate for your loss. Get involved with children or youth groups in your church or community. Volunteer as a teacher’s aide in your school. Help to lead a scout group. Anything to help make up for the fact that you can’t be with your own grandchildren.
8. Try not to be what your daughter-in-law or son-in-law might try to portray you as to your grandchildren. I learned that my DIL and son tell my grandchildren that my wife and I were evil. I consider that a brilliant way for them to get by without other explanation of why we can’t see one another. It doesn’t allow much questioning. But I try to be anything but evil.
9. Think of the thousands of people who are worse off than you and your children or grandchildren. All those Central American parents and grandparents who were separated from their children by our government’s order in recent months. All the grandparents of children now separated by continents, who haven’t the money or means to be together. Grandparents who are incarcerated for years without seeing family members. There is always someone who is worse off than we are if we only think about it.
Hopefully, things will change.