Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Twig. “You can bend a twig, but not a tree.” Theo of Golden

A small force early in life can alter the course of growth. Same thing with a career. I hope some of the “foresters” of my med school years are still around to see how straight and tall the twigs they pruned have grown when we return 40 years later.

2) Trickle. “It was hard on all of us to watch her trickle away.” Theo of Golden

My siblings and I and our spouses watched my parents slowly trickle away. Their bodies still in the room; their essence slowly departed and eventually gone. Blessedly, they remembered each of us until the very end. Many are not so fortunate. We’d spent much time together over the years. Time during which we learned much about what made us all who we were.

It hurt so much more to know just who it was we were about to lose.

3) Dolly. Boy, has anyone over the last, oh, 30 or 40 years been as universally loved as Dolly Parton? Nope. Not from where I sit. Old and young and everything in between. Didn’t really matter what kind of music you typically listened to, you listened to at least some of Dolly’s stuff because so many musicians you DID listen to covered so many of her songs.

What an impressive human, Dolly Parton. Raised in the holler in abject poverty that was so severe it was even more spartan than how my Dad grew up. No electricity. No running water. 1 of 12 kids (like my Dad). Like so many poor kids of that era she literally couldn’t wait to get away, and yet everything we saw her do she could trace back to that backwoods building in Tennessee. She constantly and consistently gave homage to her family and her upbringing. Raised by a father who couldn’t read, one of her charities has given away 330 million books and counting to pre-school children.

Not a typo. 330 MILLION.

Dolly’s sense of high style famously came from a chance encounter with “working girl” in the town next over. She owned it. Used it to turn any critical conversation away from how she dressed to what she thought. She parried every criticism and every “dumb blond” joke with sensitivity and wit. She got the best of everyone from Carson and Letterman to Barbara Walters. To Newsweek in 1977: “Some folks see my artificial look and think I have no depth. But my inner sadness and joy are as real as my hair and nails are fake.” To Letterman: “Honestly, it makes me mad. All these people staring at my chest, but I’ve got a great ass, too.”

She sang “this dumb blonde ain’t nobody’s fool” on her debut album, and truer words have rarely been sung. Dolly Parton, one of one. She will also be one of the few folks everyone knew who everyone will miss.

4) Entanglement. Quantum entanglement is a phenomenon in which two or more particles are so intrinsically linked that the state of one particle instantly determines the state of one or several of the other linked particles regardless of distance. The theory of superposition, that all particles consist of an infinite number of possible positions until you measure them, is the theory that underlies the famous Schroedinger’s Cat thought experiment.

It is also the theory underlying the possible existence of the multiverse, the infinite number or versions of our universe that exist unseen because they are, well, unseen.

It’s the key component that forms the plot line of my favorite Sci-fi book, Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. A brilliant physicist and his equally brilliant artist girlfriend discover that they are pregnant before they have become truly committed to one another. Their tiny little life lies in a very real kind of superposition. Stay together and become a family means dramatically downsizing their professional aspirations. All-in pursuit of their careers means leaving family behind. Like the cat in Schroedinger’s box, their fate becomes fixed once they have opened the door.

Entanglement is something else. An added something. Once “measured” is there an effect on another version or versions of themselves in rest of the multiverse? Does entanglement only exist at the smallest of scales? An electron alternating between spins or a molecule somewhere between its cis and trans form, each all of the above until observed? Once observed, measured, how is it that their entanglement effects itself on the particle entangled?

Does this work at a macro level? At any given point in time are two people in a macro version quantum entanglement linked in such a way that the measurement of one instantly determines the state of the other?

5) Estrangement (n). The deliberate physical and emotional distancing from family members and other loved ones resulting in near or complete loss of communication. Estrange (v): to sever contact with a family member or other loved one. Estranged (adj): to have communication with a family or other loved one severed.

Over the course of the last 6 or 7 weeks there have been no fewer than 3 articles in the WSJ about the phenomenon of estrangement and the peculiarities of its modern day iteration. Each article was followed by a series of letters to the editor with opinions on all sides of the issue. In today’s Sunday Times Magazine “The Ethicist” is asked to weigh in on the subject. Where once this was territory with cleanly marked borders, a child cuts all communication with a physically or emotionally abusive parent or a family ceases to communicate with a child who has a mental illness or recalcitrant substance abuse, the theme in all of the above mentioned articles has been the relative downgrading of what constitutes grounds for estrangement.

Beth and I know several people our age who chose to cut communications with a family member. We also know several couples who have had a child sever those lines with them. Our lived experience with these people echoes what I have been reading these last several weeks, and what I read this morning. It is as if there are two, distinct scenarios in play, each with a generational dynamic, and each seemingly with a starkly different therapeutic engagement. This latter aspect, the actions of therapists, is particularly different today in contrast to that seen in eras past.

I find this latter part to be interesting. When we were a very young couple with very young kids we had friends who had rather unhappy relationships with parts, or even all, of one family or another. Many turned to a therapist for help in making their way through these gauntlets. To a person, though, the effort was an attempt to find some way to tolerate whatever it was that was making them unhappy in the extended family. I can’t recall a single instance in which they either sought advice on how to, or were ever counseled to cease all communications and contact with their family.

Nobody should be expected to remain a participant in a family in which extreme examples of abuse such as physical or sexual abuse, severe addiction, or severe untreated mental illness that puts other family members at risk exists. Our one friend endured beatings and constant emotional abuse from a parent who went untreated after a psychotic break when our friend was in jr. high school. Yet another suffered extreme emotional distress when they were abandoned by a parent who had a hidden second family and an entire life they chose over our friend and their siblings when they were in high school. Neither of those friends has had any contact with those parents since. Sometimes, in the case of real abuse, the shoe must be on the foot of the parent. We know yet another couple who have a child with a severe substance abuse problem who tends toward violence when they have lapsed. For their own safety and emotional well-being they have been forced to cease all communication with their child.

And yet, it’s quite hard to rectify the situations of couples we know as adults who have been proactively estranged by their adult children. In several cases we were spectators to the lives of their young families. We interacted with them as families and as couples, and spent lots of time with their children when the parents weren’t around. There weren’t and aren’t any mental health issues. The possibility of any type of physical or emotional abuse was so distant as to be unimaginable. And yet there they are, suffering what can most accurately be described as a life sentence of silence, apart, without parole.

It’s inexplicably sad. The addition of a new generation, the appearance of grandchildren often makes these stories sadder, still. At dinner one night with one of these couples one said that the beginning of the school year was particularly difficult as they watched neighbors head off to games and plays, concerts and recitals. “I guess I just thought that I would get to be a part of that just like my Mother and Father did.” They spoke of birthdays and holidays where their gifts and their cards were returned, sometimes just showing up on the front porch, unopened. “What do they tell the children? How do they explain why they haven’t seen us? What do they say when the children ask why Grandma and Grandpa didn’t send them anything for their birthdays or for Hanukkah?”

Something very fundamental seems to have changed in at least some parts of our communities. Where once adult children sought assistance in managing the challenges of family ties they deeply desired to keep, there is now an active community led by a vocal group of very high profile therapists that encourage such estrangement. The Ethicist: “But, to paint with a broad brush, therapeutic culture has tended to expand, sometimes recklessly, what qualifies as abuse or harm. In an earlier era, the complete severing of family ties seemed to be justified only by extreme circumstances…Today the adult child going no-contact may speak of not feeling ‘seen’ or of parents who weren’t ’emotionally present’, failed to ‘respect boundaries’, or were ‘controlling.’ Sometimes the grounds–‘narcissistic abuse,’ some generalized ‘toxicity’–sound alarming but are so amorphous that they can be neither refuted nor verified.”

He continues: “All these complaints can arise from genuinely damaging relationships. They can also describe ordinary parental shortcomings. But we should pause at the premise that total, you’re-dead-to-me estrangement is justified simply because continued contact makes someone less happy.”

Is that it? Is the reason for the apparent decline in what constitutes grounds for a life-time ban due to a shift in the therapy community zeitgeist? As young parents we sought the counsel of trusted elders, and we did speak with therapists in an effort to work through some of the stickier, harder parts of raising our family. Always with the desire to maintain a workable, and hopefully happy and loving relationship with not only our children, but also our parents.

Indeed, one of the estranged couples told a story one night over dinner of what would now be a classic example of “failure to respect boundaries” and “controlling behavior” likely to result in estrangement. A clear, red-line boundary around guns and gunplay had been made clear to both sets of grandparents, and yet one summer a set of grandparents arrived for a visit with gifts of very realistic-looking squirt gun pistols and rifles. The in-law in the couple thanked their in-laws for the gift, removed the squirt guns and announced a water balloon fight commencing in 15 minutes. When the grandparents expressed their displeasure at the removal of the guns the young parent-in-law simply reiterated their long-held rule against toys of such type in the house, and asked what their mother-in-law would like them to bring with them when they arrived at the annual family Labor Day party.

No argument. No histrionics. Certainly no cessation of communications or threats to the relationship. Simply a firm restating of the boundary and an equally clear indication that they planned on family business as usual.

These couples who were not creators of a seriously abusive or dangerous relationship, but who have nonetheless been estranged by their adult children tell of “parting words” like “I need to choose myself”, or “I need to protect my peace”. And yet, these sentiments can coexist with an intact family. One that continues to communicate. One in which a next generation gets to receive, and the generation of grandparents gets to extend caring and yes, love. From my seat at those dinner tables everything about estrangement in the absence of truly abusive and harmful behavior on the part of either generation is not normal. It’s actually quite abnormal and strange.

Says so right in the word.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 30th, 2026 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.