It Ends With Us

I was once estranged from my father. Raising kids with an engaged dad has made me realize how radically we can change what comes next.

A set of statistics stopped me cold this week: 28 percent of daughters and 24 percent of sons are estranged from their fathers. Only 6 percent of adult children are estranged from their mothers.

That first number isn’t abstract to me. For most of my life, until his suicide when I was 19-years-old, it would have included me; I was estranged from my father. When I was a kid it wasn’t necessarily normal, but no one treated it as a scandal, either. No one assumed something had gone terribly wrong. It was sad, sure. But not shocking.

That alone says a lot.

The Atlantic recently ran a piece examining the widening father-daughter divide, and what struck me wasn’t just the emotional distance it described, but how culturally legible that distance has become. Father estrangement has been normalized in a way maternal estrangement hasn’t. When mothers disappear, we reach for moral language, people write entire books about it.

Raising my kids in a home where their dad isn’t just present but profoundly involved has quietly reshaped how I understand all of this. My husband isn’t “helping.” He isn’t an assistant. He is a parent in the fullest, most ordinary sense of the word.