The Question Every Estranged Parent Is Secretly Asking

Two Sentences That Captured Everything

Dear Loving Heart,

I read every comment that comes through here. And most of them I carry around for awhile.

This one still lingers.

This reader wasn’t writing to be profound. She was just being honest. And sometimes honest is the most profound thing of all.

“When does the foreseeable future arrive for our daughter? Will it still be our future, or our past?”

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about those two sentences.

Because they call out something about estrangement that almost nothing else does. Not the pain of the present. Not the wounds of the past. But the particular ache of the waiting. The holding of a future that may or may not still be yours when it finally arrives.

Most of us who love someone we’ve lost to estrangement are living in a kind of suspended time. Not fully in the present, because part of us is always leaning toward a future where this is different. Not fully free, because we’re holding space for something that hasn’t come yet and may never come in the form we imagined.

And underneath all that waiting lives the question she named so precisely.

What if by the time it comes — if it comes — too much time has passed?

What if the future we’ve been holding space for has already quietly become the past without us knowing it?

What if we’ve been waiting for a door that gently closed while we were looking the other way?

I don’t think the answer to that question is found in more waiting. Or in more certainty. Or in more hoping things will eventually resolve on their own.

I think the answer lives on the other side of being willing to ask it honestly. To sit with it. To let it show you something about where you actually are… not where you wish you were or where you’re afraid you might be.

Because what lives in the space between now and that future, the silence, the distance, the unresolved… is not empty.

It is asking something of you.

More on this in part two.

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But before I go…

This question has been sitting with me for awhile now. I wonder if it’s been sitting with you too.

When you imagine the future you’ve been holding space for — does it still feel like yours to hold?

Thanks for leaving your comment below. What does this question stir in you?

Walking this with you,