Yay, I’m Getting Married … But, What The Hell Do I Do About The Estranged Parents?
Whilst a wedding is potentially a joyful occasion, for some it can become a real challenge - and I am not talking about the headache-inducing conversation with the printers; the months spent trying to source the perfect pair of bridal shoes or getting the recalcitrant photographer to respond to emails. I am talking about the painful business of those who are estranged from family members and whether to invite or not invite them.
Let’s think about Alice, 35, engaged, excited but for the past 10 years, estranged from her parents. She and her beloved fiancé, Alistair were enthusiastically searching for the perfect wedding venue, synching diaries to get the perfect date and investigating the perfect honeymoon destination.
When Alice was around 10 she began to fantasize about her wedding day, about her dad walking her down the aisle and shopping for her wedding dress with her mum, unaware of the bitter and painful estrangement that was to occur following a rather substantial family feud 15 years later.
At 25, Alice, who like her parents had read English at Cambridge, had challenged the family expectations, “spurning” a seat at the table of her parents’ long-established, successful and swanky publishing house in favour of teacher training, a career that for her, felt more meaningful. Her parents’ wrath and disappointment were immeasurable and had far-reaching consequences.
There is an expectation that as young people become independent adults, the relationships with parents morph into something akin to a friendship. Family holidays, shared interests and meals out. What happens when there is an estrangement from parents, when planning a once in a lifetime event such as a wedding?
So here she was, with limitless access to wedding ‘directives’ about each, and every aspect of how to plan her Big Day down to the finest detail, but there was somehow nothing to help her navigate her wedding without her estranged parents’ presence. Societal narrative made no room for this type of scenario. Worse, everything Alice read about the “parentless” bride referred to parents who had died.
Alice was fortunate, early on in the wedding planning, to be able to access private psychotherapy to help her unravel and process her tricky and complicated feelings. During this time, it became clearer and clearer to her the extent to which estrangement is a taboo - she found that many people, by way of mitigating their discomfort would offer uninvited advice such as: “let bygones be bygones”; “just rise above it and invite them” and “they gave you life, why wouldn’t you want them there?”
With the support of the therapist, something that really helped Alice ease her way through her pain and confusion, was being able to put her friends (her chosen family) centre stage, so creating a very different event to the one she had fantasised about at the age of 10. Sadly, Alistair, 45, 10 years ago had lost both loving parents months apart, so there was no opportunity for Alice to receive any form of parental love from what might have been her in-laws. Therapy also helped her to look more creatively at ways of managing this (and other key aspects of her life) and once she had conclusively reached the decision not to invite her estranged parents, she felt completely liberated.
It is worth shining a light on some of the factors that drove Alice to reaching her final decision.
Battling that pressurising voice in her head, urging her to “just rise above it and invite them”, she reminded herself of the reason that she was estranged from her parents. As there had been zero contact for the past decade, she feared that their presence might well create unnecessary drama for this estrangement was not just a minor ‘run-in’.
So essentially,
If they attended, how might her parents’ presence impact the day and would it bring negative energy ?
Would she have the energy to enforce boundaries if things did get “tricky”, even with others’ support?
What would happen if, say, her parents were unwilling to attend, and this reinforced the estrangement?
Would their NOT being present create unnecessary and unwanted gossip …?
Is this the right forum for reconnection and bridge-building?
Ultimately, the decision whether or not invite her estranged parents to her wedding was such a personal and delicate one, and she discovered that there was no right or wrong answer. The key thing was that she and Alistair could celebrate their special day with maximum joy and minimum stress, prioritizing their happiness and well-being, so creating a day that involved those people in their lives who truly loved them for who they were, and not what they did for a living!
And what Alice also reconciled herself with, as part of this process, was that by doing things differently, she was following a growing trend of couples opting for less-stressful alternatives, such as simpler weddings, imicro-weddings and elopements.
Perhaps it is time to normalize dialogue around estrangement and life events to make it easier for us all?
Written by Jennifer Pitt
Jennifer Pitt has been a counsellor/psychotherapist accredited by the British Association of Counselling & Psychotherapy (BACP), for nearly two decades. She runs a private practice where she is increasingly working with those presenting with issues around family estrangement. Alongside this, she has been running a bereavement counselling charity where equally, many clients present for therapy having lost someone from whom they were estranged.
