Since late 2002, with a few breaks, I’ve lived with “invisible grief,” disenfranchised from conducting a normal family life. By “normal family life,” I do not mean an idealized life, just the usual up and down but decent family life.
It is difficult to explain my consuming and pervasive inner grief to friends, who’ve often met Rachel and gained a negative impression, and who assume that I can’t possibly love her as much as a biological mother could love her child. Peter is unable to discuss it at all; he will not involve himself. He and I have an agreement that Rachel is not mentioned between us. So I don’t share my grief. It has muted with time, as though Rachel died. I know that I will never have a relationship with her again.
Sadly, the daughter I raised with love and respect turned against me, and is unable to control the attention-seeking lies that she concocted with her Aunt Patty Grossman's encouragement and direct suggestions. Poor Rachel continues to embellish and share her stories. A victim of reactive attachment disorder, Rachel has been a compulsive liar since early childhood. She and I worked (with behind the scenes help from my therapist) to overcome the lying (and other RAD behaviors), but the “alienation-causing intervention” by Aunt Patty when Rachel was around age 17 explosively ignited all of Rachel’s early neglect, abandonment, and attachment issues.
I also can understand how easily, with such encouragement and actual suggestions from Aunt Patty, Rachel aimed her long-buried, pre-verbal rage at the only mother she knew.
Without hesitation, I can assert that Rachel and I developed a fully functional “heart-to-heart” connection that grew consistently from the time I appeared regularly in her life, when she was 18 months old, until the time I became her step-mother when she was 2 years 9 months old, and then far more solidly and securely from that point until her late teens. Rachel and I experienced predictable ups and downs during those teen years, and she long resented that I sent her to boarding school for grades 9 through 12 (once at university, though, she thanked me for it). During times of trouble, when she misbehaved, I made clear that I was angry about behavior, but that I would always love her no matter what. Despite the paucity of information about RAD until the late 1990s, my therapist did instill in me the importance of reminding Rachel that no matter how much she pushed me away I would never leave her, and that I always will love her no matter what.
I adopted Rachel shortly after she turned eighteen, as it hadn't been possible before then. Peter and Rachel had planned the adoption as a surprise Christmas gift for me, but Peter discovered that I was required to initiate the adult adoption. Concurrently, coinciding with Rachel’s eighteenth birthday, Peter’s family had escalated their alienation efforts with sharp focus against me. I will never understand why, because the person hurt even more than I is Rachel. The Grossman family is destroyed. Patty Grossman, her partner Helene Kendler, and Peter's mother Carol Z. Klein formed an alliance to separate me from Rachel and Peter. It didn't work with Peter, but poor Rachel is now saddled not only with reactive attachment disorder but also parental alienation from the one person who literally saved her. Perhaps it provides the makings of a new novel for Patty. Otherwise, I can't fathom the rationale. No matter what — even if I actually had been the monster they created in order to scare Rachel away — this isn't appropriate family interaction. Parental Alienation is wrong. Normal family members would find loving ways to help a child deal with a monster parent.
I continue to “move on,” find joy, create loving bonds and enjoyable experiences, but I have lost my daughter. That grief is imbued in me.
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