Parental Alienation and Me
By Sean Bw Parker
November 30, 2025
On an evening in the winter of 1984, after my older brother and I hadn’t seen our mother for some weeks, there came a tap on the French windows of our house near Cullompton in East Devon. The heavy burgundy curtains remained drawn, our father ignoring the quiet raps.
Our mother had finally left the family home on 6th June that year, D-Day, after years of stress, and finally prompted by an exposed affair with a local vicar, whose wife had also been a friend. Our father was 18 years older than our mother, his having met her at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London in the 1960s after the break up of his first marriage, and she down in the capital after growing up in Kendal.
His small-c conservative ways, lurking behind a left-wing presentation, didn’t match so well with our truly liberated mother, in town to become independent as a speech therapist, which she later did. After marrying in 1969 they decamped to the Westcountry where she started working for the NHS, he started as a drama lecturer at Exeter University, and they had my brother in 1972 and me three years later.
However nine years after my birth, and four years at the big new house in East Devon they found their divorce in the Daily Mirror due to the story’s salaciousness, and our father moved us 200 miles away to Carmarthenshire in South Wales (near where he had lived with his first wife and they had brought up his first two sons). Contact with my mother was sporadic from that point forth, our father becoming more and more depressed and isolated, while keeping up arm’s length, wary contact with her. After he died in 1997, I was able to make gradual steps in becoming closer to my mother, and have remained so since.
Two years before he died, in 1995 I married my first girlfriend at the age of twenty, and we soon had a daughter and even bought a little prefab bungalow in a Carmarthenshire village with some inheritance from her grandfather. We had been together since 1992 when we met while I was working at my first job at a local antiques shop, and I became close with her Mormon family (she was one of ten siblings).
When my father died of a heart attack in 1997, at the age of 67, and I was 22, I subconsciously started to reassess my situation, and realised I had things I wanted to do in the world of creativity that wouldn’t be possible in my current domestic situation.
Alcohol had always been part of my family story, from my heavy-drinking grandfathers down (though not my own father). Following a liaison with someone named Robyn while I was dressed as Batman at my brother’s Halloween party, which my wife briefly witnessed, she left to stay with family in Essex.
We remained separated into 1998, staying dolefully in contact on the telephone, until she went quiet one day and told me the next day she had met someone else, and stayed the night with him. We were ‘even’, but the divorce came through the next year, after I had had a full blown nervous breakdown the following Halloween, which led to some years of panic attacks and anxious depression, for which I eventually sought treatment.
During this extended breakdown I met my subsequent partner, a primary school teacher living in Surrey Quays in London, who had family in Surrey near where I was living. She quickly fell pregnant, and upon telling me by phone I said I’d stand by her as long as I could, in whatever she chose to do.
However we didn’t know each other too well, and while I spent my father’s small inheritance on a returning – a few years late – to art school and rent for a cottage for us to move into, it became clear she expected me to give up my new degree. I felt somewhat sprung into this having only recently split up with my ex wife, and started drinking again, despite now having lost my licence twice for drink driving, and our tensions mounted.
My new partner objected to my regularly going to the Student Union, while I saw it as living the student life which she had had, and for which I had opted out of domestic life in the first place. I wasn’t in any sense a ‘wild’ student anyway, seeing university, as a mature student, as another career stage by that point. Suffice to say we only just made it into the new millennium, when the tensions became too much, and I moved into a local student house – in the knowledge I now had a four year old daughter and six month old son.
My mother did a good job of keeping in touch with both of my exes and their mothers, aware of the historical resonances in what was happening, and enjoyed being a supportive grandmother. The mothers gradually stopped communicating with me however, as I became a chef to support myself, then moved to Istanbul following my masters degree in 2004. I had met a Turkish/Armenian woman whom I missed when she returned home, was tired of Tony Blair’s constant bombs-era media, and wanted to live in a foreign country for a while at least.
This accidentally became ten years, over which I had ‘Facebook contact’ with my children, being as supportive as I could be, but obviously not enough. After I returned in 2014 we had a couple of semi-frosty meetings, at which I tried my best, but realised there was much work to be done. When I had some serious legal problems of my own in 2018 (the details of which are not for this piece) we became further estranged, and when I was at last in a position to be in touch in 2022, there was tumbleweed, despite a number of letter sent and attempted explanations of all this. I had no idea what had been said about me over the years, by whom, or how accurate any of it had been.
My ex wife had verbally attacked my mother a couple of years before when she gave me our daughter’s new address so I could send a congratulations card on the birth of our first granddaughter. This made my mother unwilling to be go-between from then on, so I made an approach through National Family Mediation. Still crickets.
I knew when I left my wife and young daughter as a 23 year-old that the future would be challenging because of these decisions I felt myself having to make, but the truth is ‘broken families’ were nothing new in my experience – and epigenetically this reality might have gone back generations.
Neither of the mothers of my children shared these experiences, we never talked about it, and I’m still not sure they truly understood the breakdown I endured following my father’s death. Did my father alienate his sons from their mother, and then did the mothers of my children alienate them from me? Was any of it deserved? It’s a matter of perspective, I guess.
Sean Bw Parker (MA) is an artist, writer and musician, and contributing editor to Empowering The Innocent (ETI)