When I was growing up, my family had its own way of dealing with disagreements. We stopped speaking. Sometimes the deep freeze lasted a day, sometimes a week. Every once in a while, an offending cousin or aunt was simply erased from the family landscape, airbrushed out of our lives like a deposed member of the Politburo.
I stopped talking to my parents after a series of family difficulties culminating in an angry phone conversation with my mother in 1988. This communication blockade continued to 2000. Other than an annual Christmas card from my parents, which they warmly signed using only their last name, there was no interaction whatever for 12 years.
People like me who were raised in a grudge-holding culture know that the silent treatment is self-perpetuating. The longer you are silent, the longer you will be silent. The further out into the ocean you sail, the harder it is to see the harbor. After a year or two or three, it’s not so easy to pick up the phone and just chat.
It´s amazing to read something like that. The one who has not crossed family troubles cannot feel relieved the way I am, after reading it!
I remember as a kid going for our weekly “Sunday drives” with my mom & dad not speaking to one another the entire day – they could sit in the car 2 feet from each other & not speak during the drive, hikes, meals, amusement parks, ice cream stops, & on & on. It was strange for my sister & I (they would speak to us as if nothing was wrong) and looking back on it, surreal. These ‘silent treatments’ (that’s what we called them) usually lasted 3-4 days (sometimes half of a 10 day camping vacation), but could go for well over a week. These episodes would happen several times a year. Now he’s been gone for over a decade, and she (86 y.o.) misses him. She has forgotten (or buried) the really bad times (there were many), and just misses him.