Can You DIY a Family?
Can You DIY a Family
Written by Kat Boskovic
Photographed by Alexa lunney
My father is a narcissist. That’s the simplest way to put it, though it took me years to reach that conclusion—a conclusion the rest of my family still struggles to accept. He showed up to all my orchestra concerts. He coached me from the sidelines at my soccer games. He once even hassled every employee at the Graz International Airport for an earlier transatlantic flight to catch the opening night of a play I had written. Physically present, financially supportive, yet fissures in our relationship widened as I matured to detect his blatant manipulations, control disguised as care, and affection that came with terms and conditions. The person who was meant to love me unconditionally was the very one holding me back.
After three years of high school littered with periodic depressive episodes and anxiety attacks, I chose to cut my father out of my life entirely. Coincidentally, the mental illnesses that had festered within me since I could remember, that plagued my every thought and behavior, dissipated into thin air. For the very first time since elementary school playground shenanigans, I could confidently say I was happy. And not a forced happy, where I incessantly analyzed the occurrences of my day and convinced myself that it was, in fact, a good day despite the growing pit of existential dread germinating within the very core of my being—but genuine delight with my life.
But my renewed joie de vivre quickly became infested when relatives learned that I had cut off my father. In my eyes, I had merely ended an abusive interrelationship—one that was no different than a toxic friendship or romance—but people who didn’t even know the sweeping history of my father’s manipulations and grandiosity thought differently. I had become a villain tearing apart a happy family. I was selfish. Dramatic. Unforgiving. I simply did not understand the extent of unconditional love a parent feels towards a child, and my cruel actions had supposedly broken my (emotionless) father.
The shame and judgement that develops after such a decision is hardly an anomaly. While society has long propagated the ideal of family as an unassailable bond and a foundational pillar of unconditional love, an increasing number of individuals are recognizing that these very relationships—particularly those marked by manipulation, control, and emotional exploitation—can be not only damaging, but downright abusive. The decision to sever ties is not a betrayal, but an act of self-preservation that 27 percent of Americans have made when choosing to cut off a relative (Pillemer 2019). Estrangement, though still laden with societal stigma, is becoming an increasingly viable choice for those who have faced the harsh reality that maintaining such familial ties can come at the cost of their own emotional well-being. In a modern society that combats mental health stigmas and places psychological health at the forefront of personal welfare, it’s no surprise that the concept of “no contact” has gone culturally viral. Through buzzwords like “gaslighting,” “guilt tripping,” and “generational trauma” that have flooded our social media feeds, we’ve metamorphosed from prioritizing traditional families to prioritizing self-care. If our families fit into our self-love agenda, we embrace them as a cornerstone of our well-being for comfort and continuity, but if they only evoke negativity, we have the grace to step away.
Especially as society progresses to embrace non-nuclear families such as single parents, LGBTQ+ couples, and second marriages, blood ties are rendered less consequential. In the twenty-first century, we have redefined family.
I didn’t speak to my father for 14 months. The silence was both a relief and an epiphany. The absence, rather than creating yet another fissure in our complicated relationship, revealed to me that blood alone could not bind one to a meaningful connection. My friends cared for me much more than my father ever did. “Dad” was a word that always lingered on the tip of my tongue but never seemed to break out of my mouth, yet the words “best friend” spilled right out of my lips with no resistance. Saying “I love you” was no longer a challenge. Hugs were easy, not awkward. I discovered a chosen family, bound not by lineage, but by a mutual care that unveiled the futility of prioritizing biological ties over authentic companionship; afterall, while family is built-in, friends are people we choose over and over to be with, without any obligation to do so. I had found true kinship.
Yet, as liberating as this realization was, severing ties with a parent, no matter how fraught, remains a profoundly challenging decision. The very act of cutting off blood family, regardless of their toxicity, pulls at the very threads that constitute identity. The adult understands the necessity, yet the inner child, with knuckles white from desperation, clings onto deep-seated ties to the past. After observing close-knit families who eat their meals together and share stories over dinner, I can’t help but ache for that unconditional love. I may hold my father at an arm’s length, but there will always be a 5-year-old girl who asks her dad to do her pigtails in the morning, and a twelve-year-old preteen who smiles with all the brackets of her braces when her dad is on the sidelines of her soccer game. My father has both been heavily involved in my life, and cut off entirely, but both courses of action felt inextricably at odds with my sense of self, each fraught with its own unresolvable paradox.
Perhaps, our relationship exists in an ambiguous gray area, a limbo of irresolution. Perhaps, there is no way he can be entirely on my good side, or entirely on my bad side. He simply must permanently reside in a purgatory between absolutes, for there is no neat resolution where I can tie up all emotional complexities into a neat little bow. And so, I move forward, not in the certainty of a clean break, but in the messy, often painful understanding that sometimes, we must live with the tension of things unresolved, knowing that some relationships are too tangled to ever fully untangle. And for my 18-year-old self, that will suffice.
