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A Mother's Battle — A Story Whose Shape You'll Recognize Whether You're a Mother or a Father

TL;DR. Fictional 5-scene vignette synthesizing patterns from the longitudinal PA literature. The post is anchored in Harman, Kruk & Hines (2018) finding that parental alienation victimization is gender-symmetric — roughly equal prevalence between mothers and fathers. The cultural narrative (PA as mostly a fathers'-rights issue) has not caught up to the data. The shape of the experience is the same. So is the reunification path: be the door that refuses to close.

Author: Alan Markson · Last reviewed: 2026-05-15 · License: CC BY 4.0 Originally published at antialienate.com/blog/a-mothers-battle.

One

The first time her son said it — I don't want to come this weekend — she was making toast. The kitchen radio was playing something French. She turned the radio off and sat down at the small wooden table and asked him, on the phone, what was wrong. He said nothing. She said that's okay. She said I'll see you next weekend then. And then she hung up and made the toast anyway and ate it standing at the sink because sitting felt suddenly impossible.

She didn't know yet what she had just heard. She would learn — over the next eight months, through three court hearings and one school meeting and seventy-two evenings of writing single-line entries in a notebook with a navy cover — that what she had heard was the first move of a campaign that had been running for six months before her son ever spoke that sentence. The sentence was the surface. The campaign was the depth.

Two

Most things about it were ordinary. That was the part that people who had not lived through it could not believe. There were no bruises. No 911 calls. No dramatic exit. Just a series of cancelled weekends, missed phone calls, a stuffed bear that disappeared from her son's bedroom, his last name slowly omitted from school enrollment forms, the way her ex's new partner began signing notes home from the teacher.

She read about a mother in Texas whose son said the same first sentence. She read about a mother in São Paulo whose daughter began listing reasons that were not reasons. She read about a father in Manchester whose seven-year-old started flinching at his own name. She read about parents in Dublin and Lyon and Antwerp and Toronto and a small town in Bavaria she would never see. The stories all had different details. The shape was the same. The shape was always the same.

Three

Her therapist — a woman named Lina who had read Pauline Boss in graduate school — said one thing the first session that she would remember for years afterward: what you are experiencing has a name. The name is ambiguous loss. Your child is alive but psychologically unreachable. There is no funeral for this. There is no sympathy card. The grief has no script. You are not crazy. You are grieving something the culture has not yet built rituals around.

She wrote that on the first page of the notebook with the navy cover. Underneath it she wrote: the shape is the same.

Four

There were small mercies. A neighbour who watched her son on Saturdays and told her, gently, that he had asked twice that month when he could see her. A school nurse who, eighteen months in, slid a printout of a nursing log across a coffee-shop table without saying a word. A judge who, on a Tuesday morning, asked one question that her ex's lawyer could not answer. A handful of academic citations that her own lawyer learned to put into motions: Harman, Kruk and Hines, 2018. Bondavalli v Italy, 2015. Re S, 2020.

There were also small cruelties. The grandmother who sided with the alienator without examining the story. The friend who said both parents need to compromise. The pediatrician who never wrote the words no acute findings in a way that the family court could later use.

She did not blame any of them. Most of them had simply not been taught.

Five

Three years later her son arrived for a Sunday lunch and sat across from her at the same wooden table and asked, in a voice that was older than the voice she remembered, Mom, why didn't you ever stop showing up?

She had practiced the answer for a long time. She had also un-practiced it many times. In the moment, what she said was the simplest thing she had: Because the door had to be one I refused to close.

He nodded. He ate the soup. They didn't talk about any of it again for a month. Then they did. And then they didn't again for two months. And then they did again, this time longer.

The notebook with the navy cover sat on a shelf above the radio. She did not open it that year. She did not need to. The clock had started again.

What this story is naming

This is fiction synthesizing patterns from the longitudinal PA literature. The clinical and legal anchors are real:

  • Harman, Kruk & Hines (2018) — Psychological Bulletin meta-analysis: PA victimization is gender-symmetric (roughly equal prevalence between mothers and fathers). The cultural narrative that PA is mostly a "fathers'-rights" issue has not caught up to the data.
  • Boss (1999) — Ambiguous Loss. The signature wound. Grief without a funeral.
  • Baker (2007) — longitudinal adult-children data. Many alienated children eventually re-engage. The most common turning point is not a court ruling but a life event that reframes the old story.
  • Re S (Parental Alienation: Cult) [2020] EWCA Civ 568 — UK Court of Appeal recognition of a mother-targeted case. The legal architecture is increasingly gender-neutral.
  • Bondavalli v. Italy (ECHR 2015) — applies regardless of which parent is targeted.

Three things to leave with

  1. You are not the only one. Across thirty time zones in this exact hour, other parents are reading the same exchange-weekend message you just got, looking at the same quiet folder, listening to the same child whose voice has been narrowing for months.
  2. The cultural narrative is wrong about who this happens to. Mothers and fathers are roughly equally affected. The shape of the experience is the same. The strategies in the literature work for both.
  3. The clock does start again. Many alienated children re-engage. The reunification literature is consistent. The work in the meantime is to be the door that refuses to close.
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Citations

  • Harman, J. J., Kruk, E., & Hines, D. A. (2018). Parental Alienating Behaviors: An Unacknowledged Form of Family Violence. Psychological Bulletin, 144(12), 1275–1299.
  • Boss, P. (1999). Ambiguous Loss. Harvard University Press.
  • Baker, A. J. L. (2007). Adult Children of Parental Alienation Syndrome.
  • Bernet, W. (2010). Parental Alienation, DSM-5, and ICD-11.
  • Re S (Parental Alienation: Cult) [2020] EWCA Civ 568.
  • Bondavalli v. Italy, ECHR 2015, App. no. 35532/12.

Disclaimer

Educational fiction. Not clinical or legal advice. If you are in crisis: US 988 · Belgium 0800 32 123 · UK 116 123.

Author byline: Alan Markson · License: CC BY 4.0 · Originally published at antialienate.com.