When You Wonder If You'll Ever Hear From Them Again
Published by Still Their Parent | July 2026
It happens in the middle of the night.
You are lying awake — not exactly thinking, not exactly sleeping — and your mind starts running the math. How long has it been now? Fourteen months. Nineteen. Three years this October. And then the question that lives underneath all the other questions, the one you don't say out loud to anyone: Will I ever hear from them again?
This is one of the most common questions in estrangement communities — and one of the least talked about. It feels too dark. Too final. Like saying it out loud might make it true, or like wondering it means you've already given up. So most parents carry it in the dark, alone, running numbers that can't be calculated.
You are not alone in asking. And you deserve a real answer — or at least, the most honest answer available.
The Question No One Wants to Ask Out Loud
There is a reason this question stays unsaid.
Most parents who are waiting for an estranged child have developed a particular mental discipline: they do not let themselves fully confront the possibility that reconciliation might not come. The question will they ever come back? feels too much like asking should I stop hoping? — and stopping hope feels like stopping love. Like betrayal. Like closing a door on someone you refuse to close the door on.
So the question gets suppressed. Buried. Surfaced only in the dark, only when the guards are down.
But there is a crucial distinction worth making: Will they come back? is not the same question as How do I live while I don't know?
The first question — will they come back? — is unanswerable. You cannot know. No one can tell you. It is outside your control in every meaningful sense. Asking it is the kind of asking that goes nowhere, that exhausts without producing anything.
The second question — how do I live while I don't know? — is answerable. It is within reach. It is the question that this post, and the Still Their Parent course, are actually built around.
The wondering isn't giving up. It's your mind trying to figure out how to survive something it was never designed to survive without a resolution.
What the Research Actually Says
If you are going to lie awake running numbers, you should at least have the real ones.
Dr. Joshua Coleman, one of the leading researchers and clinicians working with estranged families, has spent decades studying estrangement patterns. His work, along with a growing body of research, suggests that most estrangements are not permanent. Studies indicate that roughly 25 to 30 percent of estranged relationships reconcile within five years. Over longer timeframes, that number grows. Most estrangements — not all, but most — involve some form of eventual contact.
Dr. Karl Pillemer of Cornell University, whose research identified that approximately 67 million Americans are currently estranged from a family member, similarly found that the majority of estrangements involve eventual reconnection of some kind — even if the relationship looks different from what it was before. Reduced contact. A changed dynamic. Something rather than nothing.
But here is the part that deserves equal weight: not every estrangement reconciles. Some resolve into limited, careful contact rather than full restoration. Some do not resolve at all. These are real outcomes that real parents are living, and pretending otherwise would be a disservice to every parent who is carrying that reality.
The research offers genuine hope. It does not offer guarantees. And you deserve to sit with both of those truths at once.
Why the Waiting Is Its Own Kind of Suffering
Dr. Pauline Boss, whose work on ambiguous loss has shaped how therapists understand unresolvable grief, has a precise name for what you are experiencing.
Unlike death, estrangement has no endpoint. There is no funeral. No cultural ritual that marks when the mourning is supposed to shift. No one brings you a casserole and says, we're so sorry for your loss — because the person is not dead. There is no moment when the world around you acknowledges that you are allowed to grieve, or allowed to move forward, or allowed to feel anything at all about what has happened.
The open-endedness of estrangement keeps the nervous system in a state of readiness. The brain knows there is unfinished business. It stays vigilant — scanning for signals, alert to possibilities, on watch for the text that might still come. This is not a character flaw. It is the biological machinery of attachment doing exactly what it was built to do. And it is exhausting.
To be waiting for an estranged child is to live in a suspended state — past the acute phase, not yet anywhere near resolution, carrying a wound that the world around you often cannot see and does not know how to honor.
That is a specific and serious form of suffering. It deserves to be named as such.
The Trap of Living on Hold
There is a version of waiting that becomes something else over time.
Many estranged parents unconsciously put their lives on pause. They avoid redecorating the child's old room — in case they come back and feel at home. They skip events or opportunities — what if this is the year? They hold off on major life decisions. They organize their lives around the possibility of a return that may be years away, or may never come.
This pause feels loving. It feels like keeping the door open. It feels like faithfulness.
Over time, it becomes its own form of grief.
Life lived on hold is not a gift to your child. Your child does not know you kept the room. Your child does not know you didn't take the trip, or turned down the opportunity, or waited instead of living. The pause costs you something real. And it may cost you that something for years, while the person you are paying it for is entirely unaware of the price.
Keeping the door unlocked does not require not living. You can love someone, hold space for their return, and still move forward in your own life. These are not in conflict. They are, in fact, what healthy hope looks like.
How to Hold Hope Without Being Held Hostage by It
This is not the section that tells you to just move on. It is not the section that tells you everything will be okay.
What it is: an honest map for living fully while keeping the door unlocked.
The unsent annual letter. Some parents find it meaningful to write a letter to their child on their birthday, or at the new year, or on the anniversary of the estrangement — documenting their love, their life, their continued thinking of them. These letters don't have to be sent. They can be kept, returned to, revised. They can be sent someday, or never read by anyone but you. The practice keeps the relationship alive in a form that does not require your child's participation to exist.
The five-year question. When you notice yourself pausing your life for the possibility of reconciliation, try asking: What would I do if I knew for certain that it would be five more years? And then do that thing. Not as resignation. As clarity. The answer is almost always something you already knew you needed to do.
Grief counseling that explicitly addresses ambiguous loss. Not all grief counselors are trained in this specific framework — it is worth asking about directly. A therapist who understands the open-ended nature of estrangement grief is working with you toward something real. Our post on finding an estrangement therapist covers how to find one and what to look for.
Isaiah 40:31
"Those who wait on the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint."
We offer this not as a promise of reconciliation. The verse does not say those who wait long enough will be reunited. It says: those who wait will have their strength renewed. The waiting itself is not punishment. The waiting itself is not wasted time. There is something happening in the waiting — something being built, something being tended — even when it is invisible to you in the middle of it.
Whatever your faith tradition, or your relationship to Scripture, the truth this verse holds is worth sitting with: you are not diminished by waiting. You are not failing because you are still here, still holding, still keeping the door unlocked. That faithfulness has its own weight.
Still Their Parent
The hardest part of estrangement isn't the silence. It is not knowing if the silence will ever end.
The Still Their Parent course was built for parents who are in exactly this place — past the acute phase, not yet near resolution, carrying an open wound in a world that doesn't quite have a word for what you are carrying. Phase 5: Hope and Reconciliation is specifically for parents who are learning to hold space for a future while living fully in the present.
You are still their parent. Even in the silence. Even in the not-knowing. That does not change.
Still Their Parent is an online course for parents who did not choose estrangement. Our content is therapist-backed, grounded in research, and written with care for where you actually are.