Dear Lorraine,

My son Brian turned forty-one in March. I called him on his birthday, like I always do. It rang five times and went to voicemail. I left a message. He texted back three days later: “Thanks Mom, been busy.” That was it.

This has been building for about four years now. The calls got shorter, then less frequent. He used to visit for Thanksgiving with his wife and the boys, but last year they went to her family’s instead, and when I said I understood, I meant it, but I also cried in the kitchen after I hung up. The visit before that, the one they did make, they left a day early. Something about the boys’ soccer schedule. Maybe it was true.

I don’t know what I did. I have replayed every conversation I can remember from the last five years and I cannot find the moment where this started. I want to ask him. But I’m afraid that asking will be the thing that finally makes him stop calling altogether.

What do I do?

Still Waiting in Sacramento

Dear Still Waiting,

I want to start with the sentence you almost buried in the middle of your letter. “Maybe it was true.” That is the sentence that tells me everything. You are living in a place where you no longer trust the ordinary explanations your own son gives you, because the ordinary explanations have stacked up into something that doesn’t feel ordinary anymore. A soccer schedule is a soccer schedule. But a soccer schedule on top of a shortened visit on top of a missed Thanksgiving on top of a birthday call returned by text three days late is not a soccer schedule. It is a pattern. And you see it, even though you are not sure you are allowed to say so.

Here is the hard thing I want to say to you, and I am going to say it with care because you deserve care. You may have done something. You may not have. Both of those things are possible, and you may never get a clean answer about which one it is. Sometimes a grown child pulls away because of something specific the parent said or did, something that landed harder than the parent realized, something the child has carried for years while the parent has forgotten it completely. I have sat across from hundreds of people on both sides of this, and the thing that surprises parents most is that the moment they cannot remember is often the moment their child cannot forget.

But sometimes it isn’t about you. Sometimes a grown child pulls away because their life got complicated in ways that have nothing to do with their mother. Because their marriage is hard and your voice on the phone reminds them of a version of themselves they are trying to outgrow. Because they are overwhelmed and the people who love them most are, unfairly, the first ones they drop. None of that is your fault. All of it can look exactly the same from where you are standing.

You asked me what to do. I am going to tell you, and you are not going to like part of it.

Don’t ask him what you did. Not yet. That question, right now, will land on him as a demand for reassurance, and if he is pulling away, a demand for reassurance is the thing most likely to push him further. The parent reaches out with love. The child hears pressure. And the distance grows.

Instead, do something smaller. Call him on a Tuesday. No occasion. Tell him something small and real about your day. Don’t ask when he’s visiting. Don’t ask about the boys. Don’t say “I miss you,” even though you do and you have every right to. Just let him hear your voice without any weight on it. Even if it goes to voicemail. Especially if it goes to voicemail.

You are not performing indifference. You are giving him a version of you that is easy to call back.

And then, if months pass and the texts stay short and the visits don’t come, you can ask. Sit with him, if you can get him in a room. Say something like, “I’ve noticed we talk less than we used to, and I want to understand why, even if it’s hard to hear.” And then you have to actually be ready to hear it. Whatever it is. Without defending. Without explaining.

But the woman who wrote me this letter is not a woman who is going to sit in her kitchen and wonder for the next ten years. You are grieving a relationship that is still technically alive, and that is one of the loneliest kinds of grief there is, because nobody brings casseroles for it. You just notice, quietly, that the phone doesn’t ring the way it used to.

He is forty-one. You are his mother. Both of those things are permanent. The silence is not. Not necessarily. But you cannot love someone into calling you back. You can only make it safe enough that they want to.

That is what I would do. And then I would wait. Not forever. But long enough to mean it.

Lorraine Kessler is a retired clinical social worker who spent thirty years in private practice in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, specializing in midlife and later-life transitions. Write to her at letters@sundayeveningreview.com.