The case of the mother whose kids won’t talk to her.

JC’s adult children have cut off contact with her. They’ve told her why. But JC still doesn’t understand what happened — or what, if anything, she’s supposed to do now.

So reporter Kim Nederveen Pieterse finds JC a proxy: Chess Dugas, a woman who cut off contact with her own parents and now talks publicly about estrangement on her YouTube channel, The Scapegoat Club. Together, JC and Chess have the kind of conversation neither of them can have with their own families — about no contact, boundaries, gifts, guilt, missing your mom, and whether estrangement always has to feel so final.

This is part one of our two-part story on estrangement.

From the episode: 

— Chess Dugas — makes The Scapegoat Club on YouTube and TikTok: @thesscapegoatclub

— Joshua Coleman — wrote New Rules of Estrangement and publishes the newsletter Family Troubles: www.drjoshuacoleman.com

— Kim Nederveen Pieterse — listen to more of her reporting: www.kimnp.org

New to Proxy? Try Bisexual Wife Guy for a classic case, or Bob and the Forgiveness Spell for another story about family rupture, anger, and what it means to let go without pretending nothing happened.

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