I hardly knew ye, Johnny... . Good luck to you!

My middle child has a birthday this month.  Happy Birthday, Johnny.

The last time I saw Johnny was when he was about sixteen.  Now he's in his thirties.

The child-parent estrangement phenomenon, prevalent almost exclusively in the West, is called Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), where one parent, most often the woman, abuses a child by overbearing his or her will as a tender-minded minor, in effect brainwashing him or her against the other parent, and it typically comes to the forefront during a divorce where the manipulating parent suborns the will of a young child for her own short-term benefit (although the effects can, as in the case of Johnny, last decades or forever), abetted by her superior custodial grant of time alone with the child thanks to our mother-knows-best inclined domestic law courts (in my case, I had Johnny and his sibling 19% of the time versus 81% of the time granted to their mother).  My divorce from Sharon Rogers Lightbourne was a doozy, lasting about half a decade and costing me at least a quarter-million dollars, my entire legacy (the litigation stopped only when there was no longer any money her unholy battery of divorce lawyers could rip and tear from my eviscerated estate) and although I still mourn the extrajudicial loss of my three children to this, in my opinion, to this covert narcissist, I don't rue one bit getting free of this woman who is, in my opinion, a totally self-centered, deviously manipulative and deceptively controlling adult female who preys upon innocent children along with her coterie of paid mercenary "professionals" to ruin their lives in pursuit of her selfish goals.

The last time I had any communication from the lad was when he wrote to me upon his graduation from high school asking me to provide full funding for his four years of college tuition and all university fees, which I did, with nary a word of thanks afterwards.  I stumbled on-line across a 2016 voter registration listing for him in a Seattle precinct, so I am glad that he alone of my three sons was able to break free of his, in my opinion, destructively dominating mother and move as far away from her as possible, as she lives across the country from him on the East Coast with her second husband.