“But that’s still your family”
The Southern Black rules that make kinship more important than harm in family estrangement
“But that’s still your mom.”
“That’s still your blood.”
“You only get one family.”
Growing up Black in Mississippi, I overheard different versions of these phrases throughout my life. Now, I hear them directly. It usually happens after someone learns that my mother and I no longer have a relationship, as though reminding me that she’s my mom should settle every question about why I chose to create distance over four years ago.
You can love a family member and understand that love has not made the relationship emotionally safe. She can accept that someone will always be her mother, sister, aunt or cousin without accepting that the title grants that person unrestricted access to her life.
Rule # 1 "That’s still your mom.”
The conversation rarely begins with what happened, whether there has been accountability or what would need to change for the relationship to become healthy. Her title becomes the answer. She’s my mom, and according to a rule I learned long before our estrangement, that relationship is supposed to outweigh whatever happened within it.
Rule # 2 You only get one family
Phrases like these, designed to teach us loyalty, also taught us that preserving family relationships should matter more than addressing the harm taking place inside them. Kinship was treated as a permanent obligation. Trust, emotional safety, accountability and respect were negotiable, but family wasn’t.
“That’s still your family” sounds like an acknowledgment of connection. But too often, it functions as a demand for continued access.
Once the phrase is spoken, attention shifts away from what made the relationship harmful and toward the person who has decided to limit or end contact. Instead of asking what happened, whether the person responsible has acknowledged it or whether anything has changed, people begin questioning the decision of the person who stepped away.
“Why can’t she forgive?” “Why can’t she let it go?” “Why can’t she be the bigger person?” “Why is she breaking up the family?” While these questions are directed at anyone who chooses to walk away, they carry a specific, historical weight when aimed at Black women.
For Black women, those questions come with another expectation: We are often assigned responsibility for maintaining the relationships around us. We are expected to remember birthdays, check on relatives, bring people together, smooth over disagreements, protect family privacy and keep family traditions going. When a relationship breaks down, people may look to us to repair it even when we weren’t the ones who caused the damage.
Rule # 3 “What happens in this house stays in this house.”
That responsibility of kin keeping is reinforced by another rule many of us learned early: “What happens in this house stays in this house.”
Privacy can protect a family’s intimacy, but secrecy can also protect harmful behavior. When keeping family business inside the family becomes more important than addressing what happened, silence gets mistaken for loyalty. The person who names the harm is often treated like she has betrayed the family, while the behavior she named remains unexamined.
Rule # 4: “Respect your elders”
This becomes even more complicated when the family member is an elder, especially a mother, especially in the south. Respect for elders in the south can quietly become freedom from accountability. A Black woman may be told that she should never speak to her mother a certain way, embarrass her, challenge her version of events or remove herself from the relationship. What is often missing from those conversations is any consideration of how a mother should treat her adult daughter.
The title is expected to govern the daughter’s behavior, even when it has done little to govern the mother’s. My estrangement is not something I chose casually, nor is it a decision I believe every person should make when a family relationship becomes difficult. Estrangement is not the answer to every disagreement, disappointment or unresolved conflict. Relationships can go through painful seasons and still be worth repairing.
But reconciliation requires more than a shared last name or family title. It requires honesty about what happened, responsibility for the harm caused, changed behavior and a willingness to respect the boundaries needed for a relationship to continue.
New rule: Forgiveness cannot do all of the work by itself.
A person can forgive and still recognize that renewed access would place her back in the same harmful dynamic. She can love a family member and understand that love has not made the relationship emotionally safe. She can accept that someone will always be her mother, sister, aunt, or cousin without accepting that the title grants that person unrestricted access to her life.
That distinction matters because family connection and meaningful support are not automatically the same thing. We are taught to look to family as our first and most dependable source of support, but a family relationship does not become supportive simply because it exists. Support also requires care, respect, accountability and concern for how another person experiences the relationship.
When those things are consistently absent, reminding someone that “that’s still your family” does nothing to address what she has been asked to endure.
If families want relationships to continue, the entire responsibility cannot rest on the person who was harmed. She cannot be the only one expected to understand, forgive, overlook, return and try again. Repair requires participation from the person whose actions made repair necessary.
When people tell me, “That’s still your mom,” they are not telling me anything I’ve forgotten. I know who she is. I know what the relationship is called. The title was never the question.
The question is whether a family title should be enough to require someone’s continued presence when accountability, emotional safety and changed behavior are absent.
“That’s still your family” may accurately describe the relationship, but it does not resolve what happened within it. Kinship can explain how we are connected. It cannot, on its own, make that connection healthy enough to continue.
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