Dawn is estranged from her children. She wants you to learn from her mistakes.

Meet Dawn.

Dawn is a TikTok creator who posts videos about being estranged from her three adult sons. Posting under the username 'Fired Mom', Dawn's story has gone viral, with some of her videos racking up millions of views.

Dawn has said that she began posting on TikTok as a way to find community with other estranged parents, as the experience of child estrangement is one that is inherently isolating and difficult to navigate. But not everyone believes her motivation.

Rather, Dawn's videos have been met with significant backlash from TikTok creators and commenters across the internet. Many have questioned her decision to post such an intimate story online for all to see, and others have gone so far as to label her a narcissist. 

And while Dawn says she takes accountability for her actions and the role she played in her estrangement from her family, people in the comments section often disagree.

How "Fired Mom" became estranged from her children.

When you hear that a mother has become estranged from all three of her children, it's only natural that the first question to pop into your head is, what happened?

The TikTok creator shared her version of events over two 10-minute videos, the bulk of which focus on how she became estranged from her eldest son.

@fired_mom Replying to @Maria Answering why my sons are #nocontact. #part1 #traumatok #therapytiktok #therapytok #estranged #singlemother #fosterchild #orphan #narctok #divorcedwomen #divorcediaries ♬ original sound - Fired Mom

In the first video, Dawn said that her children have gone no contact with her due to "a multitude of factors".

"My life was one filled with trauma, and was not one that was addressed with therapy," she began.

Dawn felt like she "was in a fast-forward" to achieve all her life goals by the age of 29, which led to her ignoring red flags when she met the man who would become her husband, and eventually the father of her three sons.

"I did not have the strength or the self-esteem to be able to stand up to those red flags," she said, although she noted that she did try to end things several times along the way.

"Once I found out I was pregnant, I was like, 'This is it. This is my life. I need to make it work,'" she said.

Things didn't improve with marriage and children, and after several more attempts, Dawn said that she finally left the marriage when her youngest son was around two years old.

"It takes seven or eight times for someone who is abused to leave their abuser, and it was the eighth and final time," she said. "I did not realise that when you leave or when you discard a [narcissist], that they will do everything in their power to make your life hell, and that's exactly what he did. He did everything in his power to alienate my sons against me, but that's just part of the story."

The other part of Dawn's backstory, she said, is that she was allegedly "raised in a narcissistic family cult, by a silent generation cult leader with Boomer uncles".

"My upbringing was very strict, so I was very strict with my sons," she said. "I did choose my battles; I loved them very much. I don't think they doubted how much I love them, but I did not have a typical family unit to model, to understand how to be a loving parent, that's for sure."

It was during her sons' teenage years that tensions began to rise, she said. When her oldest son was "showing that he needed therapy", she tried to get him that help, but "he would not open up". She then "tried the tough love, because tough love was... the parenting style at the time when kids were acting out."

Dawn said that it was "very tough on him" and that his father only saw the children "every other weekend", so he wasn't very engaged. But neither was she, Dawn conceded.

"When they were teenagers, my body started to implode with one chronic illness diagnosis after the other," she said. 

"It was very difficult for my kids, because when I wasn't working, I was sleeping, I was resting. Their teen years probably were not fun and were filled with worry, I'm sure."

Her eldest son left home "very early", and Dawn recalled that they were "very difficult years" in which she "made lots of mistakes".

Eventually, her eldest met his then-future wife. Initially, Dawn was "very grateful" to her, because her son "started making some really good decisions" that she was happy to celebrate.

"She was very complimentary to me as a mum, saying I did such a great job raising my son, thanking me because he was such a wonderful guy and treated her so well," she said. "I should have, at that point, said, 'Well, I wasn't the perfect mother.' I should have, at that point, brought up the fact that I made many mistakes — I didn't... I wish that I had, because that would have opened up some conversations at that point, and allowed me to apologise to my son then."

Over time, though, Dawn said that her own joy in seeing her son's successes was not being perceived that way.

"I was happy... to see my son as I knew he could be, but they took that as me being obsessed with him," she said. "I was just happy to see him being such a great guy."

Then, in what Dawn called "horrible timing", she "suffered a brain injury" and a "very severe concussion" in which she was "knocked out for over 45 minutes, and it was the second concussion within a year".

"A second concussion within a year can kill you, and it almost killed me," she said.

Healing took a long time and a lot of medical intervention, and, she explained, caused her to "have a lot of behaviours that were difficult" for her eldest son and his wife — who, at this stage, was expecting their first child.

Along the way, Dawn said, she "went into a mania and a psychosis that made things even worse" between them, and Dawn suspects that her ex-husband was also telling them that she was "crazy anyway".

The first time her eldest son went no contact with her, Dawn said, was because of a comment she made to her daughter-in-law when her granddaughter was an infant.

They had organised a visit on the porch (this was the height of COVID-19), and Dawn recalled that her daughter-in-law was "looking forlorn the whole entire time". Noting that she was "on lots of psychiatric meds [due to her] mania, from [her] psychosis, that were keeping [her] brain down" and that she was "trying to lighten the mood", Dawn recalled saying, "'Does it piss you off that everyone says she looks just like her dad?'"

"My son's response to me saying that on the porch was, 'Oh, she's too pretty to look like me,' and my daughter-in-law didn't really respond," Dawn said, adding that she apologised immediately. "I also said, 'Wow, that didn't sound right, I'm so sorry. I should not have even said that.'"

Now, the context here is that the daughter-in-law was adopted, and as Dawn said, she "should have understood how much she wanted to have a child who looked like her". However, later in the video, Dawn also said that the daughter-in-law was upset with her for not apologising to her directly for her behaviour while she was in a state of psychosis.

"I was devastated, and I did everything wrong," Dawn said of this first period of no contact. "I sent gifts, I sent cards, I sent emails. I sent cards to my daughter-in-law. I still, at this point, was not looking at anything to do with no contact online, I had no idea about anything. None of this, I had no clue about any behaviours that any adult children would do if they thought their parent was a narc, I had no idea."

After five months of no contact, Dawn's oldest son reached out, and they organised to meet in a public park and try to find a way forward. "Once I started investigating... the no contact world, they do that so that the... narcissistic parent won't, you know, throw a fit or make a scene," Dawn said. "I was horrified when I saw that was why they had met with me in a public place."

After this meeting, both Dawn and the couple set new boundaries. Dawn agreed to stop reaching out first, and would instead wait for them to initiate contact.

As an orphan who went through the foster system herself, Dawn said she was "so excited to be a grandmother", particularly because her granddaughter was the only "female blood relative" she had.

"I had no other female blood relatives on the planet other than my granddaughter," she said. "Being an orphan is a very traumatising experience. [Estranged] adult children will say they orphan themselves... hmm, no, you still have those relatives, they're still on the planet. You are an orphan when there are no other blood relatives on the planet. That's when you are an orphan."

This period was a struggle for Dawn, she said, because she was dealing with undiagnosed PTSD that was not recognised by her therapist at the time. And when her dog became sick with a brain tumour, Dawn — who was still recovering from her health issues — broke the boundary she had set for herself.

"I reached out to my son first in regards to my granddaughter, which was a boundary that I had created, and he didn't take well to that," she said. "Instead of not responding to his harsh response... I responded, and I shouldn't have. I should have walked away."

From there, Dawn said, she did "everything" she shouldn't have.

"It truly wasn't until I did everything that I shouldn't have done — which was trying to justify, trying to explain, trying to stop the horror from happening that was happening right before my eyes in real time — that I finally started looking into adult child estrangement, and I realised, 'Jesus, I'm doing everything wrong,'" she said.

By then, Dawn said, it was too late to mend the relationship with her eldest son. But what about her other two children?

Dawn's middle child first went "about six weeks without speaking" to her, after Dawn took him to the hospital following some difficult health problems.

"I was trying to get him to advocate for himself and I was very forceful about that," she said. After the six weeks of silence, Dawn said she "learned to be much less forceful about trying to get them to advocate for themselves, that they need to make their own decisions".

In the midst of Dawn's struggles with her eldest son, she also "involved her middle son in conversations" regarding his brother, which he didn't appreciate.

"It led to my middle son being very authoritarian to me about the situation, which I did not take very well, and that led to our estrangement," she said.

As for her youngest son, Dawn said that they "never really had these head-butting issues", like she did with her two older children. She credited this to the fact that he attended "a boarding school for students that were gifted", something her ex-husband did not support or "pay anything towards".

"It was where my son needed to go, because he's gifted," she said. "His response to his brothers having issues with me was that his memories didn't reflect their memories, and he felt it was because he didn't stay home while he was in high school."

However, after her middle child moved closer to him, Dawn said her youngest son went "very, very, very low contact". And when she began making TikToks, he cut her off completely.

"My youngest was not upset about the TikToks, he was upset that I was not taking accountability," she said. "And that's when he said that I was emotionally abusive in their childhood and he said that if I harassed his father, that he would never speak to me ever again. 

"That is not a boundary for him, that's a threat, and harassing his father is me being truthful about the abuse that I received from his dad."

The online backlash.

Dawn has said that she wants to use her story to help others, be they parents who are in the same position as her, or anyone who wants to learn more about family estrangement. It's "not something [she's] proud of", but she felt that it was important to share her story, because "it does help other parents when they find that they are not alone".

She added, "Being estranged is very isolating, and very excluding."

However, not everyone wants to hear what Dawn has to say. After Dawn's initial video went viral on TikTok, the backlash online was swift.

Over on Reddit, one person wrote, "I don’t even need to watch the videos. If you have three kids and they all go no contact once they are adults, you are the a**hole."

"I've seen SO many response videos to her I finally just blocked her all together. She's the type that will never learn," said another.

"She refuses to consider she might be or even could possibly be even part of the problem," noted one commenter in a different thread. "She calls out her daughter-in-law. Her tone of superiority and condescension is unbearable. Very bad energy. No insight."

Yikes.

Over on TikTok, Dawn's initial video was met with several stitches and angry response videos.

"Stop watching Fired Mom content," said TikTok user Some.Dumb.Broad. "I have an estranged mother, and while I think that she has opened the door for this discussion, I see way too many stitches and videos surrounding this, and I'm telling you guys right now, all that it's doing is validating her own opinions in her head. Some people will never receive the information you are giving them. They will only see it as a form of attack."

Another TikToker, @mom.behind.the.scenes, noted that "when you make this your full identity on this app, it seems like that would add a lot of pressure to your estranged children. It also seems like it would make it more difficult for them to want to repair that relationship," she added, noting that Dawn had promptly blocked their account.

Nevertheless, Dawn continues to post on TikTok — and with 31K followers tuning in to her videos, it seems unlikely that she'll stop anytime soon.

Feature Image: TikTok/fired_mom

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