Laura Wellington is estranged from one of her adult daughters. The Connecticut 59-year-old is somewhat famous for this, in fact, or anyway famous for her response to it. Across Tiktok and Instagram, under the name "Doormat Mom," Wellington's railing against the supposed injustice done to her by a daughter she calls an "ungrateful little bastard" has brought her some 140,000 total followers. This past weekend she was one of the subjects of a Wall Street Journal article reporting on what the writer Elizabeth Bernstein calls a "movement" aiming to "reduce stigma, build community, and empower others who are enduring one of life's most painful experiences: the loss of a child who is still alive."
From the Journal article, a reader can learn that Wellington, who regards herself as a good mom, reportedly initiated the estrangement herself, after learning she wouldn't be invited to her daughter's wedding. You can learn that Wellington, in addition to her dedicated Tiktok and Instagram accounts, also has launched Facebook and YouTube accounts, a podcast, and a self-published book, all themed around the supposed phenomenon of parents being unjustly cut off by their cruel adult children. You can certainly, on the basis of these facts, start to form a pretty good idea of what kind of person Laura Wellington is, and, say, what it might be like to encounter her as a worker in a retail or customer service job.
What you can't learn, and something that goes conspicuously untouched in the Journal piece, is how Wellington wound up getting left off her daughter's wedding invite list in the first place, or why that daughter (apparently) has demonstrated no interest in trying to end the estrangement Wellington portrays herself as having initiated. The crux of Wellington's whole deal, across those four dedicated social media accounts, podcast, and self-published book, concerns the supposed unfairness of how that she and other parents are being treated by their adult children, but the Journal article not only leaves unexamined the daughter's possible reasons for not wanting Wellington at her wedding, it never considers the possibility that the daughter might have reasons at all. The perspective of the daughter in question is nowhere to be found in the story.
It's a bizarre editorial choice! You certainly would not write or publish a story about, say, the leaders of a movement of prisoners speaking out against what they decry as unjust imprisonment, and include no account of those leaders' supposed crimes, or the evidence for their guilt, or their trials, or their sentencing. That information would be essential to any reading of the story. After all, in its absence, all the reader is left with is the hardly novel news that some people in prison do not think that they should be there—that and some free, if baffling, publicity for them and their gripes.
A reader of the Journal article is left to hunt around for clues about its estranged moms' situations, such as:
- Wellington's nasty, self-satisfied little smile in the embedded video after she asks if "your child has decided to be an ungrateful little bastard," the defining facial expression of the online MAGA grievance farmer;
- Her history, which the Journal doesn't mention but some intrepid readers quickly uncovered, of contributing to the loony right-wing Western Journal (entirely representative Western Journal headline: Sick Video: Sweet, Elderly Target Worker Horribly Attacked by Woke Activists for Wearing Charlie Kirk Shirt Is Now Getting Tens of Thousands of Dollars);
- The video Wellington posted publicly online entirely of her own free will in which she smilingly calls her absent daughter a narcissist and blames all of her own problems on that supposed narcissism.
(If you like, you might consider these mothers' very quest to wring and monetize internet celebrity out of their fractured relationships with their own children a pretty important clue re: how they ended up estranged in the first place. Personally, I include in the list of strong clues the weird Anglophilic touches in the work of Atlanta-based estranged mom influencer Kendall Williams, who in her "Mum's True Tea" videos repeatedly uses the word "daft"; I love my own mom very much and consider our relationship healthy and nourishing, but she would get about 2.5 uses of the words "mum" and "daft" before I said goodbye to her forever. Probably that says more about me than her. I hope never to find out!)
Politics is surely at least among the most common reasons for familial estrangement in 2025, and almost certainly germane to Wellington's estrangement in particular. The readiest explanation I can think of for why the Journal would leave not only politics but causation itself out of its article about these moms—and their message that familial estrangement is a matter of "ungrateful little bastard" adult children, rather than parental fault—concerns the article's target readership. The median WSJ reader already spends more than enough time thinking about the reasons why adult children cut off their parents—it's how the median WSJ reader fills some of the time that they might otherwise spend catching up with their adult children who do not talk to them anymore. For that reader this is less a trend piece than pure service journalism: Here are some social-media accounts to follow, or perhaps a grift to get in on yourself.
