“My daughter Y.
is 5 and has never really seen her father. He left when she was a baby. Every
now and then she says “My dad doesn’t love me” and it seems she blames herself
for not having a dad. I have tried to explain that not all mummies and daddies
live together and her dad had to go a very long way away to work. She just says
“Why doesn’t my dad come and see me?” I don’t know what to say. The truth is he
lives nearby and has no interest. He has a new wife and family. His wife approached
me in a shop once. Should I tell the truth?”
Mrs
P.
It takes two
people to bring a child into the world but, increasingly, a child is raised by
only one. There used to be the idea that if a child only knew one biological
parent the existence of the other would not matter. However, as Brendan Mac
Carthy has pointed out, there is not so much a one-parent family as a
two-family child. For however well one parent shoulders the emotional, economic
and social tasks that child-rearing involves, there is always the shadow of the
missing person. At times, the shadow of the missing person can be a more
powerful influence than that of any presence regardless of the love and
sensitivity of the care-taking parent.
How can we
understand this? The young child cannot imagine its parents as separate beings
involved in their own problems. For the child, any break-up or death feels
directly connected to their own bad thoughts. Reassuring comments, such as the
ones Mrs P. tries to give, can never help. To her daughter the absence is seen
as evidence enough that she is not like other little girls with fathers and her
preoccupation with what she did wrong.
In addition to
the omnipotent childhood way of thinking, there is the important issue of
identification. A child wants to visually know who it has come from and what
its emotional and physical inheritance is.
May, aged 16,
never saw her father when she was a child. Like Mrs P’s ex-husband he had left
home before she was born. There was just one photograph of him. “Even though
Mum had done everything for me and I didn’t even think I would like him I was
desperate to see for myself what he was like. When I did finally find him it
was such a relief just to know what he looked like. We did not really have
anything else in common”.
Mary waited
until she was 16 because her mother only felt able to support that search then.
To find out about a painful family circumstance involves all the members of the
family. If it is too painful for the parent to manage they will then not be
able to support their child’s investigation and the feelings it will evoke. If
a parent cannot manage to face something there can nevertheless come a point
when the child’s emotional needs are so powerful that they have to take
precedence.
14 year old John
brought his worries about his missing father to the attention of his male class
teacher, not by his words, but by his disturbed behaviour, stealing and
learning difficulties. His stealing was slowly understood as a way of showing
he felt something had been taken away from him. His mother would not allow any
talk about the missing man and had thereby unwittingly wiped out part of his
history and knowledge. He finally sought his father even though his
relationship with his mother suffered for it.
The meaning of
the absence for the care-taking parent needs understanding. Where two people
reciprocally end a relationship there are less raw feelings left than where one
person feels abandoned by the other. If there is a death, the surviving parent
of a good-enough marriage continues some strands of the parental couple and the
grief involves work through the good and bad points of the dead partner. Where
there is instead grievance, there is usually much less talking to the child and
a more polarised view is given of the absent parent.
Mrs P. sounds as
if she has not come to terms with the end of the relationship. She says the
father is away working but her mood allows the child to understand the truth
that he is not coming back to them. She says he has no interest but she also
briefly mentions an approach by the second wife. Does this mean the father is
struggling to come to terms with his past via his new wife? We cannot tell
because Mrs P. was not able to take that exploration further. Perhaps it feels too
difficult for her to think of her husband re-married or the child of her first
marriage having to face step-siblings and a step-mother.
There are
various options. Mrs P. could seek some help for herself in working through
what she feels about her broken marriage. Some private exploration for herself,
without her daughter present, would provide a space to understand more fully
the situation she and her daughter are in. Alternatively, she could be seen
with her daughter. She might find it easier to speak of these matters with
another adult present. A parent on their own can need support at different
difficult moments from other adults.
Mrs P. sounds
ready to take some action. In starting school her daughter is intelligently
observing and seeing the different kinds of families there are. Of course it is
always painful when a relationship is broken; however, the particular distress
Y. faces is from her own mistaken ideas rather than in the actual facts and
these cannot be dealt with by explanation alone. Eventually she will need to
see and hear more from her father to come to terms with the reality. It is also
possible she has picked up the secret that her father is nearby and that is
adding to her grievance. If Mrs P. manages to get help now her daughter will
hopefully appreciate the love that she has received. However, if the daughter
has to experience not only her own grief but her mother’s unspoken grief too
more problems will be built up for the future.