Providing For Your Children Is Not The Same As Parenting Them and I Learned That The Hard Way

I used to think that having an absent parent was the absolute worst thing that could happen to a child. Then I learned there is something more confusing than that.

Having a parent who is physically present but emotionally absent.

A parent whose car is in the driveway but whose mind is always somewhere else. A parent who sits at the dinner table but whose eyes are on a screen. A parent who is home but never quite here and that specific kind of absence is one of the most disorienting things a child can grow up inside of.

Because at least when a parent is gone you know why you’re lonely.

I remember sobbing like there was no tomorrow on the days she left and not because I didn’t know when I’d see her again but because even when she was there it never felt like enough. I’d count down to her coming home and then she’d walk through the door and something would still be missing. I couldn’t name it then but I can name it now.

She was there but I still had to beg to be seen.

I remember calling and calling and getting voicemail. Calling again. Getting voicemail again. And then finally getting through only to hear

“I’m in a meeting, I’ll call you back.”

She never called back.

And I would sit with that phone in my hand and think the thing that no child should ever have to think:

Am I that bad?

Is there something so wrong with me that even my own parent doesn’t want to talk to me?

That question does not stay in childhood. It follows you and shows up in every relationship you ever try to build. It whispers in your ear every time someone takes too long to reply to a message, a friend cancels plans, someone you love seems distracted when you’re talking. The question mutates and evolves. It gets quieter but it never fully leaves.

The cruelest thing about this kind of childhood is that it comes with no permission to be angry.

At least not openly.

Because your parent wasn’t cruel, drunk or violent. They were working. They were providing for you. They were doing what society told them good parents do, sacrificing themselves to their career so their children could have better lives and so you learn to swallow the loneliness and call it gratitude. You learn to say “my mum worked really hard for us” with a smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes. You learn to be reasonable about it or make excuses.

She was just busy.

She was doing her best.

At least she was there.

As an adult it is so easy to convince yourself you’re over it. That you’ve processed it, understood it, filed it away neatly under complicated but resolved.

And then it shows up anyway.

It shows up as people pleasing.

That desperate compulsive need to make everyone around you happy, to be agreeable, to never take up too much space or ask for too much or need too much because somewhere deep down you learned that needing things makes people leave. Or worse, stay but resent you for it.

It shows up as anxiety about abandonment dressed up as independence. I don’t need anyone is sometimes just I learned early that needing people was dangerous.

It shows up as an inability to believe that people who love you actually want to be around you. As always waiting for the other shoe to drop. As feeling vaguely guilty for wanting presence from the people in your life when you were taught so young that presence was something you had to earn and even then might not get.

It shows up in who you choose to love. How often you choose people who are emotionally unavailable and then exhaust yourself trying to finally be enough for someone to stay. Trying to finally win the attention that was withheld from you before you even had the language to ask for it.

I want to say something to the person reading this who grew up in that house.

The one where a parent was technically home but you were somehow still alone. The one where you learned to be quiet so you wouldn’t be a burden. The one where you watched other children’s parents show up to things and felt that specific hollow ache of wanting to be wanted.

You were not too much.

You were not the problem.

You were a child who needed something completely reasonable — presence, attention, the simple knowledge that you mattered more than a meeting and that need was not met. That is not a reflection of your worth. It is a reflection of what your parent did not know how to give.

And it makes sense that it still shows up in your life. It makes sense that it shaped you. Wounds that start that early and go that unnamed tend to run deep.

But they are not permanent. And they are not your fault.

I wrote a story once about a man named Richard. He was a father and a workaholic.

I wrote Richard because I wanted to tell the story from the inside. From the perspective of a man who genuinely believed that working hard was the same thing as loving his family. Who never once thought of himself as absent because he was always, technically, somewhere nearby.

But his children knew the truth that he never learned.

Being in the building is not the same as being present. Providing is not the same as showing up. And love that cannot be felt is not love that lands.

If you want to read Richard’s full story it’s called Diligence and it’s the first chapter of my dark fiction anthology Seven Glass Flowers — available free on Wattpad and Inkitt. It’s a collection of seven stories about people destroyed by the very things that were supposed to make them good.

Wattpad — https://www.wattpad.com/story/411178002-seven-glass-flowers-%E2%9C%94

Inkitt — https://www.inkitt.com/authormirajayne

I hope it makes you feel a little less alone in it. 🥀

— Mira Jayne