Pain

As a parent, the one thing we want to be able to do above anything is to protect our children and stop them from ever having to experience pain. Now I go above and beyond to protect them, but eliminating pain from their lives is unrealistic. Especially the pain of an absent parent. I cant ever begin to imagine how my sons feel or what they think or believe in terms of their father. See I grew up in a two parent family. I didn't know anything other than a father and a mother and never really gave it too much thought growing up because everyone around me had a mum and a dad. I don't think I had ever met a child with just one parent while I was growing up. That was until I moved back to London at the age of 11 and then I remember meeting other children my age who came from a household with only one parent. I mean, to me, it didn't really make them any different, that's just how it was and because it was just so easy for me to accept I never really explored what it must have felt like.....that was until I began to have these conversations with my sons and I remember the first time we were having this type of conversation and one of them got upset with me and said "you have no idea what it feels like to not have a dad" and I cant begin to describe to you what that felt like to hear the pain in his voice. To hear those words coming out of the mouth of one of my precious babies. It cut so deep, I had pain in my chest, it felt as if someone had grabbed me and was squeezing all the air out of my body, I couldn't breathe properly and

my chest hurt, I mean really HURT, because he was so RIGHT. I would, and could never imagine what that feels like. Regardless of how much love I shower them with, how often I am there to nurse them back to health, watch all their milestones in life and cheer them on when nobody else is around, even when I am not allowed and I cheer them on silently inside my head, no amount of affection from me (the only parent they have ever known) will ease that pain or take away those feelings of abondenment that they MUST feel. Despite not being able to describe to you the hurt and pain I feel as a parent knowing that my babies have this internal agony and nothing I do will ever take that away or ease it, it is still not comparable to the pain they actually feel.

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