When my children were four and eight, their father decided to absent himself from their lives on a semi-permanent basis, which has increased over the last twelve years to the point of a visit two or three times a year for a meal. Our home caught fire, with me home alone, a month after he left. He bankrupted our family four months later, leaving the children and me homeless and me without a job or money. My family lived a day’s drive away, and I couldn’t leave the County due to legal constraints. The children remember all of this.
We stabilized with a small rental and a job that allowed me to parent without babysitters very often for two years. At that time, a new man came into our lives and became very important to the children as we became closer and eventually married four years later and moved into his home. He passed suddenly six weeks after the wedding from cancer that was undetected until four weeks before he passed, leaving the three of us in a new area and no family support and no social support.
The children “crashed” at different times, my older son within a year of his stepfather’s death, and my daughter two years later after the death of my father, her only consistent grandfather.
Life is often unpredictable and traumas happen, both intentionally and by chance. Children must be allowed to heal.