Full of Empty

There is rarely a day that goes by that I do not think about my children. Although I have not seen them for several years and had to content myself with a handful of phone calls during that time, I live with their ghosts constantly. The ghosts of the living. The many hundreds of photos of fleeting shared moments still extant on my phone and in the cloud, digitally outsourced memories, and the handful of printed and framed images that adorn my flat, some of the two young new daughters I knew and loved as part of myself and others of two blossoming young women to whom no doubt I would feel even more of a stranger than they do now to me.

Perhaps I found myself dwelling more on their absence, on my absence, today due to the half term holiday starting, but for the first time in a long time I took out the wooden box in which I keep the copies of letters I had sent them. I had hoped when beginning this archive that it might become a repository also for the cards and letters they sent me, but apart from one or two items drafted by their smaller hands, it is filled mainly with unopened duplicates of my letters sent to them as a backup for them to read one day should they never have received or read the originals. These letters were addressed with their names but at my residence and sent simultaneous to those addressed to the PO Box my wife had set up for the purposes of my communication with them.

I am fortunate to have never lost to death anyone that I’m immediately close to, but I have felt the despair at the loss of my daughters might equivalent and others including friends, lovers, and professionals have described my experience as grieving. But maybe it is more than that or different at least for they are not dead and gone beyond. One future, one life, the one I had imagined and so wanted has gone certainly, but their lives continue while I remain a parent in parenthesis, a future possibility, a paternal potentiality.

And that potential is the light I find at the end of the tunnel; the consolation I attempt to temper my grief with. They say that to truly love someone you must be prepared to let them go. My ex-partner with whom I was in a relationship for five years following my divorce like me had had a chaotic childhood experiencing neglect and abuse. She did not know or have a relationship with her father until she sought that out in her late twenties. Their relationship now is a positive and strong one and her experience gave me hope I might to attain the same with my daughters one day when they are ready. I have had to conclude that the best way I can to any extent parent them in my absence is to remain open to that possibility and continue to love them truly unconditionally with no judgement or jealousy against the relationship they have with their stepfather.

Don’t get me wrong, this is no easy task, but then parenting isn’t easy. Parenting, true love requires sacrifice and sometimes putting the needs of others before ones own. So, while my grief and sense of loss has sometimes taken me to the brink of taking my own life, the possibility that my children might one day need to know me again has so far kept me from the abyss.