(And neither of them is easy to answer)
This weekend my oldest son went away for the weekend with his dad. He left on Friday at the end of the day. He was happy. Excited. He was going to be with his cousins. The beach. The pool. Days out. Everything he loves most. And I was happy for him. For the first time since the separation, I didn’t feel that huge knot in my chest when I watched him leave. There were no tears. No crushing weight sitting on my heart. I said goodbye feeling calm. Happy knowing he was about to have a wonderful weekend. Or at least I thought I was calm.
That night I was putting his younger brother to sleep. In the dark. In silence. One of those moments when the house finally starts to slow down. That’s when my phone began to ring. A video call. From his dad. We agreed on one thing from the very beginning: whenever one of us receives a video call, we answer. Because it usually means the boys want to talk.
But the little one was almost asleep. So I declined the call. It rang again. I declined it a second time and sent a message.
“I’m just finishing putting his brother to sleep. I’ll call back in a minute.”
I received a voice message. I couldn’t listen to it. The call came back immediately. And that’s when I realised. It was my son. And he was probably not with his dad at that moment. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have kept trying. I got up. Turned on the light. His brother immediately woke up crying. And I answered.
On the other side was my oldest son. Sobbing. Calling for me.
“Mummy, mummy… I want my mummy…”
That was all. I asked him what was wrong. If everything was okay. If he wanted to tell me something. But he couldn’t answer. He just cried. He just kept saying he wanted his mum. And in that moment I felt my heart shrink. Because nothing prepares you for hearing your child call for you when you’re far away and can’t simply walk through a door and hold them. I had to make an almost superhuman effort not to cry too. I smiled. Or at least I tried to. And I told him he needed to calm down because I had a brand-new story to tell him.
The problem was that I didn’t have a story. I made one up. Right there and then. While rocking his brother. While trying to settle an overtired baby who had just been woken up. While trying to mend a broken heart on the other side of a screen. I have no idea what story I told. I only know that I kept making it up. One sentence at a time. One character at a time. Until I heard his breathing slow down. Until I heard him stop crying. Until he became himself again.
In the background I could hear his dad telling him it was bedtime. But I kept going. Because by then the story wasn’t a story anymore. It was a hug. It was the only way I had of reaching him. And I only hung up when he asked me to. Calm now. Ready to sleep. I ended the call and sat there with a tiny heart inside my chest, wishing I could cross miles in seconds just to kiss his forehead. A little while later I received a message from his dad saying he had fallen asleep.
Only then did I remember the voice message. The one I hadn’t been able to listen to. I opened it. And I heard his voice. Crying. One of those cries that make it hard to breathe just hearing them. Between sobs and tears he said:
“Mummy, I miss you” Pause. “I’m crying because I want my mummy” Another pause. And then: “Kisses, Mummy. Bye.”
I listened to it once. Then again. And again. And I cried. I cried so much. Because there are things no mother is prepared to hear. And hearing your child say they miss you while they’re crying is one of them.
In those moments all I wanted was to hold him. To tell him everything was okay. That Mummy was there. That she had never really gone away. But the truth is, I couldn’t. And maybe that’s another one of the hardest parts of separation. Realising there are moments when our children need us… and we simply can’t get to them in time.
In the message saying our son was asleep, his dad explained that he had been struggling because they were staying somewhere unfamiliar and he hadn’t been able to give him much attention. He was trying to sort things out. The gas. The electricity. The bags. The routines. I believed him. And I still do. Because I also know that if he had been able to give him more attention in that moment, it probably wouldn’t have escalated so much. Even so, I went to bed with a broken heart.
The next day was the exact opposite. He called me late in the day. Happy. Standing on a stage in the village square where they were staying. Playing with his cousin. Laughing. Running around. We talked for five minutes. Maybe not even that. After a little while he said:
“Mummy, I’m going to hang up now”. And he did. No tears. No missing me. No needing me. And do you know something? That phone call hurt too. Much less. But it still hurt. Because I think this is one of the great contradictions of parenting after separation. We suffer when they miss us too much. But we also suffer when we realise, they’re perfectly happy without us. When we realise, they’re creating memories we’re not part of. That there are laughs we don’t hear. Photos we don’t take. Moments we’ll never see.
And at the same time, that’s exactly what we want. We want them to be happy. We want them to have fun. We want them to feel safe. Even when we’re not there. And maybe that’s why these two phone calls stayed with me so deeply. Because one reminded me how much he still needs me. And the other reminded me that, little by little, he will need me less. The first one broke my heart. The second one did too. Just in a different way. And I think that’s how we learn to live this new reality. Holding two truths that seem impossible to reconcile. We want our children to miss us. But we also want them to be happy when we’re not there. And sometimes, in the very same weekend, we’re forced to learn both lessons at once.
Leave a Reply