Don’t leave your daughter in the position of being a co-mother because you were absent.
I’m Olivia S. Benson. If you’ve been here before, you know I talk about a couple of things, and one of them is growing up without a father. Being a girl, a young woman, growing up without a father in your life.
And today I want to talk about something that kind of is a consequence of being an absent father. You might not be aware of it. This is not — you know, there’s nothing new under the sun, first of all. So there have been a lot of circumstances, a lot of history in the world where, you know, the children become part of the parenting equation for one reason or the other.
Yes, a co-mother
I did a post and it says basically, if you’ve left your daughter behind with her mother, and you care, make sure you don’t leave her in the position of being a co-mother. Yes, a co-mother.
So it’s interesting, because they say if you care, because sometimes a man is in such a state or such a position that he really doesn’t care, or if he doesn’t, sometimes he can’t care.
A person who does leave has been damaged in some way
In fact, I saw a post of a guy — not necessarily young, but a guy — and he was saying he was having a great time with his daughter and posting all kinds of things, and he says, I don’t know how a man can leave this, the love and the joy that he was experiencing with his daughter. Well, I wrote back and made a comment, and the comment is, well, the thing is that a person who does leave, in the worst way possible, often has been damaged in some way. It doesn’t just happen, because it’s not a natural thing to just leave. There’s a lot of history.
So there are a lot of people that are, you know, these days they can’t understand what would have happened before. There were many reasons why men left. Of course, we’re not justifying anything. Obviously, I’m not, but understand there are lots of reasons.
I was the eldest and I was the co-mother
So I say in the post, if you care — because you have to have capacity to care — you leave your daughter with her mother, maybe. And I am just using an example of a daughter, but you know that often it could be a son, and it puts the son in the position of a lot of responsibility, trying to be the man of the house. It just so happens that I am speaking about my scenario, where I was the eldest and I was the co-mother, so to speak.
So also I like to say, I speak about men being absent fathers, but everybody knows that there are also mothers who are absent mothers. It’s just that that’s not what we’re talking about. So just by talking about the man doesn’t mean that all men are that way. We’re just saying, if you were a person in this particular situation, this is my experience, this is what my journey was, and these are the things that are important to consider, and these are the things that are important in terms of getting better.
So I say in the post, if you care, you have the capacity to care, where you haven’t been damaged to such an extent that it really doesn’t even matter. You’re just trying to save yourself. So you save yourself by leaving, and all of a sudden this woman — and we have to presume, for purposes of what we’re discussing today, that she’s in a difficult position. She might not just have that one child, she might have multiple children.
Not being able to be a child
And that eldest, let’s just say for purposes of our discussion, daughter is going to be in a particular position, because if that mother needs help, whatever kind of help it might be, whether it’s taking care of younger children, whether it’s taking responsibility for certain things that need to be done, that eldest — and there’s something, I think in fact there’s a group that it’s called, I think it’s called the first daughter or the eldest daughters group, because there’s a certain kind of responsibility.
But the point here today is that if you are a dad and you are, for one reason or the other, leaving the mother of your daughter, make sure that you think about what you’re doing and how you’re doing it, so that you don’t put your daughter in the position of being a co-mother, of not being able to be a child because her mother was in survival mode and had to use her to help her to survive, in order for the little girl to survive. Because if the mother doesn’t survive, then the chances of survival for that little girl are also going to be reduced.
So if you have the ability, the power to make a difference, you know, when you leave a woman or your wife or what have you, it doesn’t mean that you have to leave your children. And if you have a daughter that you’re going to leave behind for whatever reason, and you can be responsible in all the different ways that a father needs to be responsible, you can avoid putting her in the difficult position of being a co-mother. Don’t leave your daughter in the position of being a co-mother because you were absent.
My name is Olivia S. Benson. If this is your first time, please check me out. My website is OliviaSBenson.com. And I’m also on Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. And the book that I’m talking about today — the discussion is based on my book, For the Love of My Father, which is available on Amazon.