How One Parent’s Lies Can Rewrite a Child’s Reality
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There is a conversation I had with a young woman that hasn’t left me.
She was in a relationship she knew was unhealthy, but she was holding on. Not because she didn’t see the truth, but because she was afraid.
Afraid her children would hate her if she left.
I asked her a simple question:
“Why would your children hate you for choosing yourself?”
And that’s when she told me her story.
As a child, she despised her mother.
Not because her mother abandoned her.
Not because her mother didn’t love her.
But because her mother chose herself.
Her mother left a man who mistreated her and moved on with her life.
And her father?
He told her he couldn’t be in her life anymore because her mother had someone else.
As a child, she didn’t understand manipulation.
She didn’t understand ego.
She didn’t understand avoidance or accountability.
She only understood one thing:
“My dad is gone… and it’s my mom’s fault.”
And that belief took root.
Even when she acted out, he didn’t show up.
Even when she needed guidance, he distanced himself.
Saying things like:
“I have nothing to do with what’s going on in that house.”
He removed himself, but made sure the blame stayed behind.
And children…
They don’t have the capacity to process adult dysfunction.
So they assign blame to the person who is present.
The one who stayed.
The one who is actually doing the work.
As she got older, her understanding changed.
Her mind matured.
Her perspective widened.
She began to see what her mother had been trying to tell her all along.
Her father didn’t leave because of her mother.
He left because he didn’t want the responsibility of being a father without control over the mother.
But by the time she understood that…
The damage had already been done.
She carried guilt.
She carried regret.
She carried the weight of how she had treated the one person who never left her.
She apologized.
She asked for forgiveness.
But healing doesn’t erase memory.
And that memory followed her into adulthood.
So when it came time for her to make her own decisions…
She hesitated.
Not because she didn’t know what was right.
But because she remembered how it felt to be the child who blamed her mother.
She didn’t want her children to feel that kind of pain.
She didn’t want to be the villain in their story.
Even if it meant staying in a situation that was breaking her.
That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
Sometimes it’s not the relationship that keeps people stuck.
It’s the unhealed child inside of them trying to rewrite a story they never fully understood.
It was therapy that helped her see it clearly.
Helped her separate her childhood perception from the truth.
And one moment shifted everything.
She started looking back at old family photos.
Looking for evidence.
Looking for presence.
Looking for proof that maybe, just maybe, her father had tried.
But he wasn’t there.
Not in the pictures.
Not in the memories.
Not in the milestones.
He had never been present.
Not even before her mother moved on.
And just like that…
The narrative broke.
Her mother was never the reason.
Her father’s absence was his own.
Some wounds don’t come from what actually happened.
They come from what we were told happened.
And the healing…
comes when we finally question the story we were given.
“Be careful what stories you accept as truth when you are too young to understand them, because you may spend your adult life trying to heal from something that was never yours to carry.”
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