Grief, Fatherhood and Mental Health

My name is Yaya, I am 42 and I have struggled most of my life with my Mental Health. Feelings of low self esteem, low self worth, low confidence, fear, inadequacy have all played their parts in different times of my life. Depression and Anxiety have been frequent visitors, but I never broke as hard as I have in the last few years. My life has been filled with what “experts” would say are traumatic events, from a young age leading into adulthood. However, these last few years have held some deeper, more severely traumatic moments, which ultimately broke me.

These recent traumatic events have still not been healed fully and if I am honest, it has become apparent that there are still some unhealed traumas from younger years. I will not and can not tell you everything in this piece, it's just too much, but this is just some of it.

I am a father of two beautiful children, a boy and a girl. They are so precious and dear to me, I love them with every fibre of my being, they are my world, my purpose. I split with their mother at the beginning of 2020. The breakdown of my family unit and the change in the relationship with my children caused me such unimaginable pain that is only ever read about. I have struggled so badly and still am struggling.

Image credit: Yaya Shah

I was raised by a single mother. My mum raised 8 of us on her own in the 70’s, when racism was really bad, which has its own story that could be written about. I never knew my father and my father never had an active role in my upbringing. All I know is that he left my mum, lived 20 minutes away, remarried and had three kids. My mother tried her best to raise us Muslim, so we would be at the Mosque in London during all the particular times, and my father used to attend the same mosque, he used to walk straight passed me and my brothers, he never once spoke or stopped or showed love. This caused me to feel certain ways, which as a kid i never really quite understood and thinking about it, those feelings were never spoken about or discussed, in fact i can remember the feeling now. Anxious and scared to talk about my father and those feelings, so I must have buried them so deep. There is a reason for this, but again it's a story for another time.

Throughout life I had very bad coping mechanisms and not that many male role models to look up to. The ones I did have, had their own demons to deal with and were not the best role models if i am being honest. There were many issues and events that made me the way I was, parts were attributed to my “Daddy Issues” and I have spent many years looking into this.

I have spent hours on the internet researching, I have followed particular accounts on social media platforms, i have paid for talking therapy (Counselling), completed courses (e.g CBT) and much more. I had, what I realise now to be, a small understanding of the impact things from my childhood/youth have on me as an adult.

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

So I swore to myself (it was even a belief i held from a young age) if I had kids with someone I would never leave, no matter what. Because I never want anyone, let alone my own children to ever feel how I have done at times in my life. A fear of mine was passing down my issues down to my kids.

I wanted to have what I thought was a perfectly comfortable life: nice car, nice house, good job, wife, 2.4 kids, a couple of holidays a year and so on. That was something that I dreamed of for years as it was such a far reality to what I had growing up.

Well I achieved a lot over the years, made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot and had all that i dreamed of……. apart from being married.

2020 comes and I split with my partner, the woman that I loved, the mother of my children, the woman I intended to marry and spend the rest of my life with. After a few months small changes started to occur, small manipulations and games. As time went on, manipulations and games became worse, eventually triggering my mental health to spiral and there was more pressure applied by the person that once said they loved me. This along with certain other factors made the situation ideal for the relationship to change between me and my children.There have been too many instances of me trying to be an active father in their lives and has been stopped. I have been restricted to access and basic information. Decisions to do with my children have been taken from me and I have no say. There have been many things that have been stripped from me as a father. Most recently I was not even permitted the knowledge that my children had returned from a holiday overseas safely. I had to drive to my old house 2 days after they were supposed to have landed, only then did I find out that they had landed safely and were ok.

All of this and much more made me fall hard into a depression and was struggling so very badly, I was surviving on half a sandwich and 3 hours of sleep a night. Waking up in tears, spending all day in a low mood and more tears. Finally crying myself to sleep. I think one of the worst memories i have is waking up and my dying mother upset, telling me i was crying very loudly and badly in my sleep.

It all got too much, I recognised that something needed to change and this was not normal. So I started looking into depression in fathers after the breakdown of a family unit. I found many websites and studies that helped me understand what I was going through. I wish I noted all the sources of information that I found, so that I could now share it. However, tucked away in my notes on my phone an excerpt that I copied and pasted with a Web Link, the link takes you to an error page now. But the copied excerpt summed up alot,

We, as a society, need to understand that an involved fathers role as a parent is central to his physical and mental wellbeing. The loss of that role is devastating.

As Robert Fay, M.D. put it:

The typical non-custodial “father is also buffeted with feelings of grief, loss, anger and failure, he experiences increasing desperation as he now begins to appreciate the depth of the gulf (physical and psychological) that now exists and is widening between him and his children”

(“The Disenfranchised Father,” Advanced Paediatrics, 1989;36:407-29).

After spending that time looking at that particular area, I then started to research coping mechanisms and strategies. I suppose the start of my evolution and healing process.

Time has passed, it's now 2022. The mother of my children now has a boyfriend, which I am fine about and am actually happy for her. The kids have met him and he is good to them, again which is fine because my kids love me to pieces and I am always going to be their dad. But when I found out that my kids were spending time with her new boyfriend as a family unit, when I found out that the boyfriend is allowed to attend my daughter's birthday party but I am not and a few other things. I broke quite badly and had a really bad emotional episode. Depression felt at its worst, felt low, worthless, irrelevant, non-existent, not needed, not wanted. Felt like I was losing everything.

BUT something happened, i'm not quite sure how, but once i had calmed myself and my mind, I realised i'm not actually upset about what has happened, yes it's difficult but looking at the facts i stated above. Everything is as it should be. So all that happened was that event triggered the similar if not same emotions i felt when i was a kid………….about my father. Those feelings and that I was going through were unhealed emotions and traumas.

Once I realised this, I have had a better handle on the pain and the situation. So now I'm still trying to heal those traumas, it's something that will take time, patience and hard work.

It's a “Process” and a “Journey”...... I know they are cliched terms, I don't like using them, but it's true. lol. So I now have some strategies and processes that are helping me understand myself and my emotions. Slowly I know I will get there and I know that I'm doing the work to ensure my issues are not passed down to my kids.

Written by: Yaya Shah