I have been writing about what I learned from OWN television’s, Oprah’s LifeClass. I’ve learned something that I would like to share. It’s about Fatherless men and women. What I learned is that you can be fatherless and motherless even if your parents lived with you.

I am learning a great deal about presence. I don’t mean for this to come across as parent bashing. It is not easy to be a parent and I understand how focusing on the difficulties of life can take a parent mentally away from their child. But, I am learning that children crave their parent’s presence. A child needs to know that they are seen and, above all else, that you are proud of them. Children need to know that you love them and know them. If not, they will go out into the world trying to find their significance in people, drugs, or crime. And it is more than just being there. I wrote about this before in my post, “Can They See the Love in Your Eyes?”

Sometimes in families, the father works hard to take care of the family but when he comes home he withdrawals to television, internet or video games. He is emotionally unavailable to his family even though he is there every single day of their life. He misses the children’s important days and rarely interacts with them. He is highly critical of their actions and doesn’t provide the balance of praise. This creates a fatherless child. Within that same family, the mother may withdrawal as well. Or she may overcompensate for the father by smothering her children with attention. She, unwittingly, makes the children responsible for her emotional balance. The children become her source of love and feel responsible for her emotional stability. The children spend their time trying to be seen in this emotional back and forth, but they must deny themselves while trying to win the love of their parent.

The child grows up into the world to feel as though they cannot be who they are if they want to get love. No one has ever told them that they are proud of who they are so they lose the connection with self. They focus on the attributes that successfully gained them love from one parent and they hate the attributes that never gained them the love of the parent that ignored them. They don’t ever know the truth. The truth is that it had absolutely NOTHING to do with the child. It was the parent’s stuff that took them out of their presence with their child. The parent is locked in their past trying to resolve or ignore the feelings they don’t like. Children tend to be a reflection of a part of the parent. The child that opposes the parent the most is usually the reflection of the things that the parent doesn’t want to deal with in himself. The child that the parent likes the most is usually the one that the parent sees as having most of the attributes that he likes about himself. The truth is that the children are there to teach the parent how to love all parts of himself. By loving your children, you must heal those wounds within yourself.

The truth of the matter is children, that your parents do love you. If they had been aware that they were doing something to hurt you maybe they would try to do differently. The important thing is to not hold yourself at fault. There was a very powerful moment in the show with a man named Steve. Steve had been sober for ten years, but he was still struggling with his feelings of inadequacy. Iyanla Vanzant had him stand up. She placed her hands on his cheeks, looked him in his eyes and said: Your father is proud of you. Your father is proud of you. Your father is proud of you.  And your mother asks for your forgiveness that she wasn’t everything that you needed her to be.

Your father is proud of you. And your mother asks for your forgiveness that she wasn’t everything that you needed her to be.

Your father is proud of you. And your mother asks for your forgiveness that she wasn’t everything that you needed her to be.

Your father is proud of you. And your mother asks for your forgiveness that she wasn’t everything that you needed her to be.

I’ve written it a few times, because I want all those fatherless children to read it and believe it. You don’t have to hurt anymore. They loved you and you have done everything that you were supposed to do. I am proud of you. I love you. Now allow yourself the love that you deserve. Fill up that hole with the love of the person that is begging for it, yourself. Love yourself. Let that pain go. Don’t own it, because it was never yours in the first place.