Nobody warns you about the specific kind of quiet that settles in when you realize you’ve missed something in your child’s life that you can’t go back and have again. These missing out on your child’s life quotes are meant to name what most people are carrying around without the language for it.
Whether the distance is physical, circumstantial, chosen, or simply the result of a life that got away from you, something about reading the right sentence at the right time can finally give a feeling its shape.
For the Parent Who Was There in Body but Absent in Mind
1. “When a father, absent during the day, returns home at six, his children receive only his temperament, not his teaching.” – Robert Bly, Iron John: A Book About Men (1990)
2. “The psychological absence of fathers can be nearly as devastating as physical absence. When fathers are alive but not a predictable presence actively participating in their daughter’s lives, the relationship becomes a permanent maybe.” – Victoria Secunda, Women and Their Fathers: The Sexual and Romantic Impact of the First Man in Your Life (1992)
3. “Just because your father’s present doesn’t mean he isn’t absent.” – Elizabeth Acevedo
4. “He was there, but not there. Present and also absent at the same time.” – Pauline Boss, Ambiguous Loss: Learning to Live With Unresolved Grief (Harvard University Press, 1999)
5. “All parents damage their children. It can’t be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair.” – Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
6. “It is a wise father that knows his own child.” – William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596)
For the Parent Separated by Circumstances (Divorce, Distance, Deployment)
7. “Sometimes you have to be apart from the people you love, but that doesn’t mean you love them any less. Sometimes you love them more.” – Nicholas Sparks, A Walk to Remember (1999)
8. “Maybe you had to leave in order to really miss a place; maybe you had to travel to figure out how beloved your starting point was.” – Jodi Picoult, Handle with Care (2009)
9. “The ache for home lives in all of us. The place where we can go as we are and not be questioned.” – Maya Angelou, All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986)
10. “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh (1926)
11. “Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them. They move on. They move away. The moments that used to define them are covered by moments of their own accomplishments. It isn’t until much later, as the skin sags and the heart weakens, that children understand; their stories, and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones, beneath the waters of their lives.” – Mitch Albom, The Five People You Meet in Heaven (2003)
12. “There are all sorts of experiences we can’t really put a name to. The birth of a child, for one. Or the death of a parent. Words are like nets, we hope they’ll cover what we mean, but we know they can’t possibly hold that much joy, grief, or wonder.” – Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes (2007)
For the Parent Carrying Regret (The Honest Ones)
13. “The absent are never without fault, nor the present without excuse.” – Benjamin Franklin
14. “A father may turn his back on his child, but a mother’s love endures through all.” – Washington Irving, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820)
15. “I was an absent dad. Once the magazine started, I really had two families. The dream was the magazine. I worked through the night all the time.” – Hugh Hefner (interview, The Guardian, 2002)
16. “There were many days out on the campaign trail when I felt like my family was a million miles away, and I knew I was missing moments of my daughters’ lives that I’d never get back. It is a loss I will never fully accept.” – Barack Obama, “We Need Fathers to Step Up,” PARADE Magazine (June 2009)
17. “You can’t fast-forward your child’s life, no matter how much you want to.” – Jodi Picoult, Nineteen Minutes (2007)
18. “A child should never have to choose.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
19. “I also believe that parents, if they love you, will hold you up safely, above their swirling waters, and sometimes that means you’ll never know what they endured, and you may treat them unkindly, in a way you otherwise wouldn’t.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
For the Child Who Grew Up With an Absent Parent
20. “Don’t forgive him. Forgive yourself for believing there is something lacking in you because he wasn’t there.” – Iyanla Vanzant
21. “Grown doesn’t mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What’s that supposed to mean? In my heart it doesn’t mean a thing.” – Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
22. “As a child, what I was missing was so much bigger to me than what I had. My mother mythic, imaginary was a deity and a superhero and a comfort all at once. If only I’d had her, surely, she would have been the answer to every problem.” – Jodi Picoult
23. “Your mother is in the habit of offering more love than you can carry. Your father is absent. You’re a war, the border between two countries, the collateral damage, the paradox that joins the two but also splits them apart.” – Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey (2014)
24. “The kindest words my father said to me: ‘Women like you drown oceans.'” – Rupi Kaur, Milk and Honey (2014)
This one cuts in both directions. Sometimes the words remembered are the ones that explained the silence.
25. “Boys who grow up in homes with absent fathers search the hardest to figure out what it means to be male.” – Geoffrey Canada, Fist Stick Knife Gun: A Personal History of Violence (1995)
26. “Father absence has been implicated in anorexia nervosa, in which daughters may exhibit literal father hunger by starving themselves.” – Victoria Secunda, Women and Their Fathers (1992)
For the Parent Watching From a Distance They Didn’t Choose
27. “There is everything you know and there is everything that happens. When the two don’t line up, you make a choice.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
28. “Sharing tales of those we’ve lost is how we keep from really losing them.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
29. “She had a bottomless well of love for me. Her only flaw was that she didn’t make me work for it.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
30. “In every conceivable manner, the family is a link to our past, the bridge to our future.” – Alex Haley
For Those Trying to Find a Way Through
31. “The bond that links your true family is not one of blood, but of respect and joy in each other’s life.” – Richard Bach, Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah (1977)
32. “Now you know how badly someone wanted you, Charley. Children forget that sometimes. They think of themselves as a burden instead of a wish granted.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
33. “What is it about childhood that never lets you go, even when you’re so wrecked it’s hard to believe you ever were a child?” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
34. “Behind all your stories is always your mother’s story, because hers is where yours begin.” – Mitch Albom, For One More Day (2006)
35. “I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive so we can keep them with us, and we keep them alive in order to be kept alive ourselves.” – Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking (2005)
36. “In many ways, I came to understand the importance of fatherhood through its absence: both in my life and in the lives of others. I still felt the weight of that absence throughout my childhood. It’s something that leaves a hole no government can fill.” – Barack Obama, Father’s Day address, White House (June 2010)
37. “We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.” – Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1923)
What These Quotes Are Actually Doing
Acknowledging the pain of missing out on a child’s life wakes up to the beautiful opportunity that stands right in front of us tomorrow morning. Time is a ruthless thing, but the choice to turn around, close the laptop, and sit on the floor with your kids is a small act of bravery that resets the entire legacy of your family.
If these words found something in you that needed naming, there’s more to sit with in the piece below. It goes into the psychology behind why this particular grief is so hard to process, and why the silence around it is almost always the most damaging part.
Read next: Missing Out on Your Child’s Life Is a Grief That Doesn’t Know Which Direction to Go
