Take Action

Hello,

For those of you that do not know me, my name is Tanner and from my own personal experience both as a child who was raised by an amazing single father and someone who has been a single father for about the last 5 years don’t know if I’m quite as amazing as he was….but I do know all too well the pain and struggle that goes along with being in that situation as a child and for children.

When we see our parents struggle, or whomever it may have been in your particular case, we tend not to want to add on to those struggles with our own issues. So, what do we do? We bottle it up. We push it way down and try our hardest to “just focus on being a kid” and not worry about it. When we pretend like everything is okay and we don’t address it. For a child especially, it only makes it worse. This “bottling up” often leads to addictions, violence, drugs, and many other bad choices because we never took the time to stop and realize that maybe as a child even though we may see the person who stuck around hurting, like I did, that its okay to admit we are hurting too, which unfortunately I did not.

Because I chose not to voice the pain I was in, I never had anybody to really pour in to me in the areas of which I was really struggling, where I felt like for the person that left in my life, even if everybody else was awesome, apparently in my mind as a child at the time I wasn’t good enough or I wasn’t wanted or maybe I just wasn’t loved enough. While I realize now these are lies I told myself. I also realize that many people will grow up struggling with these same feelings and if we can do anything to help give children and situations similar to this whether a parent left by choice or by any means really when one parent isn’t there even if one sticks around it still makes a child question their worth in the very least to the parent that’s not around or around as much after a divorce or separation, just as I did.