I Told My Children Their Father Was On A Business Trip

By Janene Kingsley, LMFT152376 CA

Author of The Importance of Fathers: How a Father’s Presence, Absence, Anger, Love, and Repair Shape a Child for Life

I told my children their father was on a business trip.

It was a few weeks after he had been removed from our home, and they were young enough that I believed I could hold the hard part for them. That is what I thought I was doing: protecting them. I gave them a version of the truth small enough to carry, and I carried the rest myself. A business trip. He would be back. There was nothing to worry about.

But the situation kept getting more real, and my story could not keep up with it. A business trip stretches only so far before a child starts doing the math. So I began to adjust, softening things, then softening them again, saying a little more than I had and then wishing I had said less. Without meaning to, I started to waver. I have come to believe it was the wavering, more than any single sentence, that my children felt.

Something moved through them in those weeks that I had no words for then. It was not only sadness about their dad. It was something quieter and more physical. A new watchfulness. A way of studying my face when I spoke, as if they were testing the ground before they put weight on it.

Children read their parents to learn whether the world is steady. Mine had started to read me and find me uncertain, and their small bodies registered that long before their minds could have explained it.

I did not understand what I was seeing. I was in survival myself, with no lens yet for what was happening underneath the logistics.

Years later, I trained as a therapist, and the training taught me how to look backward. I would sit with a client, hear how a parent’s absence or unpredictability had shaped them, and recognize my own living room.

What I had watched in my children was not nothing.

It was a nervous system learning, early, that the people you depend on can become uncertain and that the ground itself can move. That kind of learning does not stay behind in childhood. It settles in.

My children are twenty-five, twenty-three, and nineteen now. I love them more than I know how to say, and the same disruption did not make the same shape in each of them. But I can still see it in how they trust, in what they brace for, and in the particular ways each of them learned to stay safe when the ground moved.

Become a Medium member I am not writing this from a finish line. I am writing from inside the same story I am still trying to understand.

I knew something of this before I was ever a mother, because I was a daughter first.

My own father was present in some ways and absent in others. He worked hard, taught me real things, and gave me memories I would not trade. He was also out of reach in the ways a child most needs, with an anger that could set the temperature of the whole house.

I loved him. I still do.

I have stopped pretending those two truths cancel each other out. Gratitude and grief have learned to live in me at once. That coexistence, love alongside honesty, is the ground this whole book stands on.

This subject did not come to me as a theory. It came as a life: my children’s, my own, and the lives of the people who sat across from me for years, still working out what their fathers had given them and what their fathers could not.

I did not write this book to put fathers on trial. I wrote it because I have seen how much is at stake, and because I have come to believe that few things a person is ever handed matter as much as a child.

That is a weight. But it is the kind of weight that gives a life its meaning.

My hope is that, by the final page, it feels less like a burden than an honor. To help shape another person’s sense of safety, worth, and love is a sacred and beautiful thing to be trusted with.

The truth in these pages is told gently because it is meant to be carried. My hope is that it will lead not toward blame, but toward understanding, responsibility, and the possibility of repair.

This essay is adapted from the preface to The Importance of Fathers: How a Father’s Presence, Absence, Anger, Love, and Repair Shape a Child for Life. In the book, I explore how a father’s presence, absence, anger, love, and willingness to repair can influence a child’s developing sense of safety, identity, worth, strength, and relationships. It is written for fathers, adult children, mothers, and the professionals who help families understand what was passed down and what can still be changed.

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This essay is adapted from the preface to The Importance of Fathers: How a Father’s Presence, Absence, Anger, Love, and Repair Shape a Child for Life. The full book can be found on Amazon at this link https://a.co/d/0bnhZQb7

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About the author: Janene Kingsley is a California Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, author, and founder of the R.E.A.L. Repair Therapy Center. Her work focuses on helping individuals and couples recognize the relational patterns they inherited, understand what keeps those patterns alive, and build healthier ways of connecting.