Mum Guilt When Your Child Lives With Their Other Parent

The dreaded mum guilt.

Many mums experience mum guilt, and I think we can all agree that it’s a horrible feeling. When your child lives with their other parent, mum guilt can take on a whole other level of intensity. There can be guilt about not being there for the ordinary everyday moments, questions about whether you’re doing enough, and fear about what other people think.

For me, mum guilt can turn into constantly questioning myself. Did I make the right decision? Am I doing enough? Will my daughter understand when she’s older? What will other people think of me?

The difficult thing about these questions is that there often isn’t a neat answer. Going over them again and again doesn’t necessarily make me feel more certain - sometimes it just makes the guilt louder.

“Does this make me a bad mum?”

One of the most frequent thoughts I have, as a mum whose child primarily lives with their other parent, is “Does this make me a bad mum?” I have agonised over this question far more times than I would like to admit. Due to societal expectations and so-called “norms”, it is easy to believe that a “good mum” is one whose child lives with them, who does the school run each day, who is there for the daily grind. However, a relationship between a mother and her child cannot be reduced to how many nights they spend under the same roof.

I think part of the pain comes from the fact that motherhood can feel tied up with ideas about what a “good mum” is supposed to look like. When your family doesn’t fit that picture, it can be very easy to turn that difference into a judgement about yourself.

The things other people don’t see.

I have felt pressure to explain, and almost justify, why my daughter lives with her dad. It’s a horrible feeling because while I know deep down that I don’t owe anyone an explanation, through fear of not wanting to be judged, or of people jumping to their own (usually wrong) conclusions, I have found myself scrabbling around trying to answer the question I absolutely dread being asked…”why doesn’t your daughter live with you?” Family arrangements can come about for complicated reasons involving circumstances, stability, relationships and decisions that are made with a child’s needs in mind. In my own circumstances, I had to make decisions that I believed were right for my daughter, even when those decisions were incredibly painful for me.

Missing the ordinary moments.

Not being there for key moments like birthdays and Christmas is of course very hard, but even harder is missing the small, everyday moments. The chats over breakfast, the hugs, hearing about their day at school, taking them to swimming lessons, reading them a book before they go to bed, buying their favourite food when you do the weekly shop.

I think there can be a particular kind of sadness in missing the ordinary things, because they are the moments that make up everyday family life. Sometimes I find myself wondering what my daughter is doing at a completely unremarkable moment - what she had for tea, what made her laugh that day, what she’s chatting about on the way home from school. They aren’t the big moments that anyone takes photographs of, but somehow they can be the ones I long for most.

And sometimes there is guilt wrapped up in that too. I can find myself wishing I had been there, while knowing that I can’t be present for every moment of her life. Learning to live with that gap between the mum I imagined I would be, and the reality of my motherhood, has been difficult.

Making room for conflicting feelings.

Love, sadness, guilt, relief, freedom, grief, happiness… all of these emotions can co-exist within me at the same time. What I’ve learnt over time is that one feeling does not invalidate another. Sometimes the guilt has even appeared when I’ve been enjoying the time apart. I might be doing something for myself, having a lovely day, or simply appreciating having some freedom, and suddenly there is that uncomfortable thought: Should I be enjoying this?

I’ve had to learn that enjoying parts of my life when my daughter isn’t with me doesn’t meant that I don’t miss her, or that I love her any less. Lots of people have said to me “but surely you get the best of both worlds - time to yourself and time with your daughter”. There is some truth in that for me. There are parts of having time to myself that I now genuinely value. But it has taken me a long time to allow myself to enjoy those child-free parts of my life without feeling that doing so somehow says something about how much I love or miss my daughter.

You are a person as well as a mum.

Before having my daughter I was so excited to become a mum. I thought “this is it, this is going to be what finally makes my life seem worthwhile” and then, after my relationship broke down, and I realised I would spend a lot of my time not as “mum” but just as “Sara”, I felt incredibly lost. In a small space of time I had ceased to be a wife and I had become, as I felt at the time, “a part-time mum”. I had to rediscover what it meant to just be “Sara”.

It can be incredibly difficult to find our identity when the roles we had change or are taken away. My own journey of self-discovery has been a complicated one but having the opportunity to get to know who I am, aside from the roles I play in my life, has been a very enriching experience.

How counselling might help.

I remember feeling really daunted by the thought of speaking about being a mum who is not the primary parent of my child with my own counsellor. As part of my counsellor training, I had personal counselling, and I thought about avoiding this topic altogether, because it just felt too hard. I didn’t know whether my counsellor had children but I assumed she did, and I remember thinking “what if she’s judging me” and “she’s probably a proper mum, unlike me”. It took a lot of courage to open up. But when I did, I was met with empathy, compassion and warmth. It gave me a space to say the things I couldn’t say anywhere else.

That experience has stayed with me as a counsellor. I know how vulnerable it can make you feel to say some of these things out loud, particularly when you’re frightened of being judged. You don’t have to present a particular version of motherhood in counselling with me. There is room for the love, the guilt, the anger, the relief, the grief - and whatever else is there.

If some of this feels familiar, you can read more about my counselling support for mums navigating co-parenting and time apart from their children.

If you’d like to talk, I offer a free 15-minute introductory call where we can have a chat about what has brought you to counselling and whether I might be the right counsellor for you.