I planned on writing something different for this week until my 5 year old son, Kase, walked up and handed me a picture he had drawn. He very matter of fact said “This is how my dad died”. He then turned around and went off to play again. He lost his dad when he was 2 years old to a sudden heart attack. The picture was a heart coloured in red and blue.
I know that this picture was prompted by a recent visit to our family doctor, Kase was having some bad stomach pain. There was a model of a heart and he asked if he could look at it. He was surprised that a heart is not shaped like a heart and it wasn’t just bright red. He asked what broke in his dad’s heart. The doctor explained to him that sometimes people get too much cholesterol, this makes it hard for the blood to flow and proceeded to show him which part of his dads heart got blocked.
Just a few days before this I met with his teacher, she was concerned with his focus. He wasn’t getting any work done and she mentioned A.D.D. as a possibility. My mommy instincts were telling me that wasn’t it. He has been talking constantly about death. Asking me if I am going to die, where would he live if I did die, would he be able to keep his room?
What a heavy thing for a little guy to be constantly thinking about. I needed some advice, and reached out to a grief counsellor and we met for an hour to talk. We talked about how it’s alright to tell him the not so great parts about his dad. So often when we lose someone we don’t want to say anything bad about them. The truth is that everyone has an ugly side. We have all acted in ways we wish we hadn’t, said things we wished we wouldn’t have. His dad was no different and the purpose of sharing that part of him is to show that he wasn’t perfect, it’s in no way meant to make his dad out to be a bad guy, just a real guy. It’s to help Kase understand who his dad really was and why his older brothers are assholes (I say that with love in my heart).
As parents we want to protect our children. We want to take their hurt and pain away but sometimes in doing this we are hurting more then helping. Kase has said to me many times he wishes his dad was here, for a long time my response was the same, “He is here son, you just can’t see him”. I have now realized that he doesn’t want to imagine his dad being here, he literally wants his dad here. He doesn’t always need me to make it better, sometimes he just needs me to hear what he’s saying. Now I respond by saying “I wish he was too son”.
The other day I asked him where in his body he misses his dad? He said “my stomach hurts when I miss my dad.” In that very moment it dawned on me that maybe all the stomach pain he has been having is his way of trying to make sense of things that even we as adults have a hard time understanding. I really started to pay attention to what he was talking or thinking about when his stomach hurt and it is extremely clear now that it is 100% related to him worrying about death.
So my message today is to really listen to your little people. They don’t know how to communicate the same way we do. Pay attention to their words and actions but also listen to and validate their complaints. They have all the same feelings we do but they don’t know how to process them yet. That’s where we as parents come in. Its our job to read between the lines and find ways to help them, to guide them through the good and the bad times. To just be there for them. To love them unconditionally.
