Reade Saunders

The child is shaped first by absence. Not just of the father who left, but of the mother who remained – distant, distracted, or fractured. Absence wears many disguises: silence, busyness, emotional flatness, disassociation. Sometimes it smiles and says “You were wanted” while the eyes look somewhere far behind you.

The father left early, perhaps physically, perhaps emotionally. Either way, he became a ghost too soon to remember. There is no betrayal to name, only a shapeless void. This, says John Bowlby, creates the architecture of insecure attachment. Disorganised if fear is present. Avoidant if grief is normalised. Anxious if the caregiver is unpredictable.

But the mother… the mother is harder to identify as source. She is present, but not with you. She praises you, dresses you well, takes you on planes. But you sense it—her sadness is larger than you, and somehow, you are expected to fix it. Boarding school becomes the practical solution to a problem no one names. You’re told it’s a privilege. You’re told you’re lucky.

You are six. Or eight. Or ten. You learn to hide in cupboards. You carry your own tuck box like a soldier carries a rucksack. You cry silently at night, not because it’s traumatic—because no one told you it’s okay to feel. You learn not to ask for comfort. Nick Duffell calls it boarding school syndrome: the premature severing of dependency, mistaken for character-building. What it builds is armour.

Now you are grown. A husband. A father. Maybe a stepfather. And you realise you are not entirely sure what that means. The internal blueprint is either blank, or filled with scripts from men who abandoned, or women who looked through you while calling it love.

And yet, you are determined to be different.

You fight to be present. You learn emotional literacy by trial and error. You confuse over-functioning with care, and withdrawal with strength. You misstep. You apologise. You rebuild.

In therapy, you learn the difference between vigilance and love. You discover that parenting is not performance – it is availability. You begin to understand that your rage was once grief. That your independence was once abandonment in disguise.

You remember the man who stayed –your stepfather, maybe. Quiet. Reliable. Never dramatic. He didn’t save you, but he didn’t leave. His love wasn’t loud, but it lasted. And you realise: That was enough.

So now, in your own home, you set the table. You apologise when you’re wrong. You show up to the recital. You teach your stepson to ride a bike and your daughter to forgive herself.

You are still haunted, sometimes. By the mother who couldn’t see you. By the father who didn’t return. By the part of you that believes your worth must still be earned.

But you stay.

And in staying, you become what no one gave you: a model.

Presence in the context of generational abandonment is radical.

Love in the wake of emotional neglect is redemptive.

Patience when you were taught performance is healing.

This is how the lineage breaks.

This is how a ghost becomes a father.