The Grief No One Talks About in Hard Core Parenting - Part 2, Disappointment/ GRIEF/Resilience

Sometimes the future we imagined for our children is not the one that unfolds. And with that can come a kind of grief that few people talk about, but it can also open the door to discovering what might be possible.

I vividly remember the day that I handed in notice for my daughter to leave high school and start home education. We had reached the end of the line. The school, support services and anyone that I had approached seemed unable or unwilling to help.

After I put the phone down to the Deputy Head I cried. Great big, ugly, blubbing tears. This seemed so heartbreakingly painful and difficult for my daughter, me and the rest of the family. Life would never be the same again.

Meanwhile my daughter, upstairs in her room, says she remembers feeling more positive than she'd felt in a very long time!

How could these two experiences be quite so different?

The fact is, we were living two very different lives. Her experience was full of physical, mental and emotional pain, and struggling to cope day after day. Mine was mainly emotional pain as I watched her limp along, not knowing how we were going to cope moving forward.

With the benefit of hindsight I now realise that I was focussing on the past and the future and she was focussing on the here and now.

The grief no one prepares you for

Inevitably, as parents, we have a vision for the way we think and hope our children's lives will turn out. And of course, it’s picture perfect, even if we know that the reality is almost always different for everyone.

We imagine friendships at school. Achievements. Opportunities. A fairly smooth path into adulthood. But when your child’s life veers sometimes dramatically away from the norm or the path we imagine the emotional impact can be enormous.

In that moment, I realised I was experiencing something I hadn’t expected at all. Grief. Not grief for a life lost. But grief for the future I had imagined for my daughter.

Although this is obviously not the same as traditional bereavement grief, the feelings can be remarkably similar. And the fact that other people may not see or understand this doesn’t invalidate it. Your experience is your experience. And you are entitled to feel however you feel.

One of the hardest parts of this kind of grief is that very few people recognise it. When someone dies people have some idea of what it means and how it might be different for everyone. But when your child’s life quietly moves onto a different path, the world often carries on as if nothing significant has happened at all.

The seven stages of grief in a very different context

The idea of the seven stages of grief was originally developed to describe bereavement, but many people recognise these same emotional patterns when life takes an unexpected turn.

They don’t happen neatly.They rarely happen in order. And many parents move through them more than once. But recognising them can sometimes help us make sense of what we are feeling.

Denial

At first there is often a sense that things surely can’t be as serious as they seem. Maybe the school will sort it out. Maybe the next appointment will bring answers. Maybe it’s just a difficult phase.

Denial can simply be the mind’s way of protecting us while we adjust to something overwhelming.

Anger

Then frustration can appear. Anger at systems that don’t seem to listen. The meeting where you leave feeling dismissed. The email that takes weeks to receive a reply. The sense that you are somehow “overreacting” to something that is affecting your child every single day. It can feel incredibly unfair.

Bargaining

This is the stage of “If only…” If only we had pushed earlier. If only the school had made adjustments sooner. If only we could find the right support, the right therapist, the right person who might fix everything. As parents we often become relentless problem-solvers in this stage, searching for answers wherever we can.

Depression

At some point the emotional weight can land fully. The exhaustion. The sadness.The quiet realisation that the life we imagined for our child may not look the way we once thought.

This stage can feel particularly lonely, especially when the world around you carries on as though nothing significant has happened.

Acceptance

Acceptance does not mean liking the situation. It simply means recognising: This is where we are right now. And from that point, we can begin to think about what might be possible.

Reconstruction

Gradually, something begins to shift. New routines form. Different opportunities appear. Unexpected strengths emerge in both us and our children.

The future may look very different from the one we originally imagined, but it may also hold possibilities we could never have predicted.

Hope

Eventually, many parents find that hope returns. Not the old hope for the picture-perfect path. But a quieter, deeper hope based on the reality of who our child truly is.

Grieving the imagined future

When our children’s lives don’t follow the path we expected, we are often grieving an imagined future. That grief is real. But something else is also true. Children are not defined by the plans we once made for them, and life has a remarkable ability to unfold in ways we never saw coming.

Joseph Campbell, who spent his life studying the stories humans tell, observed that 'we must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.' He believed that being knocked off your expected path wasn't a derailment, it was often the beginning of the real journey.

Human beings are remarkably adaptable. We truly can recover from almost any setback, it is part of the human condition. However hard things may feel right now, both you and your child have survived every single day that has brought you to this point.

This feeling is not permanent. And this situation is not necessarily the end of possibility. Sometimes it is simply the beginning of a different story.

What next?

So which stage of grief do you believe you are at? Let me know in the comments. And once we acknowledge the grief that can come with parenting through uncertainty, the next question becomes: How do we keep going?

Next time, I’ll explore what that really means — the often overused, but still vitally important concept of resilience, and why resilience in parenting rarely looks the way we think it should.

If this experience feels familiar to you, you are far from alone. I write regularly about the emotional realities of parenting through uncertainty, and many parents share their experiences and support one another in my Facebook community Mamas In This Together. It's a space where these conversations can happen openly, without judgement.