Does anyone else feel deep sadness about missing their children's future?

[SillyOctopus]

Hello!

I'm a fifty year-old dad with a happy family and two wonderful daughters, 9 and 4. A Google search brought me to an old post on Mumsnet about this and I am 'glad' I'm not alone. I'd love to hear about other people's thoughts and feelings - mums and dads.

Fairly often I feel real physical, tangible sadness that I will die and I won't be able to be with my children. Today - I'm welling up, with a tight throat and waves of tight chest feelings - hence I was Googling it and see some other people have the same experience. I suppose I just wanted to 'say it', so I'm writing it here.

It feels selfish in a way - it's not that I feel that they'll miss me, but that I won't be around to enjoy their company. I feel real strong physical, tangible sadness and regret that I won't be able to be with my children. I already feel that their childhood, and our time together, is going far too fast.

I'm not afraid of being dead, I'm not religious and I believe that once you're dead there's nothing. It's like 'advance regret' - hard to put into words.

I don't know whether it makes any difference, but I'm bipolar 2 and had a recent diagnosis of autism spectrum. My emotions have often been quite extreme or quite flat across my life. Having children opened up whole new areas of emotional experience, so I guess this is still a learning experience as they and I grow!

At any rate, if there's a positive to this, I at least try very hard to make sure we all enjoy our time together - from bedtime stories to days out, or just watching tv together. In the end, I just want them to be ok and have the best lives and happy memories. I keep it to myself and certainly don't inflict these feelings on them!

Thanks :)

No, I never have.

Thank you! You're absolutely right. And funny you say all this as I've been taking pension advice and because we're having a conversion to make an extra bedroom so they don't have to share. I am determined to give them some security, if i can - they will have the house when we're gone!

Thank you for that :)

It’s different for me, in that I feel deeply sad at the thought of my dc missing me, or wanting me, and being gone. I don’t feel sad for me though, maybe because I don’t believe in an afterlife.

I think about death too much. Two of my close school mum friends died leaving young dc behind, and dh has attended a lot of colleague funerals in the last couple of years.

Thank you very much for your thoughtful reply and poem. I hope these feelings are fleeting, as mine are, even if very strong. I don't think it's 'bad' or even 'negative' to have them - people feel and cry sometimes, and then move on.

I often think about this. There is no perfect age to have a child, there are pros and cons however you do it, but I do think (probably due to snobbery around young parents) that it often gets completely overlooked the benefit of having more time with your children and grandchildren (talking very generally, statistically of course). I’m surprised it’s so openly dismissed, I personally see it as wonderful I have had my children through every decade of adulthood, and yet others dismiss this as me not living. But that’s not very helpful to the OP, just to reiterate no perfect age, what you’ve lost you’ll have made other gains in your own independent life experiences.

Thank you - I'm sorry you lost your dad; it must have been very hard. My parents are a similar age... My mum still misses her dad and talks about him often.

I try to stay positive, like you, when these thoughts happen; a bit of a cry and move on, and I do really appreciate the life we have. Maybe it is even helpful like that in some way?

Who the fuck are we if not THE main character in our own lives?!?

I think that when your children are very small, the relationship is incredibly close, you spend so much time with them, and so you naturally can’t bear the thought of being separated from them in any sort of permanent way.
However, as they get older, the dynamic changes. They become more independent and you find your own feelings start to change. This is just the way we are wired up, so it doesn’t feel like a huge loss once they start to branch out on their own.
Also, if you yourself have had the responsibility of looking after aging parents and the difficulties that entails, you would be mindful of not wanting to curtail your adult children’s lives by being dependent on them for ever.

My parents had me at 42. I’m now 35, so they’re 77.
I’m blessed I know, but they are happy, healthy and wonderful company. We talk every day and they’re active in being hands-on with my kids (albeit not as often as some of my friend’s younger parents, of course).
they often talk about the toughest time with me being their late forties/early fifties when they were working and I was still young.
don’t over-think it.

Absolutely not, that poster is obviously a sad individual.

The news about the solar eclipse got me thinking about this (stay with me, not too weird!). They said it would be something like 55 years until there was another total eclipse over the uk. And I thought, well I’ll just have to travel if I’m ever to see one again. But my children will, one will be just 70 other late 60s. And then I thought that I hope they have dcs who’ll see it, and then again thought that by then, my dcs may well be grandparents. Followed by me thinking that I hope to meet my grandchildren but choosing to have my dcs in my 30s means great-grandchildren isn’t something I’ll ever see.

on the other hand, every family I’ve met where there’s a great-grandma still about, at least one generation, if not two, had a baby under 18.

Well you'll be dead so won't feel anything so no point wasting time getting upset about something that's inevitable.

No but the way you dwell a lot on these thoughts is pretty main character but I had missed that you have a PD and autism it is pretty typical to fixate with those. I’m just not sure how helpful it is for others to normalise this for you.

FWIW I have a child with disabilities and it is much more common that I would think about how we might set things in place to make his life easier when we are no longer here. Those thoughts are still pretty fleeting but they are purposeful.

No, not in the slightest.

SillyOctopus, a number of the posters on here are the same kind of people who tell others who are concerned about something,“Think of the worst that could happen and you’ll realize it’s not that bad.” IMHO, those folks lack imagination. I can turn any adverse event into the first step toward the Apocalypse. That said, I absolutely understand your feelings. They originate from a place of profound love. The knowledge, even the idea of missing out on something so precious is naturally unsettling. BUT. I invite you to not allow that anxiety to taint your current joy. Don’t preemptively mourn what hasn’t happened. When these feelings come up, simply acknowledge them for a moment and move on with what you’re doing. Don’t stay in that painful spot. It’s a trap. It’s easy for me to say, but as much as you can “Be here, now.”

Well @SillyOctopus absolutely is the main character in his own life and we all carry bits of sadness inside us. As you get older, you start to realise what you will never live to see.

They will carry you in their hearts @SillyOctopus . The only advice has to be to live in the present, but believe me when I say that I know how hard that can sometimes be.

Re your last paragraph, the families I know with great grandparents, including my own, none of them had children as teenagers, they were mid twenties at least.

My mother became a great grandma at 76, and she, my daughter and I all have degrees so it's not like we had children to the exclusion of higher education.

My granddaughter has a very special relationship with her greatgrandma.The other families I know with great grandparents are similar.

Of course I know lots of people too who will never have a great grandparent in their family. My mother has several friends of a similar age to her( 89) who had children quite late and those children had children quite late, so their grandchildren are younger than my mum's great-grandchild.

Yep, that. My DDs lost their dad at 20 and 21, and helped me nurse him at home until his last breath. They were amazing, but one of them was exceptionally courageous in doing so, and more than a decade later is still a bit broken by it.

So I worry about how things will be. We have very little family, and while the other daughter has children and a huge bunch of supportive friends, the anxious one does not. Yet I suspect she'll be the one who will feel the most responsibility to care for me, and will be the one who will suffer most, or for longer, when I'm gone, I'm sure. So that's my dwelling area, but all I can do is finish collating all the admin, documents etc that will be needed towards and at the end of life.

Trouble is, doing that keeps the subject in my head more often than I want it to be!

OP- I am baffled by some of the lack of empathy in the responses to your post. I think what you feel is a sign of the strength of your love. that’s beautiful . Love conquers death - i don’t know how and i don’t mean in a religious sense. But it will and it does
“There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning. Thornton Wilder

You sound like a great dad and very emotionally in-tune. But overthinking like this is just going to cause permanent doom. There’s nothing you can do about it. Just enjoy every minute with your kids

Honestly, how does he seem like a ‘great dad’? He might be. He might not be, but expressing a semblance of emotion does f make a ‘great dad.’ The bar is low for men

Women on here are constantly being told that they're a great mother, even when their whole OP is about how evidently shit they are.

So I don't think this is a male privilege thing.