Covering for an Absent Parent May Do Harm

Trips canceled. Birthdays forgotten. School plays unattended.

Anyone who has ever had to clean up the mess created by a chronically neglectful parent knows the heartbreaking dilemma of facing a shattered child.

It’s understandable if a mom wants to say, “Your father is a brainless lout who should find worms in his pizza,” but that would only make it worse. It’s also understandable to want to say of an absentee mother, “She really loves you and wants to be here,” but that can be just as painful when it’s not true.

For years, a Palos Verdes mother of three says, she covered up for a cold and distant ex-husband. “I never said anything bad about him. My philosophy was, it was their father and I didn’t want to bad-mouth their father.”

Instead, she told her children he was a good father and that he truly loved them. “I thought I was a good person because I wasn’t saying he’s a jerk.”

Others, including grandparents and parents who are still married to each other, sometimes go further, sending letters, cards or presents to the child with phony greetings from the forgetful parent.

“We all try so hard so our kids won’t hurt,” says Los Angeles therapist Constance Ahrons. With a young child, it may indeed be kinder to soften the blow, gradually letting the truth sink in, as with Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. But if the deception is prolonged for years, and the neglect is chronic, the danger is that children will build up unrealistic fantasies or feel they cannot trust their own perceptions.

The Palos Verdes mother says that one day her oldest daughter, then 31, told her that she had made a big mistake in refusing to acknowledge the children’s father’s neglect.

They were in the car, driving along a San Pedro street. The mother relates: “She said, ‘You invalidated my feelings. I thought if Mom said he was a good dad, why am I thinking he’s not? What’s wrong with me?’

“I thought, ‘Omigod, what have I done?’ ” the mother says. She pulled the car over and admitted that her ex was indeed a horrible father. They both cried.

But the daughter says she also felt like laughing with relief. “After that, I felt like I could get on with my life,” she says. “For so long, I was hanging on to that, thinking maybe it is me. Maybe I’m wrong.

“It was like trying to tell people the sky is blue, but no one will verify that, so you think, maybe I have a vision problem. Maybe someone told me that color is blue and it’s not blue.”

After the talk with her mother, she says, “I quit doubting myself.”

Now, she is stepmother to a 12-year-old boy whose biological mother wants to see him only when it’s convenient for her. She has vowed to handle it differently. “I don’t deny his feelings,” she says, “but I don’t reinforce them. I say, ‘Well, sometimes that’s the way it is.’ ”

Family counselors say it is best for children to hear gentle explanations of the truth, in ways that are appropriate for their age and expressed as neutrally as possible.

Marion Lindblad-Goldberg, a Philadelphia psychologist, offers the following for someone faced with a child whose father has, for instance, canceled a visit with his child to go on a ski trip: “You are a wonderful kid and it’s wonderful to be with you and anyone who decides to not be with you is losing out. I know you’re hurt your dad didn’t show up. The thing you have to understand is that your dad is sometimes inconsistent. Sometimes he says one thing and does something else and it doesn’t mean you’re not a good kid and it doesn’t mean you’re less fun to be with than a ski slope.”

It also helps to balance the hard facts with good points about the parent. The key, she says, is not to paint the parent as the bad guy or the good guy, “but as someone who is human and in between as we all are.”