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When Mental Illness Is the Unseen Parent

  • Writer: Jennifer Grayson
    Jennifer Grayson
  • May 15
  • 3 min read

Updated: Jun 17

I didn’t grow up with a dad.


Not the kind of dad who comes on weekends or calls late. Not the kind who forgets sometimes and fumbles through. I mean I didn’t grow up with a dad. At all.


No visits. No voice. No steady shoulder to lean on. Just absence.


And when you're a kid, you don’t question absence. You adapt. You fill in the blanks. You build your entire personality around what’s missing because facing the truth is too loud. Too sharp. So you bend. You shrink. You work hard to become easy to love.

But when the parent who’s there is also spiraling, caught in their own mind, in cycles they can’t escape... there’s no place to land.


No pause. No stillness. Just tension. A house full of it.

Quiet and volatile all at once.


You wake up bracing. You learn to read silence like a language. You track tone shifts like survival depends on it. Because it does.

There’s no room for your own grief in that kind of home. You become the container for everyone else’s.

So I learned how to hold it all. How to please. How to disappear emotionally while showing up physically. I got really good at holding my breath. I got even better at pretending I wasn’t.

There was no dad. No anchor. No backup. Just me. Holding everything that cracked.


For the Dads Reading This

This is what I bring into every conversation with a father. Especially the ones navigating post-divorce co-parenting. Especially the ones who left something that hurt. Especially the ones who stayed longer than they should have, or left with a thousand questions.

You are not the villain. You are not weak for walking away from chaos. Especially if the chaos came from untreated mental illness. Especially if your kids were in the room while it happened.

When a relationship is shaped by instability, when you’re carrying someone who cannot regulate their own pain, leaving doesn’t mean you gave up. It means you chose something else.

A different kind of love.

A love that protects.

That parents. That steadies.

Your child needs that steadiness. One home. One parent who doesn’t unravel every time they do. One room they can walk into and exhale.

That’s the work. That’s the healing.


This Is Why Domesticatedly Exists

I didn’t build this for clicks. I built it because I’ve lived the ache. I know what it means to be the child on the other side of the breakdown. I know what it means to have no one looking out for your nervous system.

And I’ve seen what happens when a father chooses to become that safe place.

A lot of dads want to do better. They just never saw better. They weren’t taught how to create rhythm, how to be the anchor, how to manage parenting when their co-parent is unpredictable or unwell. When everything feels fragile.

And honestly, that’s where the support matters most. Not just with schedules or pickup logistics, but with the hard stuff. The questions that don’t have clean answers. The parts where you doubt yourself and need someone to say, “I see you. Keep going.”

Your child doesn’t need you to have all the answers. They just need to know you won’t disappear.


This Is Brave Work

It’s brave to leave dysfunction without passing on more of it. It’s brave to choose therapy. Coaching.

Honesty. It’s brave to show up imperfect and still be all in.


You are not just trying to move forward.

You are stopping a cycle.

And that matters more than anything.


I see you. And I’m here to help you hold steady.

 
 
 

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