This one is tough. I don’t really rationally believe that the boys prefer my husband but I sometimes can’t escape the feeling that they do.

They are both daddy’s boys and despite me being the main caregiver, spending most of my time with them, planning their days and activities, worrying about what they should eat, and remembering all their school paraphernalia, appointments and homework, they generally call for daddy first, clamour for him to read them a bedtime story, run to him when he gets in, in a way they never have to me.

I’m finding it very hard at the moment because we’ve been away for three days and I have missed them desperately. Our six-year-old ran to meet us on our return and leapt into my husband’s arms and wanted him to sit next to him in the car. Our two-year-old shouted out ‘daddy, I love you’ today and when I asked him if he also loved mummy, he said ‘no’. It made my heart break.

I know he doesn’t mean it – he’s a toddler for God’s sake – I know they both love me, but I am struggling with it at the moment, and don’t feel easily able to admit how I am feeling to others who don’t seem to have the same issue. I also think it’s great that they both have such a strong connection to their dad and would never want to discourage it.

It makes me so upset and then I’m stuck in a perpetual cycle of having to hide this because I don’t want to make them feel they have done something wrong. I’m not doing a very good job of it at the moment, as I sob around the house!

Then I worry that they can pick up on my teary demeanour that I am badly failing to disguise and no wonder they don’t enjoy my company.

I need to get over this melancholy that I sometime have a tendency towards, but my confidence is a bit shot at the moment as I hover around a feeling of not being good enough generally. Hoping someone out there can relate!

Image from Pixabay