Joanna Fortune: How do I explain mum's distance to my children? 

The older two children have started to ask about my mum and why they rarely see her. I'm not sure how to explain that we have always been distant.

I am sorry you had to make your own way without a supportive connection with your mother. It's also good to hear you could do that for yourself. 

It sounds as though you have a good connection with your mother-in-law and that your children also experience her as a close family member.

Your story about your relationship with your mother is yours to share as much or as little as you feel comfortable doing. 

The fact that your children are now asking about it indicates they are identifying the difference between the grandmother who is physically and emotionally present in your lives and the one who is notably not so. 

It is a good idea to offer them something by way of contextualising this difference, but this does not mean that you have to share everything about your relationship with your mother.

Start by acknowledging their question and reflecting that they see so much of one granny and so little of the other that it’s an understandable question to have. 

What you say next is up to you, but I suggest some holding statements that will address your children's questions but not force you to share more than you can or perhaps is appropriate at this stage. 

Consider statements like 'You are so lucky to have a granny who loves you as much as granny does. Your other granny also loves you, but how she shows her love for us looks and feels different. She has things in her life that take up a lot of her time and focus, and that is where she is happiest, but it means she cannot be around to spend time with us as much as other granny chooses to do.'

Emphasise the granny they do have, how important she is, and how much she loves you all. When you refer to your mother, you can acknowledge her absence (or minimal presence, if that is more accurate) without shaming or getting into a discourse about your childhood. 

This phase in your life might well be something you begin to share with your children as they grow towards adulthood, but it might be too much for them to process and understand now (depending on their age and stage of development).

When our children ask us questions, try to stay within the boundaries of the question rather than seeing it as an opening for a more detailed information share that they haven’t (yet) asked us for. 

If the questions go deeper than you are ready or feel is appropriate to discuss with them, you can pause the conversation, saying that they are great questions, but you need more time to think about how to answer, then redirect them to something else. 

Aside from this, I would encourage you to be gentle with yourself when thinking and talking about your complex relationship with your mother. 

You may well have processed that experience and integrated it so that it informs rather than impedes how you live and how you parent, but if not, consider seeing a psychotherapist because you deserve a safe space to work through those dynamics and take care of yourself.

• If you have a question for child psychotherapist Dr Joanna Fortune, please send it to parenting@examiner.ie