'I have 50-50 custody and nobody talks about the silent micro-grief.'

Nobody has kids thinking they'll only be around them for half their life.

To cope with it, you compartmentalise and it becomes the new normal. But then sometimes, it hits you.

And the only way I can describe it is a heavy veil of micro-grief — because you aren't grieving a complete loss. You know you will see them again soon.

But you grieve the little moments. The minutiae of intimacy you get when you hear about their day. What happened at school. Who their latest gripe is with. The small revelations that unfold in the ordinary hours — hours that are now shared.

Watch: Dr Golly on how parenting changes the brain. Post continues below.

You grieve a cuddle on the couch watching a TV show. Reading a book to them in bed. Kissing them goodnight. Getting to see how peaceful they look when they're asleep. All those precious threads that weave a parent's heart to their child's.

And let me be clear, I'm not comparing this to the unimaginable grief of losing a child and I am grateful for every moment I do get to spend with them.

The unspoken pain we don't like to talk about.

I often focus on the silver linings of being a single parent, as there are many. We get breaks, we get every second weekend to do whatever we like. And we do. But there's a silent pain we don't talk about. We try not to focus on. And that is, we miss them terribly.

It's as if you don't quite feel whole while they are gone. And it quite literally hurts your heart.

For single parents with sole custody, that's a relentless job. And it's a completely different, exhausting kind of hard.

But for those of us who do get breaks, sometimes in those quiet moments, when the house is impeccably tidy, the doorway not littered with shoes and scooters, and your tiny home suddenly feels vast and hollow with its eerie silence. Sometimes, it hits you like a wave you never saw coming.

Image: Supplied

I heard Grey's Anatomy star Ellen Pompeo being interviewed on the 'Call Her Daddy' podcast recently about the 'split of motherhood'.

"I'm not 100 per cent at work when I have kids at home, I'm absolutely not," she said.

"You cannot be a mother and have children and give 100 per cent to your job."

And it made me realise that when I don't have my kids to go home to, I can be 100 per cent at work. You learn to switch off the 'mum reflex' — that constant hum of awareness that usually vibrates in the background of every thought.

You have to, or it would consume you. And you can because you know they're safe and loved and being taken care of by their other parent. But the silence of that switched-off reflex creates its own kind of echo.

And just like grief, micro-grief isn't linear. Like sometimes when you see a child on the street that's a similar age to yours hugging their mum, and your breath catches in your throat. Or a toddler runs past you, and suddenly you're transported back in time to when you did see them every day. These moments ambush you when you least expect it.

Pompeo went on to say, "There's a part of you that is somewhere else, you split into different pieces." She was talking about not being fully present at work because you're thinking of your children, but I think this statement rings true for those of us who share custody in a different way.

Your life splits into different pieces. When you're in mum mode, you're all consumed by it. But when you aren't with them, you fragment into different versions of yourself — trying to fill spaces that weren't meant to be empty.

And perhaps that's the silent truth of shared custody — you're never quite whole. There's always a piece of you missing when they're not there. Like phantom limb pain for a part of your identity.

Learning to honour both versions of yourself.

But over time, you learn to carry that missing piece differently. Not as a crushing weight, but as a reminder of the love that exists whether you're together or apart. You learn to honour both versions of yourself, the parent and the person.

This micro-grief doesn't get smaller, but you build a life around it. You create new rhythms. And in those moments when you are out having fun with friends, lying on a beach with nobody to watch in the water, you find unexpected joy.

Image: Supplied

You do catch yourself feeling lucky for having breaks. The part of your thirties you lost to the trenches that you didn't think you'd get back until much later in life. You rediscover parts of yourself that had been temporarily frozen.

And when you do have your kids, you also feel so lucky. You appreciate the time you have. You don't take them for granted. You're more present, more aware of each moment's fleeting nature.

And you're reminded that the connection remains unbroken. Just stretched across time and space, like an elastic band that always pulls you back together.

It's not the parenthood I imagined. But it's ours. And within this fractured wholeness, we've found our way to love each other completely, even when we're apart.

Feature Image: Supplied.