One of my earliest memories isn’t of my father.
It’s of looking for him.
I remember standing in my neatly pressed school uniform during graduation in primary school. The chairs were filling up with parents, cameras flashed from every direction, and children ran into the arms of the people who had come to celebrate them.I kept looking every time another adult walked through the gate, a part of me wondered if maybe it was him. Maybe he was just running late. Maybe he’d surprise me. Maybe, just this once, I’d get to point at someone in the crowd and proudly say, “That’s my dad.”
He never came.
I told myself it didn’t matter.
But children always notice who’s missing.
Years passed, and I carried that same quiet hope into high school.
Prize-giving days.
School events.
Moments that were supposed to become memories.
Every single time, I found myself doing the same thing I’d done as a little girl searching the crowd without even realizing it ,It became a habit.Not because he had ever shown up before but because hope is stubborn, especially when you’re a child waiting for someone who is supposed to love you.
Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t just waiting for my father.
I was waiting to feel chosen.
The truth is, my father had already started breaking our family long before I was born ,my parents’ relationship was built on conflict instead of peace. Arguments filled their home, and one of those arguments ended with my mother suffering a broken hand after he beat her I never witnessed that moment but I grew up living inside the aftermath of it.Trauma has a way of reaching children, even when they never saw the beginning by the time I was old enough to understand what had happened, the damage had already become part of my life.
My mother never had the luxury of grieving the family she had hoped for.
She had children to raise.
Bills to pay.
Mouths to feed.
Dreams to protect.
Without ever asking for it, she became both mother and father.She carried responsibilities that should have belonged to two people, somehow making sure we never went without love, even when we went without so many other things.When people tell me I’m strong, I know exactly where I inherited that strength from.
It wasn’t from the man who left.
It was from the woman who stayed.
As I grew older, something became painfully clear.
My father hadn’t disappeared from the world.
He had simply disappeared from ours.
He had time.
He had energy.
He had love to give.
It just wasn’t being given to me or my siblings.
Watching him choose his other children felt like watching someone hand out pieces of themselves while pretending you didn’t exist.
They had birthdays with their father.
They had memories with him.
They had the version of him I spent years hoping would show up for me.
I remember turning eighteen.
People say eighteen is special.
It’s the beginning of adulthood.
A milestone.
A day you never forget.
Mine came and went without my father’s voice.
No phone call.
No message.
Nothing.
What hurts even more is realizing that my own father doesn’t even know the day I was born.
Not the month.
Not the date.
Not the child he helped bring into this world.
There was a time when that truth made me question myself.
I wondered if I had done something wrong.
If maybe I wasn’t enough.
If maybe I was too easy to leave behind.
But children are never responsible for being abandoned, adults are responsible for abandoning them.Even now, years later, his absence still echoes through parts of my life.It shows up in the fear that people I love will leave ,It shows up in the way I sometimes question whether I’m worth choosing,It shows up in moments where reassurance feels impossible to believe.
Abandonment doesn’t always leave visible scars.Sometimes it settles quietly inside you and calls itself normal,If there’s one person who deserves every bit of recognition in my story, it’s my mother.
She celebrated every achievement, no matter how small.
She sat through graduations.
She showed up for school events.
She applauded loudly enough to make up for the silence beside her.
She became my safe place when life constantly reminded me of who wasn’t there.
For years, I thought my story was about the father who left.Now I realize it’s also about the mother who refused to,and while my father may never know the day I was born, my mother remembers every detail of the day my life began.Maybe that’s why, despite everything, I survived.
I was raised by someone who chose me every single day.
