There are stories you carry quietly, hoping they dissolve with time. And then there are the stories that grow heavier the longer you hold them — the ones that don’t fade, don’t soften, don’t lose their edges. The ones that demand to be told, not because you want to relive them, but because the truth becomes too suffocating to keep buried. This is mine. And it’s my daughter’s. And it’s the story we both deserved to escape far sooner.

I met her biological father in rehab in 2017, when we were both bleeding emotionally in different ways. He was a heroin addict battling paranoid schizophrenia, always drifting between reality and delusion, between wanting help and sabotaging himself at every turn. I was unraveling too, trying to climb out of my own trauma with shaky hands and a tired spirit. Rehab isn’t a place where you build healthy love — it’s a place where broken people cling to each other because they don’t know how to stand alone yet.

We lived in Oxford Houses, a place full of rules and structure we both pretended to follow while barely holding ourselves together. And then, the very first time we crossed that line — one moment of intimacy in a storm of dysfunction — I got pregnant. You would think, for a moment, that becoming a father might’ve shaken something in him awake. But his reaction was instant, cold, and cruel. “Get an abortion,” he said, as if the child I carried was a mistake he could erase like a typo in a text. When I said no, he didn’t stay and work through it. He didn’t grow. He didn’t process. He didn’t ask questions. He simply walked away from me and the life inside me like we were disposable.

His mother was right there in the background, the puppet master behind every cowardly decision he made. She didn’t just fail to teach him responsibility — she actively encouraged his toxicity. She fed him delusion like medicine, telling him the baby “might not be his,” knowing damn well what she was doing. She wasn’t protecting him — she was protecting her control over him. It’s easier to keep a son weak and dependent than to let him grow into a man.

So he denied my daughter entirely. Through the entire pregnancy, every appointment, every scare, every milestone, he stayed gone. He wasn’t there when she was born, when my body tore itself apart bringing her into the world. He didn’t come when she cried for the first time or when I held her against my chest, terrified and in love all at once. He missed all of it — not by accident, but by choice.

He finally popped up when she was fifteen months old, held her like a stranger’s baby, smiled like he hadn’t abandoned her for over a year, and then disappeared again for nine more months. No checking in. No effort. No consistency. Just another vanishing act welcomed by a mother who never wanted him to step up in the first place.

When she was three, he returned again — empty promises and all. “I’m ready now,” he said. Ready apparently meant me doing every bit of the work. I drove her to him. I scheduled visits. I reached out. I encouraged the relationship. I played both parents while letting him play pretend. He stuck around for six months before slipping back into the shadows like a man allergic to responsibility.

Another year passed before he resurfaced again. When she was five, he tried to act stable for a few months — the same cycle, same rhythm, same disappointment dressed up as hope. And then came the night that broke something in me I will never get back. She didn’t want to buckle her seatbelt — a completely normal thing for a tired child to do — and instead of handling it like a parent, he snapped. Full psychotic rage. Screaming, losing control, terrifying her. And then he walked away. From her. In the dark. In the driveway. Five years old, crying, abandoned, and his mother didn’t move an inch to stop it. Didn’t comfort her. Didn’t protect her. Didn’t act like the adult in the room. She let it happen, because enabling him has always been easier than expecting him to grow.

He disappeared again after that — another year of nothing, another year of healing from trauma caused by a man who was never capable of being anything but chaos.

When she was almost seven, he came back and stayed for a year. But being present physically is not the same as being present emotionally. He was there, technically, but she never felt safe. She never felt wanted. She never felt seen. His mother treated her like an outsider — like a visitor, not a granddaughter. Like she was second to Oakleigh. Like she didn’t belong. That is a wound children understand even when they can’t put words to it.

And then this Thanksgiving everything came crashing into focus.

“Hey ima call her in a little while… Happy Thanksgiving tell her I love her,” he texted me.

I told him she didn’t want to talk.

“Ok.”

But the next morning he tried again:

“Tell her happy birthday and I love her.”

When I held the boundary she asked me to hold, he switched into manipulation mode.

“Or we can just keep this shit up… up to you.”

“Not letting me talk to my daughter on her birthday is a you problem.”

A you problem. That’s what he’s always wanted it to be. My fault. My doing. My control. Never his absence. Never his instability. Never his choices.

But this time, I didn’t protect his feelings. I didn’t soften the truth. I told him what our daughter told me:

“She does not want a relationship with you at all.”

“She asked me to block you.”

“She wants permanent separation.”

I reminded him of the things she remembers — the things trauma branded into her:

Being told to call him “Dad” when she didn’t want to.

Being talked about in front of her in that house.

The driveway.

The fear.

The feeling of being unwanted.

The feeling of being unsafe.

And instead of reflecting or apologizing or even pretending to care, he said the words he’s always believed:

“Have J adopt her then. I’m done too.”

Then:

“There’s nothing to fight. Keep her safe and away from me.”

“I told you before she was born that was the best option.”

“Send me the paperwork so you can stop taking my child support since she’s no longer my child.”

No longer his child.

Eight years of back-and-forth and he ended right where he started — pretending she wasn’t his so he wouldn’t have to feel the guilt of abandoning her over and over again.

But if anyone was paying attention, he never believed she was his.

Not because of truth, but because believing that lie let him run from accountability without looking like the villain.

A lie his mother planted, watered, and pruned for nearly a decade.

And here’s the part that slices deeper than anything he ever did:

My daughter didn’t cry when I told her.

She exhaled.

She relaxed.

She softened.

That’s when I realized she wasn’t losing a father — she was finally losing the weight of disappointment. She was finally choosing herself.

XOXO, The Healing Wildflower