The Unanswered Questions We Carry: Becoming a Parent After Loss
The first time I held my daughter, I felt a seismic shift in my understanding of love. Her tiny fingers curled around mine, her breath soft against my chest, and in that moment, something fractured inside me. Not a breakage of spirit, but a crack that let light spill into corners of my heart I’d kept locked for decades. Parenthood, I quickly realized, wasn’t just about caring for a child—it was about confronting the ghosts of your own childhood. And for me, that ghost was my father.
My dad left when I was seven. Not in the dramatic, slammed-door way of movies, but quietly, like a shadow dissolving at sunrise. One day he was there, teaching me to tie my shoes or laughing at cartoons; the next, his side of the closet was empty, his coffee mug absent from the dish rack. His absence wasn’t a wound—it was a void, a question mark that hung over birthdays, graduations, and ordinary Tuesday afternoons. For years, I told myself I’d made peace with it. Then I became a parent, and suddenly, I wasn’t so sure.
The Paradox of Time
Parenting has a way of bending time. Nights spent soothing a crying infant stretch into eternities, while years vanish in the blink of an eye. Watching my daughter grow—her first steps, her first words, the way she now runs to meet me at the door—I’ve started seeing time as something granular, like sand. You can hold it, but it slips through your fingers no matter how tightly you clutch.
This awareness made me wonder: Did my father feel this way too? Did he look at my childhood and see sand slipping away? When he walked out, did he imagine the graduations he’d miss, the scraped knees he wouldn’t bandage, the late-night talks that would never happen? Or was it simpler than that? Maybe he just… left. No grand internal struggle, no lingering guilt—just a decision made and followed through.
But here’s the thing I can’t reconcile: How? How do you walk away from someone who needs you so completely? How do you silence the instinct to stay, to protect, to show up? My daughter’s laughter is a siren song I’d follow into any storm. Her tears feel like a personal failure. If she called for me in the dark, I’d sprint through fire to reach her. So what changed for him? What made it possible to leave and never look back?
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
For most of my life, I crafted narratives to explain his absence. Maybe he was unhappy. Maybe he felt trapped. Maybe he thought we’d be better off without him. These theories were coping mechanisms, ways to turn a senseless act into something logical. But becoming a parent shattered those stories.
I’ve felt unhappy. I’ve felt trapped. I’ve even wondered, in sleep-deprived desperation, whether my family might be better off without me. But here’s the difference: I could never act on those feelings. The primal pull to stay—to be present, even imperfectly—overrides everything. Which makes me wonder: Did my father lack that instinct entirely? Or did he override it? And if so, what does that say about the love he had—or didn’t have—for me?
There’s a cruelty in these questions. They offer no answers, only deeper mysteries. Yet parenthood demands that I sit with them. My daughter deserves a father who stays, so I stay. But in doing so, I’m forced to acknowledge that my own father’s choice wasn’t inevitable. It was a series of decisions, each one a brick in the wall between us.
The Gift of Unknowing
Paradoxically, becoming a parent has taught me to stop seeking answers. Some truths are buried too deep, lost to time, regret, or the complexities of the human heart. My father might not even understand his own choices anymore. People change; memories blur. The man who left isn’t the same man who exists in my mind—if he exists at all.
What I can understand is the weight of responsibility my daughter has unknowingly placed on me. She’ll never have to question whether I love her. She’ll never stare at a phone, willing it to ring. She’ll never construct elaborate excuses for my absence. In healing my own wounds, I’m giving her a childhood free of those particular scars.
Yet this healing isn’t linear. Some days, grief ambushes me. I’ll watch her chase bubbles in the backyard, and suddenly I’m seven again, wondering why my dad didn’t want to see me ride a bike without training wheels. Other days, anger flares: How dare he miss this? How dare he deprive himself of something so profoundly beautiful?
The Legacy We Choose
In the end, parenthood is about legacy—not the kind etched in wills or family trees, but the quiet, daily legacy of showing up. My father’s absence is part of my story, but it doesn’t have to define hers. If anything, it’s given me a ferocity, a gratitude for the ordinary moments he chose to miss. Bedtime stories, lost teeth, mismatched socks—these are my acts of defiance.
I’ll never understand him. I’ll never know if he regretted leaving or if he even thought of me at all. But in raising my daughter, I’ve found a strange kind of closure. The unanswered questions don’t ache as they once did. They’re just… there, like old photographs tucked in a drawer. Painful to revisit, but proof that I loved someone who couldn’t love me back the way I needed.
Maybe that’s the lesson here: We don’t have to understand our parents to forgive them. We don’t have to untangle their choices to make peace with our own. Becoming a parent doesn’t erase the past—it just gives you a new lens to see it through. And sometimes, that’s enough.
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