When I was 13, my dad moved out. He sat my mom and me down at the kitchen table, his hands twisting a set of car keys, and said it was “just for a little while.” He said he and Mom were “taking space” and “figuring things out.” I believed him. I believed him because I was 13, and the alternative—that he was leaving for good—was too big and too dark to let into my head. I wanted to believe him.
Within a few months, he’d moved in with a woman I didn’t even know existed. A woman named Cheryl. Within a few months after that, he stopped calling. Not completely, not at first. It was a slow fade, like a signal dying. First, he’d text once in a while: “Hey, sport, hope school’s good.” Then it was just holidays—a “Merry Christmas, kiddo” text. Then, by the time I was 15, it just… stopped. Altogether.
I tried reaching out. I really, truly did. I sent texts about my good grades, about getting my driver’s license, about the lead in the school play. Every message I sent, crafted with a teenager’s desperate attempt at casualness, was met with one of two things: total, deafening silence, or a half-hearted excuse days later: “Sorry, sweetheart, crazy week at work.” “Didn’t see this! Hope it was great.”
Eventually, I just gave up. You can only knock on a locked door for so long before you realize no one is ever going to answer. You just look like a fool, and your knuckles start to hurt.
The worst part, the part that still twists in my stomach all these years later, was how fast he replaced me. Within a year of leaving, he and Cheryl had a baby boy. And suddenly, his Instagram—an account I had to find through a mutual cousin—was a living shrine to the new family he’d always wanted. It was filled with photos of this new life, the one I wasn’t part of. Him holding his son, Leo, at the beach. Family selfies with matching “Team Bennett” shirts. Proud dad captions about “getting a second chance at fatherhood” and “my amazing son, my whole world.”
Like he hadn’t abandoned his first kid.
I hated how much it still hurt, even as I told myself it didn’t matter. I’d scroll through his perfect, filtered life, my heart pounding, and feel this hot, acidic mix of rage and grief. He wasn’t just gone; he had erased me.