My mom, Jessica, had me really young. She and my dad, Greg, were barely adults themselves. I was told they tried to make it work for a while, but whatever held them together wasn’t strong enough to last.
Not through a pregnancy… and not through me.
The day I was born, my father rushed to the hospital, thinking he’d be meeting his son and starting a new chapter with my mother.
Instead, she handed me over to my father.
“I’m not interested in parenting, Greg,” she’d said. “I don’t want him. You can do it.”
And then she limped out of the hospital and out of my life. There was no child support, financial or emotional.
There was nothing, no voice on the line, no cards, no birthday wishes. Just silence that stretched across the years like a wall we never climbed. Sometimes that silence was louder than any fight could’ve been.
My father raised me entirely on his own. Every fever, every scraped knee, every late-night supermarket run because I suddenly needed poster board for a school project, he was there.
