Am I wrong for blocking my dad the second he messaged me after nine years of nothing?
I (26F) was seven years old the last time I saw my father, Dennis Kowalski (53M). My mom, Trish, raised me and my brother Corey alone after Dennis walked out. No child support. No birthday cards. Not a single phone call on Christmas. We lost our house the year after he left because my mom was working two jobs and it still wasn’t enough. I watched her cry at the kitchen table over bills more times than I can count.
I built a whole life without him in it. I’m in grad school now. I have an apartment, a boyfriend, friends who feel like family. Corey, who’s 23, still has a hard time with it – he went through a bad stretch in his early twenties that I genuinely believe traces back to Dennis disappearing on us.
Three weeks ago I got a Facebook message from an account I didn’t recognize.
The profile picture was a man I didn’t know. But the name. Dennis Kowalski. And the message started with: “Hi sweetheart. I know this is out of nowhere.”
My stomach dropped.
I stared at it for probably ten minutes without moving.
He said he’d been sober for four years. That he had a therapist. That he thought about us “every single day” and that he knew he didn’t deserve anything from me but he just wanted me to know he was sorry and that he’d changed.
There was a phone number at the bottom.
I didn’t respond. I blocked him. Then I blocked the number. Then I sat in my car for twenty minutes before I could drive.
I told my mom and she said she supported whatever I decided. I told Corey and he completely lost it – not at me, but at the situation. He said he NEEDED to respond, that he had questions, that he deserved answers. And then Corey said something I wasn’t ready for.
He said Dennis had already messaged HIM.
Three weeks before he messaged me.
Corey had been talking to him for three weeks and hadn’t told me.
My friends are split. Half of them think I had every right to block him immediately and protect myself. The other half think I made a decision too fast, that blocking without responding was its own kind of statement I might regret.
But what’s making me question everything isn’t what Dennis said in that message.
It’s what Corey told me last night, after I confronted him about keeping it secret.
He said, “There’s something Dennis told me that you need to know. About why he really left. And Dee – it’s about Mom.”
The Three Weeks Corey Didn’t Tell Me
I need to back up, because the Corey thing is what’s actually eating me alive right now.
My brother and I are close. Like, genuinely close, not the polite-holiday-texts kind of close. We went through all of it together. The apartment after the house. The years Mom worked doubles on weekends. The Christmas he was four and I was eight and we both knew there wasn’t going to be much under the tree and we didn’t say anything about it. We just watched TV together until we fell asleep on the couch.
So when I found out he’d been talking to Dennis for three weeks without a word to me, I didn’t yell. I didn’t cry. I just went very quiet, which is worse, and Corey knows it.
He came over to my apartment. Sat at my kitchen table with his hands wrapped around a mug he wasn’t drinking from. He looked like he hadn’t slept.
“I didn’t know how to tell you,” he said.
“You could’ve just told me.”
“I know.”
He’d gotten the message six days after I blocked Dennis on Facebook, it turns out. So Dennis tried me first, got blocked, then went to Corey. That order matters to me. I don’t know exactly why, but it does.
Corey said the first few messages were what you’d expect. Dennis being careful. Apologetic. Asking how Corey was doing, what he was up to, saying he didn’t expect anything. Corey said he almost didn’t respond. He sat on it for four days. But then he did respond, because Corey has always been the one who needed to understand things, who can’t just close the door and walk away the way I apparently can.
They talked for three weeks. Mostly over Facebook Messenger, a couple of phone calls.
And somewhere in those three weeks, Dennis told him something.
What Corey Actually Said
He wouldn’t give it to me all at once. That’s not how Corey operates. He works up to things. He started with, “You have to understand, I’m not saying this to defend him. I’m not on his side.”
I told him I didn’t need the disclaimer.
He said Dennis claims he didn’t just leave. He says he was asked to leave.
By Mom.
I sat there and let that land.
Corey kept going. Dennis told him there was an incident, a specific one, about a month before he disappeared. He said he’d been drinking badly that year, which we knew, which was never a secret. But he said one night things got bad enough that Trish told him if he didn’t go, she was going to call the police. He said he left because she gave him a choice and he made the wrong one. He said he chose the bottle over his kids and he knows it, he’s not trying to excuse it. But he says the story isn’t exactly “Dennis just walked out one day.”
He also says he tried to send money twice in the first year. Through a third party, some friend of his named Ray. And that the money never got to us.
Corey looked at me when he said that part.
I didn’t say anything.
What I Know About My Mother
Here is what I know to be true about Trish Kowalski, who goes by Trish Daley now because she took back her maiden name when I was twelve.
She worked herself half to death for us. She missed one of my school plays in fourth grade and she still brings it up. She drove Corey to every single one of his baseball games for three years even when she was running on four hours of sleep. She is the most reliable person I have ever known.
She also does not talk about Dennis. Ever. If you bring him up, she gets this look, not angry exactly, more like she’s putting something back in a box and closing the lid. She says “that’s done” and she means it.
I always thought that was strength. The ability to just be finished with something.
Now I’m sitting with the fact that I don’t actually know what happened. I know the version she gave us, which was: he left. He chose not to be here. And that version is not technically wrong, from what Dennis apparently told Corey. He did leave. He did choose not to be here. But there might be a hallway between those two facts that I never knew existed.
The money thing is what I keep getting stuck on.
Because I remember being ten years old and watching my mom cut the cable because we couldn’t afford it. I remember the specific brand of peanut butter we bought because it was fifty cents cheaper. I remember a lot about those years and none of it included any money from Dennis.
If he sent money and it didn’t reach us, where did it go? Ray, whoever Ray is?
Or.
I can’t finish that sentence yet.
What I Did Next
I called my mom.
Not to accuse her of anything. I want to be clear about that. I called her because she is my mother and because I’ve never in my life had a secret from her that felt this heavy and I didn’t know what else to do with it.
She picked up on the second ring. Asked how I was. I said fine. She said she was making soup, did I want to come over for dinner. And I said, “Mom, I need to ask you something and I need you to be honest with me.”
Silence.
Not a long silence. Maybe two seconds. But I’ve been talking to this woman my whole life and I know her silences.
“What did Corey tell you,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
So she knew Corey had been talking to him.
She knew.
I asked her if she told Dennis to leave that night. She said yes. She said she’d never lied about that, she just hadn’t explained it, because we were kids and she didn’t think we needed to know the specifics of why she made the decision she made.
I asked about the money.
Another silence. Longer this time.
She said, “I don’t know what he told Corey.”
I said, “He told Corey he sent money twice. Through someone named Ray.”
She said, “Dee.”
I said, “Mom.”
She said, “It was a hundred dollars. Each time. It was nothing. We needed real help, not a hundred dollars twice a year. I didn’t want you kids thinking he was doing something when he wasn’t really doing anything.”
I didn’t say anything for a while.
She said, “I’m not going to apologize for protecting you.”
And I believe her. I do. I think she made a decision she thought was right and she’s been carrying it for nineteen years and she doesn’t regret it. That’s my mom. She makes a decision and she holds it.
But two hundred dollars would have bought a lot of peanut butter. And she decided we didn’t get to know it existed.
Where I Am Right Now
I haven’t unblocked Dennis.
I’m not sure I’m going to.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about getting information you didn’t ask for: it doesn’t actually change the facts you already knew. It adds to them. It makes the picture bigger. But Dennis still left. He still chose drinking over showing up. He still missed nineteen years. His sobriety is real, maybe. His therapy is real, maybe. His regret sounds real. But none of that is mine to carry, and me unblocking him doesn’t give Corey back whatever those years cost him, and it doesn’t give my mom back the nights she cried over the kitchen table.
What it does is open a door. And I don’t know what’s on the other side of it. I don’t know if I have the bandwidth for whatever that is.
Corey wants me to talk to Dennis. He said it gently, not as pressure, just as a wish. He said, “I just think you should have all the information before you decide.” And I said, “I blocked him before I had all the information and I think that was still okay.” He didn’t argue with that.
My boyfriend, Marcus, said I don’t owe anyone a conversation. He’s right. I know he’s right.
But Corey also said something else before he left my apartment. He said Dennis asked about me specifically. Asked if I was okay. Asked what I was studying. And then he said, “He cried, Dee. On the phone. He just cried.”
And I said, “Yeah. Okay.”
Because what am I supposed to do with that? It doesn’t fix anything. A man crying on the phone nineteen years too late doesn’t fix a single thing. But it’s also not nothing. I don’t know what it is. I’m twenty-six years old and I have a mother who protected me by deciding what I got to know, and a father I don’t remember, and a brother who’s been carrying a secret for three weeks, and I’m sitting in my apartment trying to figure out which version of the story I’m actually in.
I don’t have an ending to this. I haven’t decided anything.
I just needed to write it out.
—
If you know someone sitting with something like this, pass it along. Sometimes just knowing other people are in the middle of it too is enough.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out My Dead Brother Walked Into My Section at 7am and Ordered Nothing or hear about a different kind of life change in My Seven-Year-Old Said “We Don’t Have to Say Anything” and I Finally Heard Myself. You might also find something interesting in Someone Sent Me a Photo of Tyler Briggs Asleep in His Bedroom.
