Am I wrong for blocking my dad the second he messaged me after nine years of nothing?
I’m 26 and I have a mortgage, a full-time job, and a four-year-old I’m raising with my partner Denise. My dad, Gary, has been gone since I was seventeen – not dead, not deployed, just GONE. He left my mom, blocked her number, and drove out of our driveway one Tuesday morning while I was in the shower getting ready for school. When I got downstairs, his coffee cup was still on the counter.
My mom, Patrice, worked two jobs for three years to keep us in our house. My grandma moved in to watch my little brother Marcus after school because we couldn’t afford a sitter. I watched my mom cry in the Walmart parking lot once because she had $11 left until Friday and wasn’t sure if she should buy milk or gas. I never told her I saw that.
Gary didn’t send child support for the first two years. We had to take him to court just to get $400 a month, which he paid inconsistently until Marcus turned eighteen. He didn’t come to my high school graduation. He didn’t come to Marcus’s. When I had my daughter, my mom posted about it on Facebook and I always wondered if he saw it.
Three weeks ago, I got a message request on Instagram from an account I didn’t recognize. The username was just a random string of letters. No profile picture. One message in the queue.
It said: “It’s your father. I know I don’t deserve anything from you. I’ve been sober for two years and my sponsor told me I owe amends to the people I hurt. I’m not asking you to forgive me. I just want you to know that leaving the way I did was the worst thing I ever did in my life, and I think about you and Marcus every single day. If you’re willing to talk, even once, I’ll be here.”
I stared at it for probably ten minutes.
I showed it to Denise and she said it was my call, completely. I called Marcus and he said he didn’t know what he’d do, but he didn’t think I was wrong either way. My mom didn’t say anything for a long time when I told her, and then she said, “Whatever you need to do.”
My friend Tara said blocking him would be cruel because he’s clearly trying to get better. My friend Devon said nine years is nine years and I don’t owe him a single word.
My friends are split and I genuinely don’t know what the right thing is here.
I typed out a response three different times and deleted all three. The fourth time, I wrote something I’ve never said to anyone out loud, not even Denise, not even my therapist – something I’ve been holding since I was seventeen years old standing in a kitchen next to a coffee cup that was still warm.
I hit send.
The Thing Nobody Tells You About a Parent Who Leaves
He didn’t die. That’s the part that messes you up in ways that are hard to explain to people.
When someone dies, there’s a whole infrastructure for it. People bring food. There’s a funeral. The loss has a shape. You’re allowed to be wrecked and people understand why.
When your dad just leaves, you get none of that. You get your mom pretending to be okay at the dinner table. You get teachers asking if everything’s alright at home in a tone that makes you want to disappear through the floor. You get the particular shame of having to explain, over and over, to coaches and friends’ parents and school forms, that your dad’s not around. Not dead. Just not around.
I was seventeen. I had a Spanish test that Tuesday. I remember thinking about it in the shower. I came downstairs and the house had that specific quiet that was different from normal morning quiet, and Gary’s coffee cup was on the counter with maybe two inches of coffee still in it, and I stood there and looked at it and I knew. I don’t know how. I just knew.
I didn’t call my mom at work. I went to school and I took the Spanish test and I got a 91, and I didn’t tell anyone what I knew until she got home that evening and I watched her face change when she walked in and saw his closet half-empty.
I never cried in front of Marcus. He was twelve.
What Nine Years Actually Looks Like
People hear “nine years” and they think of it as a long time in the abstract. Like a number on a page.
Here’s what nine years actually is.
It’s three years of watching Patrice work a morning shift at a dental office and then come home, change her shoes, and leave for a four-hour evening shift at a restaurant. It’s my grandma, Vera, who had bad knees and didn’t like to drive at night, parking herself in our living room every weekday afternoon anyway because there was no other option. It’s the Walmart parking lot, which I never mentioned to anyone, not even Marcus, because some things you just carry.
It’s my high school graduation, which I kept scanning the crowd for him at even though I told myself I wasn’t. It’s finding a parking ticket in Gary’s name online once, in 2019, from a town in Tennessee, and not knowing what to do with that information so I closed the tab and never looked again.
It’s my daughter Kezia being born two years ago and my mom holding her in the hospital and crying, and me thinking, somewhere in the back of my mind: does he know?
Nine years is not abstract. It’s a specific accumulation of Tuesday mornings and school forms and parking lots and moments you file away and don’t talk about.
So when I got that message, I knew what I was looking at. I knew what it cost him to send it, probably. I’m not a person who needs other people to suffer. I’m not sitting around hoping Gary’s miserable.
But I’m also not seventeen anymore. I’m 26 with a kid and a mortgage and a full life that got built without him in it, and I’ve learned something about myself over the years, which is that I don’t have unlimited capacity for things that cost me.
The Three Drafts I Deleted
The first one I wrote was almost polite. Something like, I appreciate you reaching out. I need some time to think about this. I read it back and it sounded like an email to a client. I deleted it.
The second one was the angry one. I don’t want to get into specifics but it was long and it covered a lot of ground. The Walmart parking lot was in there. The graduation was in there. I wrote it fast, didn’t stop, just let it go. Read it back. Deleted it. Not because I didn’t mean it, but because I could feel, reading it, how much of me was still seventeen in that message. And I didn’t want to give him that.
The third one was short. Just: Why now? I stared at that for a while. Deleted it too. Because honestly I don’t care why now. There’s no answer to that question that changes anything.
The fourth one took me about forty minutes to write and it wasn’t long.
What I Actually Sent
I’m not going to post the whole thing here.
What I’ll say is that it wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t forgiving either. It was just true. The truest thing I’ve said to another person in a long time, maybe ever.
I told him that I’d read his message. I told him that I believed him that it took courage to send it, and that I wasn’t going to pretend I didn’t feel anything when I read it, because I did. I told him that I was glad he was sober, and I meant that. I’m not in the business of hoping people stay sick.
And then I told him the thing I’d never said out loud.
I told him that the worst part, the part I’d carried for nine years, wasn’t that he left. It was the coffee cup. It was that he left in a way that made it look like he’d just stepped out. Like he was coming back. That cup sat on our counter for two days before my mom finally washed it, and I used to wonder if she left it there on purpose, or if she just couldn’t bring herself to touch it. I never asked her. I still haven’t.
I told him that I was not ready to talk, and that I didn’t know if I’d ever be ready, and that I wasn’t going to make him a promise I didn’t know if I could keep. I told him that I had a daughter now, and that I’d held her on the day she was born and I could not understand, physically could not make my brain form the shape of, choosing to leave her. That’s not an accusation. It was just true.
I told him I didn’t hate him.
I told him not to message me again for a while.
Then I sent it and I put my phone face-down on the kitchen table and I went and sat on the couch and Denise came in and sat next to me and didn’t say anything and I put my head on her shoulder and we just sat there for a while.
After I Hit Send
Kezia was asleep. It was maybe nine-thirty at night.
Denise made tea. I didn’t drink mine. She drank hers and half of mine and neither of us talked much, which is one of the things I love about her. She doesn’t fill silence with words just to fill it.
At some point I picked up my phone and I looked at the message again. The little checkmarks that mean it had been delivered. I don’t know if he read it yet. I don’t know where he is. Tennessee, maybe. Or somewhere else entirely.
I didn’t block him.
I know that’s not what the title says. I know some of you came here expecting a clean answer, a definitive choice, a story that ends with the door either open or shut. I thought I was going to block him. I had my thumb right there. I decided I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of knowing he’d rattled me enough to block him, which is probably its own kind of reaction, but whatever. I’m not perfect.
What I did instead was leave it on delivered and put my phone in the other room.
He might read it tonight. He might read it in a week. He might read it and feel relieved or feel wrecked or feel nothing or write back immediately or never write back at all. I’ve spent nine years not knowing what Gary was doing or thinking or feeling and I survived all of that just fine.
I can survive not knowing this too.
The Part I Keep Coming Back To
Marcus texted me the next morning. Just: you good?
I said yeah. He sent back a thumbs up and then, after a minute, a second message that just said: I think about the coffee cup too.
I had to put my phone down and stand in the kitchen for a second. Kezia was eating cereal and watching something on the tablet, completely unbothered, completely unaware that her mom was standing three feet away having some kind of quiet earthquake.
I never told Marcus about the coffee cup. I never talked about it at all. We just both carried it separately for nine years without knowing the other one had it.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t think I’m supposed to do anything with it. I think some things just are what they are.
Gary’s out there somewhere, two years sober, with a sponsor who told him to make amends. I hope the sobriety holds. I genuinely do. I hope he’s okay.
But I also know that his being okay is not my job. His recovery is not my responsibility. The amends process, whatever it means to him, is between him and himself and whoever he believes in. I’m a person he hurt, not a task on a list.
My daughter is four years old. She’s never going to wonder where her parent went, because I’m not going anywhere. That’s not me being noble. That’s just the most basic thing. You stay. You stay and you wash the cup and you take the Spanish test and you work the jobs and you stay.
I stayed. Patrice stayed. Marcus stayed. Vera with her bad knees stayed.
Gary’s the one who has to figure out what to do with that.
—
If this one hit somewhere close, pass it along to someone who’d get it.
For more intense family drama, read about how My Stepdaughter Said Something That Ended the Argument Greg and I Were Having About Her or how My Daughter Asked to Go Home, and I Finally Listened. If you’re in the mood for a story about how a moment of weakness can change a life, check out I Volunteer Every Saturday. Then I Opened My Mouth and Ruined Someone’s Life..
