I raised you by myself. Not the version of alone that still had somebody in the next room to hand you off to when I ran out of patience at two in the morning. The real version. Just us, for all the years that actually shape a person. I want to start there because I think you’ve forgotten it, or maybe you never fully knew what it cost, and either way it belongs at the top of this letter and not buried somewhere in the middle where it’s easy to skim past.
I’m not writing this to relitigate whatever happened between us. I have a version of that story. You have yours. I have stopped expecting the two to match, because expecting that was its own kind of exhausting, and I’m done being exhausted by things I cannot fix by wanting them fixed hard enough.
What I actually want to say is smaller than an apology and bigger than a status update. I want to say that I think about you more than the silence between us would suggest. I want to say that raising you alone taught me things about love that I didn’t choose to learn and would not trade now that I have them. And I want to say, plainly, that I do not know how to close the distance between us, and I’ve made a kind of peace with not knowing, even though peace is a generous word for what this actually feels like some nights.
I’ve tried, for the record. I flew five hours recently, planned the whole trip around a single knock on your door, and heard footsteps on the other side that never turned into an answer. I have sent texts that came back blocked. I have sent emails into what I can only assume is a spam folder doing its job a little too well. I have called and gone straight to voicemail enough times that I stopped bothering to leave a message somewhere around the fourth attempt. I’m not listing this to make you the villain of a story that does not need one. I’m listing it because I want the record to show I didn’t just sit still and call the silence acceptable. I fought for a door that wouldn’t open, and at some point continuing to knock on it stopped being love and started being something closer to self-harm, so I stopped.
Here is what nobody tells you about single parenting when you are in the thick of it. Every decision is yours alone, and every consequence is yours alone too, and there is no one in the house to say you handled that well or you handled that badly, there is only you, replaying it at midnight, grading yourself on a curve nobody else can see. I got some of it right. I know I got some of it wrong. I do not have a clean accounting of which decisions land where, and I suspect you have your own private ledger that disagrees with mine in places I will never fully see.
I think about the specific texture of those years more than I let on, and most of it has nothing to do with anything I actually did for you. It has to do with everything else I was carrying at the same time, in the same house, in earshot of a child who never signed up for any of it. A business that was either taking off or falling apart depending on the week. A job that demanded a version of me I had to manufacture fresh every morning before I even looked at you at breakfast. And underneath both of those, a relationship with my own mother that was its own kind of war, one you should never have had a front row seat to, and one I was not always skilled enough to keep entirely off stage. I did not always manage to keep that turmoil in a separate room from you. A lot of it leaked. I know it leaked. I do not have a clean answer for how much of what I was carrying landed on you simply because you were the only other person in the house.
I do not know what brought us to this particular silence. I have my theories. I imagine you have yours, and I imagine they are not the same shape as mine. What I know for certain is that estrangement does not feel like a decision most days. It feels like a low hum underneath everything else I do, a thing I have learned to work around the way you learn to work around a bad knee, present in every movement even when I am not thinking about it directly.
People ask me sometimes, carefully, how you are doing. I have gotten good at the short answer that ends the question before it goes any further. I do not know how you are doing. That sentence still catches somewhere in my chest every time I say it out loud, and I have said it enough times now that you would think it would stop catching. It has not.
You might say I should announce the no contact with the same volume I used to announce your wins. The exceptional athletics. The wonderful grades. Walking across that stage with a master’s degree before you turned 25. Finding a wonderful job and actually feeling seen as an active contributor. I flexed those, out loud, unprompted, to anyone standing still long enough to hear it. You used to tell me I flexed unnecessarily, and you were probably right, though I never once apologized for being proud of you at that volume. I have not found the same volume for this. I do not lead with the silence the way I led with the bragging. Maybe that is its own kind of dishonesty, keeping the good parts loud and the hard part quiet, and if it is, I am naming it here instead of hiding from it.
I am not asking you to read this and call me. I am not asking for anything, actually, which might be the most honest sentence in this whole letter. Asking implies I think there’s a reasonable next step, a specific action that closes the gap, and I do not know what that action is anymore, if I ever did. What I have instead is this. A letter I am not sure will ever reach you, written by a woman who raised you completely alone and is still, somehow, after everything, hoping you are well, wherever you are, whoever you have become without my daily witness to it.
I used to think love this specific needed an ending. A reconciliation scene, a hard conversation, a moment where everything gets said and something shifts. I have stopped waiting for that scene. Some love just sits there, unresolved, doing its quiet work in the background of a life, and I have decided that is allowed too. What I know for certain is this. My love for you was never conditional on you answering that door, and it is not conditional now. The door on my side has never been locked. I do not know if you will ever walk back through it, and I am learning to live inside that not knowing, but it stays open, for as long as I am the one holding it.
I do not know if this reaches the person it is written for, and I have made peace with sending it out into the world anyway. If you are carrying a silence like this one, with a parent or a child, I am not going to tell you how to end it. I have not ended mine either. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.
