It’s been a couple of weeks. Life has a way of making sure you mean it before it lets you write it.
There is something I didn’t fully say in the first three posts.
Something that sits underneath all of it — underneath the bruises, the one-minute affection requests, the calculating and the planning and the building in the dark. Something that explains, at least in part, why a woman who had always fought back suddenly didn’t. Why I stayed as long as I did. Why I held onto the idea of a two-parent home like it was oxygen.
This is Part 4 in a series. If you’re new here, you can start from the beginning: Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
I grew up without a father, but with an emotionally absent mother who also was physically and emotionally abusive.
And I don’t mean my dad was around but distant. I mean he was gone. An absence so complete that I learned early on to read it as a verdict on me. What else was I supposed to think? When someone who is supposed to love you unconditionally simply doesn’t show up — at all, literally — you don’t think something is wrong with him. You think something is wrong with you. After all, your mother also isn’t loving toward you, abuses you, and he left you with her, all alone. You start to feel like you yourself are unloveable, unworthy, a mistake, that the world would not care if you were never born. Hell, it might even be better for everyone if you were never born.
I was a child. That’s what children do.
The pickup line
I still remember getting out of school and watching fathers pick up their kids.
Not every day. Not obsessively. But enough that it became something I noticed regularly — the way those kids lit up when they saw their dad walking toward them. The way those fathers looked genuinely happy to see them. Like their kid was the best part of their day. I remember wishing and praying that someone would love me like that. I remember walking to school, feeling the cold wind hitting me as I prayed to God as a child, pleading with him to bring me someone to love me.
I remember standing there wondering what was wrong with me. What I had done. Running through possible reasons why I wasn’t worth staying for, why I wasn’t worth fighting for, why the parent who did stay treated me like I did everything wrong. I must be defective. Too ugly. Too dumb. I must have done something that showed him and her that I was unworthy. He must have found something better than me and didn’t care that he was leaving me with her.
I know now that wasn’t true. I knew it intellectually long before I felt it in my body. But knowing or understanding something is not the same as being free of it. And that belief — I was not good enough to make him stay, nor was I good enough to inspire my mother to be loving towards me the way a mother should — traveled with me for a very long time, shaping everything for me and I didn’t even know it. Honestly, that is the kind of wound that might never completely heal in me. You just learn to heal as much of it as you can and then try to understand the rest, while continuing to push forward.
The question underneath all of it — am I worth staying for? — followed me longer than I’d like to admit. Longer than felt fair, honestly. It shaped what I accepted from people. It shaped what I thought love was supposed to feel like. Because when your first experience of love from a man is abandonment, you spend years recalibrating. You tell yourself you’ve healed. You do the work. You build yourself up. And in many ways, you do heal.
But wounds that deep don’t disappear. They go quiet for a while. Silently shaping your choices, your relationships, what you believe others see you as worth… quietly influencing everything. Making you harder on yourself — much harder — than you would ever be on anyone else.
What it built inside me
It built walls. High, carefully constructed, with a guard always posted at the gate.
I learned to let people see a piece of me and then watch. How do they handle this? Do they use it against me? Do they stay? Do they pull back the moment something gets heavy or real?
I got very good at reading the small signals — a shift in tone, a slight withdrawal, the particular way someone’s energy changes when they’ve decided you’re too much. I learned to spot it early. I learned to stop handing people pieces of myself the moment I sensed they wouldn’t treat them with empathy or understanding. When I sensed they didn’t want to understand, or maybe simply couldn’t. Pain is a funny thing. You think your pain is the worst until you experience more of it. Most people will never truly understand the degrees of pain I have been through. They are luckier than they think.
This is what growing up with an abusive mother and a father who completely abandoned you does to a nervous system over time. It makes you a very fast, very quiet expert in other people’s limits. It makes you hypervigilant in a way that looks, from the outside, like being perceptive or independent. But from the inside it is exhausting. It is the opposite of rest. It is never fully putting down the weight, because putting it down means trusting that the ground will hold.
I was not good at trusting the ground.
What it made me accept
Here is the part that is harder to write.
When you grow up believing, in some wordless cellular way, that you were not enough to make your father stay… that you were not good enough for your mother to be loving towards you — you don’t walk into adulthood with a clean slate. You walk in with a template. And that template has questions baked into it that you spend years trying to answer through other people:
Am I lovable enough this time? Will anyone really ever love me, or am I genuinely just too much?
You don’t ask it out loud. You might not even recognize it consciously. But it is there, underneath everything, shaping which relationships you choose and how long you stay in them.
So when I found a man who was warm and present and who looked at me like I was worth something — with love seemingly pouring out of his eyes — I held on. When things started to shift, I held on harder. I basically told him I would. I was so in love I told him everything, including how I would always want to be able to tell our child that I tried everything to work things out with his dad — for him. I shot myself in the foot.
When the affection dried up and the gaslighting started and the man I thought I knew began to feel like a stranger wearing his face — I told myself it was a phase. That we could fix it. That our child deserved the thing I never had.
I was so afraid of becoming the reason my child felt what I felt standing in that school parking lot that I bent myself into shapes that should have broken me.
I am not saying that to excuse staying. I’m saying it because I think a lot of women who grew up without a father — or who grew up watching their mothers accept less than they deserved — carry this same quiet terror. The terror of being the one who breaks the family apart. Of being the reason your child has that hollow space in their chest, where love should be.
That terror is real. It is valid. And it is also something people who want to keep you stuck will use against you — whether they know they’re doing it or not. I’ve come to believe it’s actually worse when they are not fully aware of what they’re doing, because if they won’t accept that their behavior is harmful, they will never try to change it. They will just keep deciding you are the problem. Slowly you may very likely start to believe that yourself.
What I’ve had to accept instead
A father who is present but abusive is not giving your child what you wished you had growing up.
He is giving your child something else entirely. A different kind of wound. One that also teaches them they are unworthy — just with a different delivery. And more than that, he is teaching your child what love looks like. If what love looks like is a man who throws the woman he’s supposed to cherish onto the floor while their baby watches — then staying to preserve the two-parent home is not the gift you think it is.
What a child needs is not simply a father in the building. What a child needs is to see love modeled as something safe. Something consistent. Something that does not require them to knock on a closed door and cry as they desperately try to get the attention of their father.
I watched my child do exactly that. Knock on a door. Crying softly. Saying daddy, let me in.
That image does something to you when you are someone who spent years wondering why your own father never opened the door for you.
I know that now. Part of me knew it then too, which is why I started building my exit even while I stayed. My therapist helped me see it more clearly. Stupid me also still had love for this person, believe it or not. The knowing and the leaving are two very different things when you’re also carrying thirty-something years of please don’t go in your chest.
What I am choosing now
I am not going to pretend I have healed this completely. I haven’t. The wound is old and it goes deep and some days it still shows up in ways I have to actively choose not to act on.
But I know some things now that I didn’t know standing in that parking lot.
I know that my child’s father being in the home is not the same as my child having a father. Presence without engagement is not the same as being there. A man in the next room who does not look up from a screen when his child asks for help, who places a foot on his child instead of answering him, who closes the door — that man is not giving my child what a father is supposed to give. He is just in the vicinity.
I know that I am already being both parents in the ways that matter. I am the one at the kitchen table with the abacus. The one reading the same book for the hundredth time because my child loves it. The one who sings. The one who says I am so lucky to be your mom — and means it so completely it brings me to tears.
And I know that my child does not need me to model accepting less than I deserve. My child needs me to model knowing what I deserve, and moving toward it. Even when it is slow. Even when it is terrifying. Even when it means becoming the parent I always wished I had — not by staying in something broken, but by building something honest in its place.
To the little girl still inside me, standing in that parking lot:
You were not your father’s absence. You were not what he decided you were worth. And you do not have to keep paying for his choice with your safety, your sanity, or your life.
To anyone reading this who recognizes herself in these words, even just a little:
Your child needs to see you safe. Your child needs to see you valued. Your child needs to understand, in their bones before they can even form the words for it, that love is not supposed to come with pain.
Give them that.
Even if it means leaving.
Especially if it means leaving.
Ready for Part 5? Read What “Just Leave” Doesn’t Understand – Leaving an Abusive Relationship With a Child
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