Dedication: To my mom who tried her best guven the circumstances.
This is the letter I could not write for forty-six years. It is the story of a life lived in the space you left behind, a silence I am now ready to fill with my own words.
I was born on a cold January morning in 1978. My mother was alone when she brought me into the world, a testament to a strength I would later learn I inherited. While she labored, you were absent. You had already made your decision, cementing it in a letter to her father, denying your own child. With the stroke of a pen, you set the course for my life, and then you were gone.
From my first breath, I was unwanted. My own grandmother, who by custom should have given me her name, refused. I was the first granddaughter, but I was born out of wedlock, a source of shame. She threw my pregnant mother out of her home, forcing her to seek refuge with my great-grandmother in the city. This was my welcome into the world.
My life without you in it was a version of hell. When I was just a year old, my mother had to leave me with that same resentful grandmother to find work in a dusty frontier town. The arrangement lasted only a month. The phone call came, sharp and cruel: “I’m sure you have your first paycheck. Come pick your child, or I’ll mail her to you.” I was a parcel to be shipped, a problem to be solved. Though my mother rescued me, and for a short time it was just the two of us—a happy, warm memory of good food, new dresses, and toys—the shadow was always waiting to return.
It returned in the form of my stepfather, a hateful man whose arrival meant I was no longer welcome. I was sent back to my grandmother’s village in the highlands. The lie I was told was that she was lonely; the truth I came to understand was that my stepfather didn’t want me. There, my childhood vanished. At six years old, I learned to cook. At seven, I was washing my own clothes in freezing water, my small hands raw and aching. My allowance was sent, but it never seemed to reach me. When my sister was born, I faded even further, becoming a ghost in my own family—the unwanted child.
One morning, when I was eight, I ran away. The fog was so thick and cold you could barely see your own hand in front of your face. I was suffering from severe bronchitis, and the 5 a.m. chores in the biting highland air were torture. School was no better, a place of constant bullying from teachers and students alike for being different. Home was not a sanctuary. So, in my flimsy slippers, I took a shortcut through a tea plantation and just started walking. I got onto three different buses, a small, quiet girl no one noticed, until a kind woman on the final leg of the journey saw my muddy dress and shivering frame. She made sure I found my mother’s shop. In that moment, I have often wondered: if you had been there, would I have ever needed to run?
My life became a series of temporary homes. I was bounced between strangers—sometimes with my mother’s friends from a community whose social and religious ways were entirely foreign to me, and other times with families I didn’t know at all. Eventually, I landed with my step-grandparents. Each move reinforced the feeling of being a burden and made it harder for me, as a child, to comprehend the world around me.
It was during this time that I first saw you. There was a school fundraiser, and you were a guest of honor—a prominent man in a big hat. I knew, with the certainty only a child can possess, that it was you. My grandmother confirmed it later with a simple, emotionless statement: “That was your father.” I watched you from a distance, my heart a frantic drum in my chest, waiting for a glance, a sign of recognition. It never came. You saw me, I’m sure of it, but you looked straight through me. You didn’t even turn back.
That day, something hardened in my heart. To survive the ache of your rejection, I created a new father in my mind. He was a tall, handsome Egyptian man who had loved my mother but was forced to leave. He sent money for me, I told myself, and one day he would come back. This fictional man was kinder than the real one.
The instability of my life left me vulnerable. It led to dark, terrifying moments that a child should never experience—moments of assault that were silenced by the adults around me to protect the family’s reputation. It’s why I couldn’t finish school. Shame became another heavy coat I was forced to wear. By my late teens, I was already fending for myself, working in a dance group, but the pattern was set. At eighteen, I fell into a marriage that would last for twenty-two years, a private hell of abuse that mirrored the chaos of my youth.
I survived that, too. I left. I raised my children alone. And after forty-six years, I came looking for you. I needed to stand before you, a grown woman, and have you look me in the eye as I asked you why. The answer I received felt like little more than an excuse.
And it changed nothing about the reality I live in today. I am now 47 years old, a mother to three children, and I am still struggling. The financial, emotional, and mental toll of a life that started with instability is a daily reality. The consequences of your choice now echo into the next generation. My children are growing up without the grandfather they could have had, another loss in a space that should have been filled by family.
What I have written here is just a fraction of what I endured. Honestly, so much of my childhood is a blur of pain that my mind has mercifully blocked out to protect itself. This story is built from the fragments that remain.
But even with this weight, I choose to move forward. That is why I am choosing to forgive you. Not because you have earned it, but because I deserve peace. It is the hardest work I have ever done, and it continues every day.
And then, your loving daughter.