My name is Dylan, and for most of my life, my mother was less a person and more a sentence.
A brutal, unforgettable sentence.
According to my dad, on the day I was born, she looked at me once, turned to him, and said, “I’m not interested in parenting. I don’t want him. You can do it.”
Then she left.
No dramatic hesitation. No tears. No promises to come back. She didn’t ask for updates. She didn’t send birthday cards. She didn’t pay support. She didn’t even disappear in the way people usually do, with excuses and half-hearted attempts.
She just erased herself.
So my father became everything.
He was the one who learned how to warm bottles with one hand and hold me with the other. The one who sat beside my bed through fevers, rubbed my back when I was sick, and slept upright in a chair after double shifts because I had nightmares and didn’t want to be alone. He learned to braid shoelaces, sign permission slips, cook decent pancakes, and fake confidence on the first day of kindergarten when I cried so hard I threw up on his work boots.
We didn’t have much. He worked construction during the day and repaired appliances at night. His hands were always rough, his eyes always tired, but somehow, when he looked at me, he never made me feel like a burden.
He used to say, “It’s me and you, kid. We’re enough.”
And somehow, we were.
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