Am I wrong for telling my dad that I ran into his ex-wife – and that she told me the thing he swore never happened, actually did?
I’m 20, living back home in Dellwood for the summer after my first year of college, working at the same hardware store I worked at in high school. My parents divorced when I was nine. My dad (47M) raised me alone after that. He told me my mom, Patrice, left because she didn’t want to be a mother anymore. That she chose her new life over me and never looked back.
I believed him for eleven years.
Two weeks ago I was loading someone’s truck in the parking lot and a woman said my name. It took me a second. Patrice looks different – shorter hair, glasses now – but I recognized her. She lives here. Has for three years apparently. Dellwood. Population 4,000. She’s been twenty minutes from me this whole time.
I didn’t hug her. I didn’t know what to do so I just stood there holding a bag of mulch while she talked.
She said she tried to come back when I was twelve. She said she showed up at our house and my dad told her I didn’t want to see her. She said she wrote letters. She said she called. She said she stopped because she thought I had made my choice and she wasn’t going to force herself on a kid who didn’t want her.
I told her that wasn’t what happened. That I never got any letters. That I never said I didn’t want to see her.
She got quiet. Then she said, “Denny, I sent the first letter the same week I left. Your dad called me two days later and read it back to me word for word so I’d know he had it.”
My stomach dropped.
I drove home and I asked my dad about it. I kept it calm. I just said I’d run into someone and had some questions. He didn’t even ask who. He just got this look on his face – this specific look I’ve seen my whole life when he’s about to explain something away – and he said, “Whatever she told you, you have to understand the position I was in.”
Not a denial.
I said, “Did you keep her letters from me?”
He looked at the floor for a long time.
Then he said, “I need you to sit down, because there’s something I should have told you a long time ago, and it’s not just about the letters.”
The Floor
I didn’t sit down.
I don’t know why. Some reflex. Standing felt like the only thing I had control over in that moment, so I kept my feet where they were and I crossed my arms and I looked at my dad, this man I have had breakfast with ten thousand times, and I waited.
He sat down. On the couch. The same couch we watched every single Steelers game on for the last eight years. He put his elbows on his knees and he rubbed his face with both hands.
That’s when I knew it was bad. My dad doesn’t do that. He’s a composed guy. He cries at funerals, but quietly, and he wipes his face fast and moves on. He doesn’t sit and rub his face like he’s trying to sand something off.
He said it took him a while to start. And it did. Maybe two full minutes of nothing while I stood there in the living room of the house I grew up in, looking at the framed school photos of myself on the wall, third grade through senior year, all those small versions of me who had no idea.
What he told me is this.
Patrice didn’t leave because she didn’t want to be a mother. She left because he asked her to. Not in those words. But he made it clear, over the course of about a year, that if she wasn’t going to be the kind of wife and mother he needed her to be, she should go. He said he thought she’d fight for it. He said he thought the ultimatum would fix things. She left instead.
And then he panicked.
Because he’d told everyone – his parents, his brother, people at church, me – that she abandoned us. And once the story was out there, he felt like he had to hold it. So when she wrote, he read the letters and put them in a box. When she called, he’d tell me I was outside or asleep. When she showed up that one time, when I was twelve, he stood on the porch and told her I was in therapy and my therapist had said contact would be destabilizing.
I was not in therapy.
The Box
I asked him if the box was still in the house.
He said yes.
I asked him where.
He said the top shelf of his bedroom closet, behind a plastic bin of winter stuff.
I walked down the hall. He didn’t follow me. I went into his room – his room that smells like the same drugstore deodorant it’s smelled like my entire life – and I opened the closet and I moved the bin and there was a shoebox. A Nike shoebox. Size 11, which is what he wears. And I opened it and there were letters in there. Envelopes. A lot of them.
I didn’t count them then. I counted them later.
Twenty-two.
Twenty-two letters from my mother, spanning from when I was nine years old until I was fifteen. The last one was dated March 2018. The handwriting on the early ones is big and loopy and the handwriting on the later ones gets smaller. Like she was running out of room for something.
I took the box back to the living room and I put it on the coffee table and I looked at my dad.
He looked at the box.
Neither of us said anything.
What He Said
He didn’t defend it. That’s the thing I keep turning over. He didn’t say she was dangerous or unstable or that he was protecting me. He said he was scared. He said he was twenty-seven years old and his wife had just left and he had a nine-year-old and he didn’t know how to explain any of it, so he made the story simpler. And then the simple story became the only story, and every year it got harder to undo.
He said, “I told myself you were better off not being confused.”
I said, “I was confused anyway. I just didn’t have any information.”
He nodded. Like that was fair.
I wanted him to argue. I think I actually wanted him to argue, because if he argued I’d have somewhere to put the feeling. But he just sat there nodding, and the feeling didn’t have anywhere to go, so it just kind of spread out and filled the room and I didn’t know what to do with any of it.
I’m twenty years old. I’ve spent twenty years being the kid whose mom didn’t want him. That was my whole thing. That was the story I told at college when people asked about my family. I have a whole personality built around a thing that didn’t happen.
Patrice
I texted her the next day. She’d given me her number in the parking lot and I’d saved it as “Patrice” because I didn’t know what else to call it.
I said I’d found the letters. I said I was sorry she’d been sending them into a hole for six years.
She called me instead of texting back. She didn’t cry on the phone, or if she did I couldn’t tell. She has this very even way of talking. She said she’d moved to Dellwood because she had a friend here, Marcy, who she’d known since before she met my dad. She said she’d thought about looking for me for years but she didn’t want to blow up my life.
I said, “It’s already blown up.”
She kind of laughed. Then she said she was sorry too. I asked her what she was sorry for and she said for leaving when she did, the way she did, even if my dad backed her into it. She said a better person would have fought harder.
I didn’t tell her she was wrong. I didn’t tell her she was right, either.
We talked for forty minutes. It was strange and not as strange as it should have been. She knows I’m studying mechanical engineering. She has a dog named Carl. She works at a dental office on Route 9, which I have driven past approximately eight hundred times.
We’re getting coffee on Thursday. I don’t know what that is. It’s not reconciliation. It’s coffee.
My Dad and Me
I’m still living in the house. I don’t have anywhere else to go and I’m not going to blow up my summer over this, but things are different and I think we both know it.
He cooked dinner the night after our conversation. Made pasta, which is his go-to when he’s trying. He put the bowl in front of me and sat down across from me and he said, “I know this doesn’t fix it.”
I said, “I know.”
He said, “I’m going to spend a long time being sorry.”
I said, “Yeah.”
That was it. We ate the pasta. The TV was on in the other room, some game, and I could hear the crowd noise from where I was sitting.
I’ve been thinking about who my dad is. And here’s the thing I can’t shake: he’s a good dad. Not perfect, not even close, but he came to every game and he helped me with calc junior year even though he’s terrible at math and he drove four hours to move me into my dorm and he cried in the parking lot when he left, which he’d probably kill me for saying. He’s a good dad who did a genuinely awful thing and kept doing it for six years and then spent another five years sitting on a shoebox.
I don’t know how to hold both of those things at the same time. I’m twenty. I’m not sure I have the equipment for it yet.
What I Actually Did
So. The original question.
A few days after all this happened, I told my dad I’d run into Patrice. I told him what she’d said in the parking lot before I’d even come home and asked him about it. And he said, “I know. I figured that’s who you meant.”
I asked him if he was angry that I’d talked to her.
He said, “No. You’re an adult. And honestly, Denny, I’m surprised it took this long.”
And that’s the part that broke something in me a little. Because he’d been waiting for it. For eleven years, he’d been carrying this thing and waiting for the day it came back around. He built the whole story knowing it had an expiration date. He just hoped it wouldn’t come up until I was old enough to handle it.
Maybe I am old enough. I don’t feel old enough.
The letters are in my room now. The Nike shoebox is on my desk. I’ve read four of them. The first one is dated October 2009, two months after she left. I was nine. The letter starts: Denny, I don’t know if you’ll ever read this, but I want you to know I think about you every single day.
I’m going to read the rest of them. Just not all at once.
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If this hit somewhere close to home, send it to someone who might need it.
If you’re still reeling from family drama, you might find some solidarity in these tales: The Drawing a Seven-Year-Old Handed Me Without Saying a Word or even My Student Drew a Man in the Corner. Her Mom Said He’s in Witness Protection.. And for a different kind of stand-off, check out My Pen Stopped Moving. Then I Put the Notebook Down..
