To The Father of my Child (A Letter of Forgiveness)
I forgave you for every time you cheated on me over the three years that we were together. I overlooked your bad habits. I supported you in your endeavors. I made ever effort to accept your family.
When we found out I was pregnant, we decided to become parents together. It was not a decision I made alone, nor was it one that I opted for without discussing other possibilities. And in all endless bouts of naive forgiveness, I even took you in after you convinced your friends that I was lying about my pregnancy and continued to cheat on me.
I should have known better by then, yet I still forgave (and begged) you after walked away from our engagement less than two weeks before our wedding. (You were sleeping with our photographer and our child’s daycare teacher.)
I was stupid and scared, and I thought that I was in love. Still to this day (6 years later), I cannot help but miss you and wish that things had turned out differently. I have blamed myself for you leaving (or for me not leaving sooner... I can never decide which). You walked away from me, but worse you walked away from your child.
I became exhausted by your emotional abuse and fearful of the places you were going and the people you were surrounding yourself with. After I applied for child support, you told me that you hoped I was happy because you would never, ever take our child for visits again. I cried. And then you decided that you’d had enough. You stopped showing up for visits on time. You stopped taking care of our child. You stopped calling. You stopped texting. Except when it was convenient for you, and then you would cancel or never show up.
I finally told you to pick: in or out. I said that our child was better off if you just disappeared.
That’s when you left for good.
And I forgave you.
(But I still haven’t forgiven myself.)
