I was thirty years old, standing alone in that apartment with a newborn in my arms, trying to understand how a person simply stops loving her own child.
Eighteen Years of Hate
I hated her at every doctor’s appointment. I hated her every time Leo needed another surgery. I hated her on the nights I had to choose between missing a shift at work and leaving him with someone I barely trusted. I hated her when therapists handed me lists of exercises and told me consistency was everything, as if I had a second set of hands hidden somewhere.
I hated her on his birthdays. I hated her hardest on Mother’s Day, watching him carry home a handmade card for a mother who wasn’t in his life, a mother he’d never once laid eyes on.
When Leo was six, he asked me what happened to his mother. I was washing dishes and the question nearly knocked the plate straight out of my hands.
“Some homes just have one parent, Leo,” I said.
“I know. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have a mother.”
I turned off the tap and gave him the only thing I had. “As long as we have each other, we have everything we need.”
It wasn’t an answer, and even at six years old, he knew it. But he also knew, somehow, that I wasn’t going to say more. I never told him what I truly believed, that his mother had rejected him because of his disability. I couldn’t hand him that wound. As far as Leo knew, he was the single best thing that had ever happened to me.
He was.
Raising him alone was not easy. There were nights I cried after he fell asleep, terrified I wasn’t enough. There were mornings he refused to get dressed, afternoons lost inside therapy waiting rooms, evenings spent decoding insurance forms written in language no single parent should have to learn without help.
