Ghost

I ghosted my son’s dad. I feel terrible, but also I don’t. Let me explain:

First of all, I’m pretty sure he doesn’t follow me on here, so I feel like I can explain myself without him reading it. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, but at the same time I don’t feel responsible for his feelings… It’s a weird dynamic.

Let me start by saying, I love my son’s dad. In an uninvolved, distant way, I love the human that he is. That’s kind of how our relationship started. It was never an equal partnership. I had a place and he didn’t. I had a car and he didn’t. I was enamored with his intelligence and his beauty. It wasn’t ever going to be a love story, but it was beautiful.

Don’t get me wrong…. I wanted it to be a real thing. But I won’t kid myself, it wasn’t. It was my car and my place and a guy that made my skin tingle.

Then I got pregnant. I’ll spare you the details. It was a thing and it happened. As soon as I knew, I knew that this wasn’t a life I wanted my kid to grow up in. Right after he was born, Miles… that’s not his name, but I will call him Miles… ended up in jail. I didn’t know how long he would be there, but I knew I didn’t want my son growing up there. We moved. My son was almost 18 months old before Miles got out of jail and I told him he had a son. As you can imagine, that was a hard adjustment for him.

Over the next several years, I tried to create a relationship between Miles and our son. I drove the many miles to bring them together. I made sure to send pictures and invites to all of the big moments. A few years later, Miles said he wanted to be a family and moved where we were. It didn’t take long for me to realize he didn’t want to be a family, he wanted an escape route from the life he was living.

After an incident where an argument turned to violence, I ended the social experiment and sent him back to where he was from. To this day, I have never told our son what led to that decision. I always took the blame when it came to those decisions. I still tried to create a relationship between them.

However, there came a point where I was the only one trying to create the relationship and our son ended up hurt multiple times. After he didn’t show up when he said he would, he would just stop answering my calls. At that point, I stopped trying. I wasn’t going to continue to put my son in those situations just to be hurt.

The next time I saw him was at our son’s graduation. He came for the day, then left. My son, at that point, was happy that he came, but felt no obligation to him.

It’s been over a year since then. We’ve talked maybe twice since our son graduated.

Today, he sent me a text asking if I wanted to drive him around town. Is he in town? I have no idea. Did he need money? No idea. I didn’t answer. Not my normal way of handling issues, but after 18 years of being ghosted when my son needed him…

I turned ghost. I owe him nothing. I raised our son, basically on my own. And now, I’m giving him nothing in return.