My Dad Left My Mom With 10 Kids For A Younger Woman—A Decade Later, He Wanted Us Back

Then he walked out with one suitcase and a Bible verse, and he didn’t come back.

The Years of Survival

The years after that blurred together into a kind of survival that became so normal we forgot there was any other way to live.

There were food stamps and careful budgeting and coupons cut from newspapers and the particular calculus of figuring out which bills absolutely had to be paid and which ones could wait a month or two. There was my mother working night shifts cleaning offices, her hands cracking and bleeding from the bleach and other harsh chemicals, coming home with her shoulders aching and her spirit diminished, only to shower quickly and then help us get ready for school.

She’d sit at the kitchen table after we’d left for school and cry quietly, just for a few minutes, as if she was allowing herself a strictly rationed amount of time for falling apart before she had to pull herself together again.

There were school events where we were the kids whose father wasn’t there. There were teachers who asked, carefully, if everything was okay at home, and we’d learned to nod and say yes because we didn’t know what the alternative was. There were other kids whose fathers came to soccer games and school plays and parent-teacher conferences, and we learned not to talk about that gap, not to mention it, not to make it real by speaking it out loud.

My father sent verses sometimes. Beautiful passages about faith and trust and God’s love. Never money. Almost never his voice. He called twice that first year, and the calls felt like violence—hearing his voice on the phone, so familiar and so foreign at the same time, talking about missing us while remaining completely absent from our actual lives.