I spent my whole life mailing letters to the address tied to my missing mother, always clinging to hope—until I finally received a reply that devastated me.
“Of course you do.”
“I was 20 when I had you.”
Finally, I asked the question that had lived in me for as long as I could remember.
“Why?”
She took a breath.
“I was 20 when I had you. No family worth speaking of. No money. No one steady. After you were born, people kept telling me you would be better off without me, that if I really loved you, I would let someone else give you the life I couldn’t.”
She brushed her hand through her hair before continuing.
She looked at the letters.
“I believed them because I was scared, and when you are that young, scared can sound a lot like practical. Then a year passed, then two, then more. Every year I stayed away, it got harder to imagine how I could come back, and harder to imagine you would want me to.”
