The Best Thing My Kids’ Father Ever Did Was Leave

He spared us all.

When my kids were two under two, their father handed me a fistful of twenties and got on a train to New York City. Our last conversation was brief—he told me he didn’t think he wanted to be a father. I told him that was fine. “But,” I said, “if you’re going, stay gone. Don’t make them wait for you at a window.” I never answered his calls or facilitated a visit with him again, and he never fought me on it.

The idea of being a single mom scared me—representations of single mothers in the media were not encouraging, and I was afraid of the life I was committing myself to raising two kids on my own. But I was less afraid of raising two kids alone than I was of the future I saw for us when I imagined staying with him.

As it became more clear over the years that he wasn’t coming back, my mother had a refrain: “I think kids need a father.” It was a barb often lobbed during the lowest moments of my single parenting, when trying to get through a day felt like an impossible puzzle of work, classes, spotty childcare, tantrums, and pieced-together meals. My response to her was always swift and weary: “I’ll see if I can grab one the next time I’m at the store.” 

Her assertion itched at me—and not just because my own parents had divorced when I was a teenager and my father quickly relocated to Los Angeles, which made my mother’s critique of me feel a little rich. What really bothered me was the assumption underneath it: that any parent was better than no parent at all. That presence, in any form, was the point, regardless of what that it looked like or what it cost the people living inside it.

Fifteen years on, I know that isn’t true. My kids’ father couldn’t be a great parent to them, but he has been the next best thing: gone.

I knew before he left that he wouldn’t be a positive in their lives. During my kids’ early years, I weathered a daily hailstorm of criticism while exhausting myself caring for a baby and a toddler—bringing them to classes at the community college when I couldn’t find childcare, doing freelance work at night until my eyes burned and blurred. His grievances were endless: I wasn’t cleaning enough, didn’t cook the right food, was away too much, wasn’t managing money well, the car was dirty, I hadn’t fed the kids lunch before he had to spend an afternoon watching them nap.

I could see the road of the next two decades stretching out in front of me: I would hollow myself out trying to manage his punishing expectations while caring for two children, and nothing I did would ever be enough. My children would grow up watching all of it, normalizing it, building their understanding of love around it. They might even one day resent me for it. No one would be spared. 

I could not give my kids a present father, but I could give them a clean break.

A parent who cannot show up fully, who appears on their own schedule, and vanishes when it’s inconvenient brings instability masquerading as love. I have watched the women in my life tie themselves into knots navigating this, and I have watched how much it takes from everyone in their orbit.

One friend has been divorced for seven years and still fields texts from her ex asking when the chorus concert is, what time the parent-teacher conference starts, whether he has to bring anything to the graduation party. He cannot retain the rhythm of his own child’s life, but he has precise, well-rehearsed grievances about my friend’s failures. He shows up to some school events and not others, and my friend absorbs her daughter’s disappointment after every no-show, smooths things over, and then calls me.

I am glad to be there for her. I am also dismayed when I think about the hours of conversation circling the same damage, the energy spent helping her rebuild her confidence after he’s chipped away at it. I think sometimes about what we might have talked about instead: her writing, my kids, the trip to Spain she wants to take, the version of her life she’d like to be living.

The cost of a half-present parent isn’t paid only by the children. It radiates outward, into friendships, into the hours of every person who loves the parent left managing the fallout. My mother saw the absence of a father as the worst possible outcome for my kids. I am not sure she ever considered what the available alternative actually looked like.

My son took his father’s absence largely in stride. My daughter struggled. Through her early elementary years, single-parent households at her school were still relatively rare. Her smile was always a little strained when she went to father-daughter dances on the arm of my brother or stepfather while her friends arrived with their dads. She saw glimpses of what other kids had and she ached for it. Sometimes she’d cry, leaning against my chest, and I’d rub her back and tell her it was OK to be sad about something she felt she was missing. My heart broke for her, not because she didn’t have a second parent, but because she’d been spoon-fed the message that she needed one.

Her preteen years brought a different perspective. Home from a sleepover one morning, she looked tired. She’d lain awake the night before listening to her friend’s parents argue, low and continuous, until well after midnight. Everyone else had slept through it, but she couldn’t. “I never hear adults fighting in my house,” she said. “It was weird.”

Something shifted in my daughter after that. She’d spent years grieving the idea of a parent she never really knew. Then she lay awake inside someone else’s version of having one, and rather than idealizing what she didn’t have, she began to see other family dynamics more clearly. Her mourning has largely evaporated. The loss is still there, but loss is not the architecture of her childhood.

My mother still believes, I think, that something essential is missing. Her assertion that “kids need a father” circles a hole at the center of my children’s lives that I fear my efforts could compensate for but never fill, and she is right that my children grew up with a loss. Raising them alone has come with real costs. Every decision falls to me, which means every mistake does too. My attention is finite—when I’m depleted, there is no one to hand anything off to. I have, on several occasions, disappointed my kids by being too tired to play a game or watch a show. They’ve had to decide between them whose school event I would attend, whose game I’d watch, whose classroom I’d visit on career day and back-to-school night. 

The weight of being the only adult responsible for their well-being is heavy—when my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia at 8 years old, there was no one to call to discuss treatment options like whether giving her a trial immunotherapy drug during her first round of treatment was worth the possibility that it would be ineffective if she ever relapsed. I made those decisions on my own, and I did not feel empowered while I did it. I felt scared and totally alone.

I have friends in genuinely happy marriages who are raising children in warm, nurturing homes. That is real, and it is good, but it was never an option available to me. What was available was an opportunity for a clean break, a life free of the clutter of their other parent’s ambivalence. That is a low bar, but I have watched enough families to know that many parents do not clear it.

Though there have been terrifying moments when I’ve wondered how I was supposed to manage any of it alone, I love having my children to myself. I’m selfish this way—every absurd and perplexing phase, every milestone, every conversation on the drive to school is mine. I don’t have to negotiate any of it or share credit or spend half their childhood in the waiting room of someone else’s custody. 

My kids are teenagers now, independent, surprising people with senses of humor that catch me off guard and leave me reeling. They troll me within an inch of my life most days, and it is delicious knowing I get to have it all to myself. We’ve traveled together—often for my work, sometimes for fun. Recently we went to Rome, and despite discussions of how we’d have a kitchen and could cook meals at home, we went out for pizza and carbonara every night. I could hear the ghost of their father’s voice in my ear—would he have berated me for the money spent, for being too lazy to cook a few meals, for pulling them out of school to sit in piazzas eating gelato? It was a blip in my brain, there and gone, but in it I saw clearly the life I was spared. I see the life my children were spared, and I am filled with gratitude.

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