Some of us have Secrets. The big, heavy, burdening kind of Secret. Those, you wouldn’t tell anyone, ever, not without a lawyer and probably not even with a lawyer.
But most of us have secrets, with a lowercase s. Those, you’d tell a trusted friend, a therapist. Those are the dark, vulnerable side of who we are. In a sense, they shape us, in a deep, intimate, private, and thus ever so powerful kind of way.
I had just one such secret. I had a daughter. And I had left her. I had walked out of the house 20 years before, and never looked back. Why? I was scared. I was “scared shitless”, to use a technical term. Fatherhood was not for me, it turns out.
I was not married to her mother, and we had grown distant in the years since Blair was born. The fights were constant, and increasingly loud, and I felt it was only a matter of time before one of us gave in to violence. My daughter did not deserve that environment. And I felt I bore most of the guilt for it. That I was the one that hadn’t adjusted. And that Laura would do just fine on her own. So, I took out half my savings from the bank, left them in an envelope, wrote a farewell letter, and walked out.