What It Really Means When A Father Abandons His Children
https://www.auntydebbysblog.com/2016/01/what-it-really-means-when-father.html

In
2012, my husband of nearly eight years told me that he was going to the
store, and then he simply never returned. In the coming weeks, my panic
turned to grief as I came to understand that his disappearance hadn’t
been the result of a tragic accident but rather the execution of a
carefully laid out plan to abandon his family in search of a carefree
life.
After
leaving his company vehicle in the parking lot of his job at a
landscaping business (a job that he never returned to), emptying our
joint bank account, and shutting off his phone, he became untraceable,
leaving me as an only parent to my 7-month-old son and 3-year-old
daughter.
In
the months following his disappearance, each day felt like I was waking
up in a nightmare — not knowing how I would support our family and
finally having to file for government assistance. But no matter how hard
I worked to pull our lives together, the most complicated struggle was
just beginning.
For
the rest of my life, I will be raising two children who were abandoned
by their father. I will be asked questions that I have no answers for —
things that my children so desperately want to understand, but
situations that as an adult I can’t comprehend. When one of the first
things children learn is the love of their parents, I’m watching my
children learn a lesson that I wish they didn’t have to: that sometimes
people hurt us in ways that we never could have imagined. I’m walking
the fine line of not telling them that their father doesn’t love them,
but also not giving them a false sense of what love is. “Does daddy
still love us?” is a constant question in our house, and the truth is I
don’t know. I can’t imagine that if he really did love them, that he
would make absolutely no effort to see them and, in fact, spend most of
his time avoiding us. But the truth is that I can’t answer that question
for them because it’s not my question to answer.
I’m
fighting the stigma that society has placed on me as a single mother —
that I must have done something wrong to be in the position of being an
only parent. There are people who assume that I could foresee the future
and suggest that I was just too “stupid to have kids with him in the
first place” or that I “must have done something to drive him away.” Or
yet other people who decide that there is no way he really doesn’t want
to see his kids and that I must be keeping him from them. Or any of the
other excuses that people choose to believe because it’s easier to blame
the parent that stayed than to accept the horrific truth that some
parents just don’t love their children like they should and sometimes
those parents leave.
In
my case, I don’t even know where my children’s father is living. For
three and a half years, I’ve tried to find him and make him pay child
support, but he has spent so much of his energy dodging the system, and
I’ve spent so much money chasing him down, that I’m coming to the
realization that I just need to let him go.

EDEN STRONG.