Elyssa

The years went by, and Elyssa grew up. 1997, 1998, each time I saw her again, she'd grown a tiny bit more. I spent weekends with her regularly, once I'd settled in somewhere child-proof and had a room for her crib. It wasn't much, but it was something. It was mine.

I was utterly out of my depth; I didn't have the tools required to be a good single parent or the maturity to learn how to become one.

The post-separation relationship with Ariel wasn't easy either; she was angry and hurt and made sure I knew it. I can't really blame her, but it didn't improve things between us, and it wasn't fair to our daughter either. The anger of one parent towards the other will always shine through, even if you think it doesn't, even if you feel you're always being careful when the child can overhear.

After I met Rose, it got worse. Weekend stays were cancelled or shifted to the next one with little warning or even a request. It was like controlling me this way was the only method she knew to express her anger and frustration with me. We tried to make it work, but it ultimately came to an end when Ariel moved with Elyssa to the countryside to live with her new boyfriend.

That, and also that Rose had reported her to the child care authorities for negligence. 

She had for some time been suggesting she felt that Elyssa was showing signs of exactly that, and that someone needed to do something about it. Perhaps she was projecting something from her past, or maybe it was just a convenient excuse to take petty revenge on what she felt was a jealous mother trying to sabotage us as a couple.

After some convincing, I relented. She insisted that she needed to make the call to the authorities alone and that I shouldn't listen in. So I didn´t. It felt like this was a better choice than doing nothing, as the result of doing nothing, if something was seriously wrong, would have been unforgivable.

Perhaps I was projecting something from my childhood, or perhaps it was simply a naive, misguided attempt at doing the right thing without knowing better or considering the potential fallout.

The authorities care only if you're an extremely bad parent; their role isn't to help bad parents become good parents. Their role is simply to minimise the damage a bad parent can do, nothing more.

In either case, despite any potential good intentions, it became the wrong thing for the wrong reasons, leaving behind only scorched earth and bitter tastes in the mouths of parents already at war with each other.

I did nothing when I should have done something. Loyalty and devotion are commendable traits in a partner, but destructive and harmful when applied without reason or consideration.

The phone call ended, and at first, it seemed like nothing had happened. But then nothing kept happening, over and over, and it was years before I saw Elyssa again. I missed her bitterly during that time, but swallowed my feelings and buried them deep inside the remotest corners of my heart; they were too much for me to bear without something breaking inside me.

My fiery relationship with Rose came to an end, I met someone else, and they didn't allow me to pretend nothing mattered and act as if I couldn't be hurt by the loss of a child, just by burying the grief deep inside. She poked me, prodded me, tried to understand why I wasn´t in contact with my daughter.

She said it wasn´t normal for a parent to abandon their child like this, even if the father and mother weren't together, the child would still need them, and whatever issues the adults had between them shouldn't cause the child to lose either of them.

That she could sense I was in pain from it, and that she could only imagine what my absence was doing to Elyssa. All children ask questions about their origins, and they need honest answers from someone who cares.

Every word she said hit an unhealed wound that screamed in response; all of them were true. I was just repeating a childhood pattern that was familiar and safe, I know that now.

One day in 2001, after Lilith's words started to sink in, I sat down and wrote a letter to Ariel. I can't remember the exact words, but I tried my best to express how sorry I was that she and I had come to this place, with our child caught in between two adults who both loved her. That I missed my daughter terribly and that seeing her again would mean the world to me, if she could only find it in her heart to put our history behind us and rebuild something from it.

I didn't demand, I asked. That I would understand if she wasn't ready for it, but that even if she still had anger in her heart, then our daughter was more important than either of us. That we were parents, and even if we weren't a couple, our child still needed us both. I then wrote my mobile number at the bottom of the page.

I sent the letter, not knowing if it would result in anything, but hoping it would. Wishing.

At least I was choosing to do something, not sitting around, waiting for nothing to happen.

At first, nothing happened. Days passed.

Then something wonderful happened: my phone rang, it was Ariel, and she told me she agreed with what I had said in the letter. I didn't ask what that meant, but gratefully accepted her proposal of a meetup in a coffee shop the next day. Elyssa would be there, and I was overcome with feelings I wasn't used to.

Happiness, hope, optimism.

The next day, I waited in the coffee shop anxiously, sitting alone at a table, sipping cheap coffee that Morgana would have frowned upon had she been in my life by then. 

I'd asked Lilith to join me, but she felt it wasn't her place to be there; she didn't want our reunion to revolve around questions about her, nor did she want to inherit the label of the wicked stepmother from a past she hadn't been a part of.

She was also by then acutely aware of my tendency to happily let others do the talking while I observed, and she knew herself well enough that this would trigger her to fill in the uncomfortable silences with small talk. 

I wasn't good at small talk then; I'm not much better at it now, but I can pretend.

Ariel and Elyssa arrived, along with her boyfriend and their daughter. Elyssa's younger sister.

Elyssa had grown so much that I couldn't believe it. She was my firstborn, and even if you know this happens, it still comes as a shock when it does.

She later told me she hadn't recognised me right away when she came in; she'd been wondering who this giant of a man approaching her mother was. She was expecting to meet her father, but she didn't remember him being a giant.

I brought with me a relic from the last time she'd stayed with me. It was a warm, padded parka, screaming yellow and cute beyond words. It had been too large for her when I bought it a few years back during the flower shop crisis; by now, it might be too small for her, I realised. 

I gave it to her anyway. I'd kept it with me for the years since our last meeting as an unspoken promise to myself that everything would eventually be alright and that time would never change how important she was to me, no matter if she outgrew it.

That day became the beginning of a new chapter in my life. For the first time, I had learned that admitting mistakes is a requirement to be able to learn from them. Denial is more than just a river in Egypt.

Everyone makes mistakes; we don't all learn from them. 

If we don't learn, what are we?