My father dumped me and my sisters like we were junk mail, just because we weren’t boys. When I got older, I made sure he regretted it in a way he never saw coming, which included lawyers and courtrooms. I’m 19 now, and I can still remember the first time I realized my father didn’t love me.
His lack of love for me and my sisters is what eventually led me to force him to see us for who we are, the only way I knew how. I remember the first time it dawned on me that Dad didn’t love me. I must’ve been five or six, sitting on the living room couch with a popsicle dripping down my hand.
I remember staring at the family pictures on the mantle and the way Dad looked at me in the hospital photos. He wasn’t angry or sad, just blank, like I was a mistake he couldn’t return. I’m the oldest of five.
My name’s Hannah. Then came Rachel, then Lily, then Ava. Four girls, one after the other.
And to Dad, that was a problem. Dad wanted a son and never hid it. He told Mom right after I was born, apparently, in the hospital, “Don’t get too attached.
We’ll try again.” He never said it in front of us, but you could feel it in everything he didn’t say. No hugs, no “I’m proud of you,” just silence and cold stares. Each time Mom had a new baby and it turned out to be another girl, he grew more bitter.
By the time Ava was born, the resentment in our house was thick enough to choke on. And so he found a solution: out of sight, out of mind. Dad started dropping us off with Grandma Louise one by one because we “didn’t count.” I was the first, a few months before my first birthday.
Then Rachel, Lily, and Ava. He’d wait a few months, long enough to keep up appearances, then pack a bag and drop us off like forgotten donations at a thrift store. Grandma never fought him.
Not because she didn’t love us, she did, but because she was afraid of stirring the pot. “I didn’t want to risk him cutting off all contact,” she once admitted, clutching one of Ava’s old blankets. “I thought maybe, someday, he’d come around.”
Mom didn’t stop him either.
Looking back, I don’t think she had the fight in her. She married young, dropped out of college to be a wife, and when Dad told her what to do, she did it, no questions asked. I think part of her resented us too, not because we were girls, but because we kept showing up in her life when she wasn’t ready to be a mother.
She didn’t seem to hate us; she just didn’t seem to want us. We grew up in Grandma Louise’s quiet little house, where she made cookies when we were sick and tucked us in with bedtime stories. She never raised her voice, and the only photos of us as babies were the ones she took herself.
And whenever our birthdays rolled around, she made four little cakes, one for each of us, every time. We didn’t hear from Mom or Dad much. The occasional birthday card signed “Love, Dad and Mom” with no message inside.
I used to sleep with them under my pillow, pretending the words had just been erased by accident. Then one night, when I was nine, Grandma’s phone rang while she was in the kitchen. I remember her shoulders tensing.
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