Justin,
What I’m writing isn’t to change your mind or ask anything from you. It’s simply the truth of how things unfolded — my perspective, my mistakes, my circumstances, and the parts of the story you may never have heard.
Pregnancy and motherhood are more complicated than anyone admits out loud. Unplanned pregnancies — and the trauma, pressure, and lack of choices around them — shape the relationship between a mother and a child long before the child is even born. Even planned pregnancies can be overwhelming in ways people can’t understand until they go through it.
My pregnancy with Michael came out of trauma. I didn’t choose it, and it changed everything about the relationship we ended up having. My mother knew she created the circumstances that led to it. Instead of supporting me after altering the course of my life when I was sixteen, she spent years punishing me for it. She still does. She wanted distance from me long before I finally stepped away.
Your story was different, but still shaped by who I was and what I understood at the time.
I didn’t choose to get pregnant with you, either. I was responsible about birth control. When Andy ended the relationship, I stopped taking it. I was in my early-to-mid twenties, but I was still making decisions with an immature mind and no real support. Andy came from a family steeped in Nazi ideology — not neo-Nazi activity, but generational indoctrination from people who lived through Hitler Youth. That environment shaped him in ways I didn’t fully understand until later. I didn’t have the skills or self-worth to make good decisions, which made it easy for him to drift in and out of my life on his terms.
I was also Evangelical then. I believed abortion was a sin. I didn’t think I had a real choice. Everyone around me pushed adoption. The idea terrified me, even though another family might have been better prepared. What I did know — and what has never changed — is that I loved you, and I was thrilled to be pregnant with you despite the circumstances.
You see your existence as something I failed at from the start: getting pregnant, not choosing adoption, not being enough. You see my flaws clearly. Last Thanksgiving, you made sure I heard every one of them. A few days later, on December 4th, my dad died.
Because of my permanent estrangement from my mother and brothers, I could not call them myself. I told you that they needed to be informed so legal paperwork could be signed. That’s all it was — legal necessity. Later, when I asked whether you had contacted them, you said you had, and then told me you didn’t appreciate being put in that position. I was exhausted, grieving, and overwhelmed. That was when I snapped and said you never missed an opportunity to be an asshole. I rarely talk that way. It was raw in the moment. And that was the last thing I ever said to you.
I understand that a whole “no contact” movement exists online, where people cut ties with mothers who harmed them. I lived that with my own mother. But nobody ever talks about the other side — that adult children sometimes choose no contact with mothers who weren’t narcissists, weren’t abusive, and weren’t malicious. Sometimes the mother was simply a flawed human being, young, unsupported, overwhelmed, or still carrying her own trauma.
And there’s something else I need to say, because it matters here:
A lot of the mothers who did harm their children now defend themselves publicly through online videos. They attack their own kids to protect themselves. I could never do that. I could never risk becoming one of those voices tearing down the very people they raised.
The children speaking out are telling the truth as they lived it, and they’re right to protect themselves. But they don’t know that some people go no contact for reasons that have nothing to do with narcissism or cruelty. They don’t know about the mothers who didn’t have choices, or the women — including me — who were never taught how to protect themselves from men who used them and left them pregnant and alone. They don’t see the mothers who were too young, too unsupported, too traumatized, or too financially unstable to make better decisions. Those stories exist too.
An adult has the right to choose the relationship they want — or don’t want — with a parent. A child can walk away, and sometimes they’re right to. I will never blame anyone for going no contact. I understand it, because I lived it. What I won’t accept is the assumption that every mother in that situation is a monster. Some of us were simply trying to survive long enough to raise the children we loved.
I was not perfect. I didn’t have the skills, resources, or emotional stability I needed back then. But I did love you with everything I had. And I know that my best still wasn’t what you needed.
I also know this: I am not writing to repair anything. I’m not asking for contact, reconciliation, understanding, or forgiveness. Your decisions are yours, and I respect your right to make them.
This letter isn’t a request. It isn’t an invitation. It isn’t a plea. It’s simply the truth — my truth — written down so it exists somewhere outside my own head.
However you feel about me now, one thing remains true from my side:
I never stopped loving you. I never wished for a life where you didn’t exist. I did the best I could with what I had, even when it fell short of what you needed.
And that is the truth I’m choosing to stand in — with or without a relationship.
— Mom
Hark, A Tiny Hum 