There’s a certain silence that follows you when you grow up without real parents. Not the silence of peace or stillness, but the silence of questions that never got answers. Who was supposed to show me how to be strong without becoming hard? Who was meant to tell me that crying wasn’t weakness? For years, I didn’t know I was missing anything at all. Absence has a way of disguising itself as normal, until you see what presence looks like in someone else’s life.
When I was a boy, I didn’t have a father or mother in the traditional sense. I had a name, a vague outline, stories that felt more like folklore than fact. Sometimes they were people who couldn’t handle life. Sometimes they were ghosts who haunted other people more than they ever haunted me. My father left me when I was two for not rational reason. My mother, for all her trying, was locked in her own cage of survival. Her love was scattered and worn thin, passed out in rations with a side of lies. I learned early that the safest place was often alone due to her struggles with schizophrenia. Just a boy, all alone.
It’s hard to write this, to open the memories from when I was just a little boy. The words start to blur on the screen when the tears come, but it’s healing me. Now that I’m older, I can see it clearly… The trauma I went through. Back then, I had no idea. How could I? I was just a little boy stuck in survival mode, trying to make sense of a world that didn’t always feel warm.
I remember how I would be lying in bed at night with three pillows. I had this habit that two of them had to be under the covers with me, always. I couldn’t sleep unless they were. I believed they were lonely, like they had emotions, and I had to cuddle and hug them so they wouldn’t feel alone. What I didn’t understand at the time was that I wasn’t just comforting the pillows, I was projecting how I felt onto them. I was the one who felt alone, and I was trying to soothe that in the only way I knew how… A warm hug. That little boy had so much hug to give.
Looking back, it’s like that little boy inside me was sending a message, a quiet cry for connection, to the person I’d one day become. And now, finally, I’m ready to listen.
Now I’m reflecting my life…
What nobody tells you about growing up without guidance is how heavy the map becomes when you're forced to draw it yourself. I watched other boys test limits, stumble into mistakes, then get pulled back by a father’s hand, firm, flawed, but present. I had no such hand. My lessons came from consequence and observation. I studied people like puzzles. I learned to read moods, silence, anger, tenderness. It was my way of surviving, always adjusting who I am to fit in the room that I am in. I was like an unpaid actor and the movie was reality. I became fluent in micro-expressions, just to feel one step ahead of chaos. Now that I think about it… I was just simply surviving a battle I didn’t start.
There’s a loneliness that hardens into habit. I carried it in school, where I never felt quite like the other kids. Not better, not worse, just suspended in some in-between space. I laughed at jokes I didn’t find funny. I played games with people I didn’t trust. I wore masks not out of deceit, but because I didn’t know what was underneath yet.
And yet, the soul, perhaps out of need, learns to find balance. I started piecing together my idea of fatherhood from fragments. A line from a book. The imaginary family I drew when the teacher said, “draw your family and color." A character in a film. A kind gesture from a teacher who didn’t even know they were saving me. I began parenting myself before I even knew what that meant. I remember I would lay in the grass and look up at the sky and talk to God because God was the only guidance I had. I never was a church person, or a Christian. But I had my own personal relationship with God, and obviously looking back on it, I was doing another projection on how I thought a father would talk to his boy. I created rules for how I’d treat others. I promised not to become cold, even though it would have been easier. I became the class clown, realizing now that my mind only felt a sparkle of what love was from making others laugh. That’s the only “love” I felt as a boy. It was the only warmth I recognized in this life.
But self-parenting is slow, uneven work. Never perfect and there will be holes unfilled. You grieve things you never had. You argue with ghosts. You catch yourself in the middle of a mistake and realize there’s no one to blame but the absence itself. And even then, you’re expected to rise, to love, to trust, to give, to do all the things you never saw modeled for you. I grew up in a society where people still assumed every child had both parents available to them.
It took me a long time to understand that being broken wasn’t the same as being weak. That surviving didn’t make me defective. That the boy who learned to find safety in solitude wasn’t ashamed, he was resourceful. That boy kept me alive. And now, slowly, he’s teaching me how to live. His last little message before he fades.
There’s no clean ending to a story like this. No moment of sudden clarity or perfect redemption. Just a quiet rebuilding. I still feel the ache sometimes when I, a father now, holding my children’s hands with ease. I still feel like I missed the instructions everyone else got. But I also feel something else now, something stronger than bitterness or sorrow. I feel like a wall to a vicious cycle that I could’ve passed down to my children if I followed the path of my origin. I will not let my children feel like that little boy.
That little boy is telling me; it’s time to stop surviving and start living. It’s time to become a stranger to that little boy dealing with abandonment trauma and I know he’s ready too.
Just one last pillow hug goodbye.
If you made it this far thank you for reading! This writing has been a beautiful chaotic mind journey. I want to think all the people and their writings have help me dig deeper inside myself. Your words healed me. I hope maybe this gets you to reflect on yourself and think about that little boy or girl you once knew. I feel like our younger selves left little messages for our future selves to see. You just need to be ready to see it. So, please go! Isolate yourself and dig deep into memory and find those little messages. It’s time to start healing. Start living.
Thank you for sharing. It’s these hard roads as kids and self parenting that has made us the incredible and resilient beings we are today 🖤
This was so heartbreaking but beautifully written. Thank you for sharing this with me - it moved me.