My uncle and I are Facebook friends. Have been for years — I couldn’t tell you exactly how many. I still don’t know if he’s alive.
He was born a year or two after my father, sometime in the early 1940s. If he’s still here, he’s well into his eighties now. He has two daughters, my cousins. I only know their first names. I’ve looked for both of them on Facebook, and I’m still not sure I’ve found the right people. I’ve taken to checking my uncle’s old page instead, the one where he used to post his preaching, scrolling for a date. The last one I can find is from 2024, or maybe 2025. I haven’t let myself confirm which.
I still have a couple of connections on that side of the family, but none of them know much about him either. Disappearing runs through that whole branch. I have no one left to ask, only a page and a date I’m afraid to confirm.
None of these relationships are biological. I was legally adopted as a child. My mother, my father, my uncle — this was the family that raised me. I mention it plainly because it matters, though the larger story of adoption belongs somewhere else.
My father used to say no news is good news. I understood it as a kind of faith: if nobody’s told you someone died, they’re probably still alive. I never agreed with that, not really, and I understand why now more than I ever have. It doesn’t matter what no news actually means. No news is its own kind of painful, regardless of what’s true underneath it. I am living inside my father’s saying right now, and it isn’t comforting at all.
This isn’t a piece asking for forgiveness. Whether my daughters ever forgive me belongs to them, not to this essay. What I want is harder: I want my daughters to understand what happened, and why, in my own words, while I’m still here to say it myself. I know exactly what it feels like to be left holding a silence nobody chose on purpose — checking a man’s old posts for a date, doing math on his birth year, guessing at whether he loved you because neither of you ever said so while you had the chance. I don’t want them doing that math about me.
I have two daughters. I have been, by any honest measure, largely absent across both of my daughters’ lives. That is not the same sentence twice, though. The shape of the absence is different for each of them, and that difference matters.
With my eldest, I was there at first. I went to the doctor’s visits with her mother, not romantically, just present. I was there for her birth. I loved her immensely from the day she arrived and was, for that first year, genuinely happy to be a father. Joining the Navy wasn’t me leaving her. It was me trying to build something stable enough to come back to. Then I went to boot camp on July 22, 2003. Her first birthday was July 26, 2003 — four days later. I want to sit with that gap on purpose: not “I left when she was young,” but four days.
I got kicked out of the Navy in September 2004 and left for Rhode Island days later, into the chapter I’ve already written about elsewhere — the arrest, the county jails, the year that cost me more than the sentence did. I came back to Los Angeles in October 2005. A year or so after I returned, a child support case led to a paternity test that confirmed what I already knew. By 2008, I had court-ordered visitation, and for a little over a year, it held. Then my housing fell apart — the way it always did, the way it still does — and that path closed. I tried once to enforce the visitation order, the police got involved, and I didn’t like what it took, so I stopped trying.
Years passed. Her mother and I found our way to something civil, and the child support case closed. But the actual repair didn’t come from any of that. It came from my daughter getting old enough to have her own phone, her own opinions, her own line straight to me that didn’t run through her mother anymore. She could call me and argue with me and tell me exactly how she felt, and she did, and somewhere in that we built something real — movies when I’m in town, a nail-and-spa day we still haven’t managed to actually schedule but keep saying out loud we want, me telling her directly that she’s allowed to ask me for things, because I don’t want her spending her life waiting for someone else to reach first the way I always have.
My youngest is thirteen now. Her mother got pregnant a few months after I got out of jail in early 2012. That incarceration was separate from the one that shaped my eldest’s early years. At the time, I was seriously considering leaving the country, France or anywhere, because I couldn’t see a version of my life in America that wasn’t already ruined. I was there for her birth too. I lived with her mother for a stretch while she was a baby, in the early, hungrier days of what would eventually become Cue Anthony Racing.
Then I was gone for a while — homelessness, instability, whatever the specific shape of my life was that year. There was a reconciliation with her mother that let me back in through the phone, FaceTime calls. My daughter was maybe four or five then, and she was so excited to talk to me those calls felt like something I didn’t deserve. Then life happened again, the same way it always does, and I disappeared for another stretch. Later I took her mother to dinner, we talked, and she let me back in again. That’s the actual pattern — not one clean break, but a cycle: present, gone, welcomed back, gone again, welcomed back again.
I want to say something plainly here, about both of my daughters’ mothers, not just this one. They did what mothers are supposed to do: they protected their children from my inconsistency. I had given them every reason to expect it. Any time a door closed on me, it wasn’t cruelty. I don’t hold that against either of them, and I won’t let this piece pretend I do.
A few years back, when she was nine or so — old enough to ask for things herself — there was an afternoon she asked me for Chick-fil-A. I called her mother first, just to check, and her mother said it was fine. On the way there, she asked if I could get food for her whole after-school crew too — a table full of nine- and ten-year-olds I’d never met. Acts of service is my love language, if I believe in that kind of thing, and I mostly do. Doing something for someone is how I feel useful; being unable to do anything leaves me with no smaller word than useless. So the idea of showing up with enough food for the whole group felt like being handed a gift. It also nearly wrecked me with nerves. I genuinely didn’t know if it was okay to hand a table of kids food without every one of their own parents signing off on it. I called her mother again and asked friends who were parents whether it was even acceptable. Everyone said it was fine. I was so glad to do it I could have cried in the parking lot.
These days there is an open text thread between us. Has been for a while. I have her number, she has mine. She doesn’t reply much anymore. She’s thirteen now. She knows exactly who I am: the father who comes back, and the father who leaves again.
For a long time my argument to myself went like this: how could I have been a father when I didn’t know where I was going to sleep. Even now, when I’ve gotten better at holding things together, I am still returning to California with nothing solid lined up. Last September I lost a job and still held onto my apartment through the end of the lease — the first time in my life I completed one instead of fleeing it in chaos. Same outcome, slower collapse. Progress and instability, sitting in the same sentence. Except there’s a detail in that case I have to be honest about: I have always eaten well, no matter what. Homeless and hungry are not the same word, and I let myself confuse them for a long time. If I could always find a way to a meal, I could have found a way to send one more text.
Somewhere in my own life I became the kind of man who disappears on his kids, and I can tell you now it was never simple, and it was never innocent either. The guilt for that is mine, and it came from my own insecurity, my own self-esteem, nowhere else. For so long I actually believed my daughters were better off without me — that I was more burden than asset, whether or not that was true. I don’t know if it was true. What I know is that it doesn’t matter to me anymore, because today I’ve been driving and crying over a man I can’t confirm is alive, and I am not willing to hand that particular grief down to my own children on purpose.
My father never did that to me, whatever else was true between us. There was a window on 75th Street, and I used to sit in it in the early morning, waiting for him to come home from third shift, before my mother died and the house went with her and we moved into two rooms on 83rd and Western that he never left until the day he did. We didn’t talk about her death. We didn’t talk about much. I hated him for stretches I’m not proud of — the church, the silence, the distance that called itself discipline — and it took me deep into adulthood to understand he’d lost a wife and been left with a kid and did what he could with what little he’d been given. I stole from him in small ways. Twenty dollars here, sixty there. I lied about where I was and came home too late and sometimes found the door locked against me. But it always opened again eventually. A meal. A bed for a night or a week.
We didn’t hug much. That was never really us. But near the end, during his convalescence, I was there — really there, present in a way I hadn’t always managed to be. By the time he became seriously ill, I had finally cleared the legal weight I’d been carrying for years. Right before they intubated him, I told him I loved him. He’d told me the same, a handful of times over the years, in his own way. There’s still real pain in that relationship, and I won’t pretend the whole thing resolved itself just because we said the words at the end. But we said them. He never once, not one single time, shut the door on me for good, and before he died, we both said the thing out loud.
I did stop going to my uncle’s house, but even that isn’t as clean as it sounds. As a teenager, after the credit cards, my father told me my uncle had said I wasn’t welcome there anymore. My uncle never said it to my face. It came to me secondhand, through my father, and I never went back to hear it any other way. Whether I ever went back as an adult, I honestly can’t tell you. Maybe a handful of times. Maybe not at all. I don’t trust my own memory on that part. What I do know is that he showed up for my father’s funeral, covered the parts of the costs my father’s own arrangements didn’t reach, and sat with me over lunch afterward and asked me, sincerely, how I’d never become a gang member. Then, at some point in the years since, without either of us deciding it, we simply stopped talking at all.
The real difference between them is not who left a door open and who closed one. It is what happened to the silence afterward. My father and I never stopped talking, badly or otherwise, until the day he died. My uncle and I drifted as teenagers, came back together enough to sit at a funeral lunch, and then, sometime in the years since, just stopped. No fight I can point to. Just quiet, the kind that creeps in without anyone deciding it should, the exact kind I don’t want between me and my daughters.
I don’t want to be either one of them, exactly. I want to be the version of my father who never locked the door and who said the words before it was too late, minus the twenty-five years it took me to say any of this out loud. I want my daughters to have what I don’t have with my uncle — an answer, whatever the answer is, instead of a Facebook page and a date I’m afraid to confirm.
So here it is, plainly, while I still can. I loved you both from the day you were born. I left too early and stayed gone too long, for reasons that were real and were never good enough. I got to say I love you to my father before he died. I don’t want you wondering too late whether I loved you, the way I now wonder whether my uncle ever knew he was loved by me. I’m saying it now, before it becomes the only kind of silence I have left to give you.
I love you. Both of you. That’s the whole confession.