Hello everyone. I’m a 30-year-old man living in Southern California.
My father left when I was very young, probably when I was four or five. My mother told me that he would eventually call, so I remember being a little boy who was always waiting for the phone to ring. Eventually, my father did call—but only to tell me that he would not be around anymore.
Growing up was difficult. My mother had very little education, and we lived in extreme poverty. She worked just enough to afford a single room in Highland Park, where we lived alongside other families in similar situations. The environment was rough: gangs, food insecurity, bedbugs from other tenants, roach infestations, and the constant feeling that we were different from everyone around us.
Although I am grateful that my mother worked to keep a roof over my head, she also physically and emotionally abused me. Looking back as an adult, many of the things she punished me for seem incredibly minor. If I did not answer her with “Yes, ma’am” or “No, ma’am,” she would pull out a wire hanger and hit me across my back, arms, or legs. If I did not listen or immediately do what she asked, she would hit me with an extension cord. This continued for years.
Eventually, my mother met someone and remarried, but my relationship with my stepfather never felt loving. I often felt as though he did not care about me. As I grew older, I developed a deep fascination with computers and music. They became my escape from everything happening around me.
High school was especially difficult because the emotional abuse at home never stopped. I developed major depression. Without making this post even longer, I eventually earned a master’s degree in computer science and built a career with a cloud-computing firm, where I had worked for six years at that point.
I finally moved out of my mother’s home and began living alone. I had a few things I enjoyed—cars, motorcycles, and other hobbies—and, for the first time in my life, I felt free.
Then, in 2021, I received a Facebook notification from my father. His home country had suffered a major economic crisis, and he asked whether he could stay with me and whether I could pick him up from the airport. After thinking about it, I agreed.
I converted my spare office into a bedroom for him. I bought a bed and everything else he would need. When the day came, I was waiting for him at the airport.
Meeting my father as an adult was strange. For the first time, we were speaking adult to adult. I had spent my entire life trying to navigate the cards I had been dealt, and I believed I had done reasonably well. However, I quickly learned that he thought I was too large, disapproved of my cars and motorcycles, and viewed me negatively for being American.
I told myself that perhaps he would warm up to me over time. Instead, after about a month and a half, he suddenly got up and disappeared from my life again.
I later learned that he had returned to the United States because he needed money to continue funding a large building project in his home country. For the previous 18 years, after leaving my mother and me, he had been living there and focusing almost entirely on that building. He became a truck driver and lived in his truck, putting nearly everything he earned into the project.
He never called on my birthday, and I rarely saw him after that.
One positive thing came from his visit, though. My uncle—my father’s brother, whom I vaguely remembered from childhood—reached out shortly afterward and said he wanted me to meet his family. Through him, I discovered that I had three cousins living only about 15 minutes away from me. They were all born and raised in Southern California.
My uncle told me that he had wanted to contact me for years, but my father would fight with him and the rest of the family and insist that they leave my mother and me alone. My uncle also told me that I had a large extended family in my father’s home country whom he wanted me to meet someday.
My uncle and I became very close. My cousins, although they grew up with far more privilege than I did, became like the sisters I never had.
With my uncle’s help, I was finally able to visit my father’s home country for the first time in 2024. I met my other uncles, their families, and many members of my extended family. They were warm, loving, and incredibly kind. I left that trip feeling accepted by my family, but still unwanted by my father.
Then, in October 2025, I was stabbed in the neck by a man who appeared to be under the influence of drugs while I was on my way to get breakfast. I spent five days in the ICU, was intubated for three days, lost my left internal jugular vein, and suffered damage to a nerve that controls my vocal cords.
I received an incredible amount of support from friends and coworkers. My mother was there. My uncle, aunt, and cousins were there.
My father was not.
Recovery was—and still is—extremely difficult. When I eventually saw my father after the stabbing, he told me that my scar looked bad and that I should have it removed by a plastic surgeon. His comment hurt, but I tried to forget about it.
In June 2026, one of my cousins in his home country invited me to her wedding. Nearly everyone on my father’s side of the family was invited. I bought my ticket and planned to fly with my uncle a few days after my aunt and cousins. The airline canceled our original tickets, and rebooking everything became a challenge, but we eventually made it.
I stayed with another uncle and felt deeply welcomed, loved, and accepted. The wedding was beautiful, and everyone treated me with extraordinary kindness.
However, I felt hurt when I learned that my father had chosen to fly into the country after the wedding—on the same day I was scheduled to leave.
My family held a goodbye dinner for me. Afterward, the plan was for my uncles and me to pick up my father from the airport, have coffee together, and then take me to the airport for my flight home.
When we found my father at the airport, he was speaking with a family he had apparently just met. The husband or father of that family had reportedly been arrested by immigration authorities. My father barely acknowledged me or my uncles because he was completely focused on these strangers.
The family followed us to the area where we were supposed to sit and talk. When we finally sat down, my father spent most of the conversation holding and showing affection to a toddler from this family he had just met.
Then he began telling me that I needed to understand something: he did not regret leaving me as a child or allowing my mother to raise me alone.
He told me that he had been with multiple women, but had never wanted marriage or children. He criticized my weight and health. He made bizarre comments about hot dogs being made from cats. He said he knew that my mother would never abandon me, and that many women had wanted marriage and children with him, but that nothing—not those women, not my mother, and not even me—was going to interfere with his mission.
That mission was the building he had spent his life and money pursuing.
As the pain of what he was saying began to sink in, I felt that I had to leave. I needed to check in for my flight, but more than anything, I needed to get away from him.
I stood up and hugged my uncles. They held me tightly.
My father gave me a handshake while still holding the toddler.
My uncles stayed with me until I reached the security gate. When I looked back, they were the ones waving goodbye.
My father was already gone.
I spent much of the flight home fighting back tears. I am a grown man, and I could not fully break down in that moment, but the tears were there. It felt as though a dam containing decades of pain was about to collapse. I wanted to sob in a way that I had not allowed myself to do for years.
After approximately 26 hours of travel, I finally arrived home.
My father never checked to see whether I had landed safely. My uncles and aunts did.
When I told one of my uncles how deeply the encounter had hurt me, he told me to continue living my life and to forget about my father. He told me that my uncles were my fathers now.
I have never asked my father for money. I never wanted anything material from him. All I ever wanted was his time, his affection, and some indication that he was proud of me.
For years, I continued acting like the little boy waiting beside the phone. I texted him on his birthdays. I wished him Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. Most of the time, he did not respond. He would come into town without telling me. I spent years wondering what else I needed to accomplish to stop feeling like a disappointment to him.
Now he is texting and calling me, but I feel finished.
I am tired of being the child who waits for his father. I am tired of trying to earn the love of someone who has repeatedly chosen not to give it.
I did not ask to be born. He had a responsibility to me, and hearing him say that he felt no regret for abandoning me was one of the most painful things I have ever experienced.
I think I have finally reached the point where I need to stop waiting.
What would you have done? What should I do?