I see the moon, and the moon sees me,
the moon sees the one I long to see.
So God bless the moon, and God bless me,
and God bless the one I long to see.
“I See the Moon,” Old English Nursery Rhyme
The moon witnesses what we do not say aloud. It sees our children sleeping in beds we have never seen, and it sees you in the fluorescent sameness of wherever they have placed you. It sees the distance between you, which is not only miles but law, and time, and someone else’s story of who you are.
I want to talk to you about that story.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose work has spent decades examining how stories are used as instruments of power. Who gets to tell them, who is told to accept them, and what is lost when only one version survives. She has written about the danger of the single story and the way one narrative, told with enough authority, becomes the only truth a person can find. Your children have been given a single story about you. Perhaps it is partly true. Perhaps it is one moment of your worst self, enlarged until it has swallowed everything that came before and after. But a single moment is never a person. And your children are out there somewhere, wondering about the rest of you.
Your children may be too young, or too hurt, or too shaped by others, to ask for a different story yet. Write them the other story anyway. Write it even if it goes nowhere. Write it even if they never read it. Write it because silence is never neutral — silence is its own story, and the story silence tells a child is: I forgot you. I moved on. You didn’t matter enough to reach for.
I know something about what it means to be the child who wonders.
But before I tell you what I know, let me tell you who I am. I cannot ask you to trust me with your grief if I do not offer you mine.
I have never met my biological father. I know his name and I know he is dead.
For most of my life, I knew only this: he was not in our lives. My mother said so simply, and left it there, and I took it as children take the facts of their world. As given. I wondered about him the way children wonder about misplaced things. Not with grief exactly. With curiosity. With the low hum of an unanswered question that never quite went away.
For sixty years I wondered. I wondered if he knew I existed. I wondered if he ever thought about me. I wondered, without shame and without complication, if he loved me. My mother was alive and I did not ask her. She had said what she had said, and her silence around it was a door I was not supposed to open, and I respected that door the as you respect the silence of someone you love.
And then my mother died. And sometime after, the truth arrived.
She had not simply been left by a man who was not ready. She had been raped. In 1958, on a date. In 1958, a woman who had been raped had little recourse. She was not seen as a victim. She was seen as a loose woman, someone who had brought shame upon herself. The man who violated her faced nothing. My mother faced a lifetime of consequences — and she faced them, every single day, without telling me.
I imagine she could have ended the pregnancy, though not legally. In those days women were left with secrecy and danger instead of choices. She could have given me up for adoption and tried to forget. Instead, she carried me. She gave birth to me. She raised me alone, in a world that judged her for it.
She had watched me wonder about him. For sixty years she had watched me carry a question she could have answered, and she chose not to answer it, because the answer would have made me carry something heavier than a question. She gave me sixty years of innocent curiosity instead of a truth that would have changed the shape of everything.
I have spent the time since trying to understand what it means to love someone that completely. To carry that alone. To watch your child wonder about the man who violated you and say nothing, because you have decided that your child’s peace matters more than your own unburdening.
I did not know, until she was gone, what my mother had given me. I do not know if I am equal to it.
Your children are carrying that weight right now. They are constructing a story about your absence, and they are doing it alone, with whatever materials they have been given. They are asking themselves what I asked myself for sixty years: Did they think of me? Did they wonder about me? Did they love me?
Silence answers that question too. It just answers it wrong.
I am a domestic violence intervention counselor. I sit across from people who have caused real harm, and I watch what happens when their children come up. Something surfaces that wasn’t there before. Not guilt exactly. Something older and more intact than anything else the room contains. The part of them that never got hurt enough to close.
They tell me about birthday parties they missed. School plays and baseball games no one called them about. Phone calls that never come. And underneath all of it, the fear that their children are forgetting them — or worse, that they are being taught to.
The men and women I work with are not a monolith, and I do not pretend otherwise. Some have done things they cannot undo. Some are working hard to become different people than they were. Some are not. I am not here to decide who deserves their children back. That is not a decision I am equipped to make, and it is not what this essay is about.
My point is that all of them carry the same weight: love that has nowhere to go.
And I tell them all the same thing: Write the letters anyway.
Write them even if you cannot send them. Write them even if you believe the envelopes will be intercepted, destroyed, used against you. Write them even if your children have been told you are a monster and will not want to read them for twenty years.
Write them so that someday, when your children go looking for evidence — and they will look, because children grow up and always look — they find you waiting on those pages.
There is a neuroscientist named Mary-Frances O’Connor who studies what happens in the brain when we grieve. Her research gave me something I wish someone had told me years ago: that grief is not a feeling so much as a confusion. When we love someone, our brain builds a detailed map of them. Where they are. What they need. How to find them. The map is not metaphorical — it is neurological, a real architecture of expectation and anticipation built into the structure of how we think.
When that person disappears, the brain does not simply update the map. It keeps consulting it. It keeps reaching for what it expects to find and finding absence instead. O’Connor describes a widow whose brain, after years of hearing her husband’s car in the driveway at six o’clock, still fires with the expectation of his arrival at that sound and is hit, every evening, with the fact of his absence all over again. Every day it tries to reconcile the map with the reality, and every day it cannot.
O’Connor’s research is mostly about death. But the bereaved brain does not distinguish well between a person who is gone from the world and a person who is gone from your life. The brain has mapped your child — their laugh, the specific weight of them in your arms when they were small, the sound of their voice calling for you in the night, the way they smelled after a bath. Your brain consults that map every day. Every day your child is not there.
Every day it tries to make sense of the absence and cannot.
This is not weakness. It is not illness. Your brain built itself around your child — their breathing, the sound of them, the specific way they needed you and it does not know how to un-build that. It was never supposed to know.
I tell you this not to make the pain worse, but to make it legible. What you are feeling is not just grief. It is your brain, faithfully, stubbornly, doing the work of love. It is reaching for the person it was built to reach for, and finding only air.
Writing is not a cure for this. But it is something the brain can do with that reaching. It is a place to put the love when the person it belongs to cannot receive it. Each letter says to your nervous system: I am not pretending they are gone. I am still here. I still remember. I am still their parent, even in this.
Four years ago, I got divorced. It was contentious. My ex-wife had a son from a previous relationship. I had been in his life since he was five years old. I loved him as my own. I taught him to ride a bike. I helped him with his homework. I sat with him during nightmares. For seven years, I was his parent in every way that mattered except biology.
When the marriage ended, a single story was created about me. It was given to this boy I love as the only story he would know. I was not in the room when it was told. I could not offer the seven years of love as context. I could only become the villain in someone else’s narrative.
This is how the single story works: it is not told once. It is told until it becomes the air the child breathes. Until the child can no longer remember that there was ever another version, because the new story has filled every room.
The last time I saw him, I told him I loved him. I told him that no matter what happened, no matter what he had been told, I would always love him.
He was twelve years old. He looked at me with eyes that had learned to hate.
He said: I hope you fucking die in a ditch somewhere.
I have not seen him since.
For months after that, I carried those words like stones in my chest. Not only the words themselves, but what they represented: the complete success of a single story. Seven years of love, overwritten. A child I had held through nightmares, hoping I would die in a ditch.
I want to tell you it felt complicated. That I understood, even then, that he was twelve years old and had been handed a story and was doing what children do with the stories they are handed. I want to tell you the grief was bigger than the hurt.
But the truth is simpler and harder than that. I just felt the rejection. The particular, total rejection of someone you loved completely, who looked at you and found nothing worth keeping. Seven years, and he wanted me dead in a ditch. That is what it felt like. Not a single story. Not a neural map consulting empty space. Just: I loved him and he didn’t want it and there was nothing I could do.
His mother made clear that contact was not welcome. I could not send letters. So, I did the only thing left to me: I wrote them anyway and kept them. There is a box in my office. I have been writing ever since. Sometimes twice a week. Letters he has not read, addressed to a boy who is now sixteen, from someone who taught him to ride a bike and still does not know how to stop loving him.
I do not know if he will ever read them. I do not know if, when he is older, he will be curious enough to ask questions, or if he will feel safe enough to hear a different story than the one he was given. But the letters exist. They are dated. They are specific. They are proof that on an ordinary Tuesday, and on his birthday, and on random afternoons when something reminded me of him, I was here and I was thinking of him, and I wrote it down.
Some of you are legally prohibited from contact. Honor that. Do not violate no-contact orders. Do not send what you are not permitted to send. Keep the letters in a journal, or sealed in an envelope, or with someone you trust.
What matters is that they exist.
So here is what the law cannot do: it cannot make your love stop existing. Your love does not need permission. It does not need a court order or a visitation schedule or someone else’s approval to be real. It does not need to arrive to matter. It does not need to be received to be true.
Write the letters. Write them and keep them. Date them. Put them somewhere safe.
Because the law changes. Children grow up. Curiosity is relentless. And the questions — did you think of me? did you love me? — do not expire.
I think about that box in my office sometimes and I wonder what he will make of it someday — if someday comes. The letter I wrote the week he would have started high school. The one I wrote on his birthday. The ones I wrote when nothing particular happened except that I was sitting and thinking of him and the thinking had nowhere to go except the page. The ordinary ones. That is what your letters can be. Not a rewriting of the past. Not an argument. Not a defense. Just: I was here. I was thinking of you. You existed in my mind when you could not exist in my arms.
There is something that keeps people from writing the letters, and it is not logistics. It is not the question of where to send them or whether they will arrive. It is shame.
I have watched it happen across the table from me, in the small offices and screens where I do my work. Someone will be talking about their children – about missing them, about the specific weight of a birthday that passed without a phone call. And then something closes in their face. They look down. They say: I don’t know if I am allowed to.
That sentence. I have heard it more times than I can count.
Here is what I know about shame: it is not the truth about you. It is the story that has been told about you by people and institutions with the power to make it stick. It moves into the space where your own voice should be. It tells you that love, once you have caused harm or been judged or been put somewhere like where you are now, becomes something you no longer get to claim.
But your children are not waiting for you to deserve them. They are waiting for evidence that you thought of them. Those are not the same thing. One is a verdict. The other is simply true, or it isn’t — and if it is true, the only question is whether you write it down.
I want to speak directly to those of you who have done harm.
I am not going to tell you that love cancels out damage, because it does not. Your children’s pain is real. Their anger is real. It belongs to them. The letters are not the place to ask them to forget what happened or minimize what they went through.
Love and accountability are not opposites. You can write letters that say: I know I hurt you. I know there are things I cannot take back. I am working on becoming someone different. And through all of it, I have loved you, and I want you to know that, whenever you are ready to know it.
The letters are not for you to feel better, though they may do that. The letters are for them. For the day when they are old enough, and far enough from the hurt, to want to know whether you thought of them.
Write for that day. Write for who they will be at twenty-five or thirty-five, sitting with the question you could not answer in person.Â
Adichie says that when we reject the single story, we regain a kind of paradise. I have thought about the word “paradise” for a long time. It does not mean happiness. It means wholeness. A person who exists in only one story is not fully a person. They are a symbol, a cautionary tale, a warning to others. Complexity is not a luxury. It is what personhood requires.
Your children have been given a single story about you. Write them a more complicated one. Write them the story of someone who made mistakes and also loved them. Someone who was absent and thought of them constantly. Someone who was judged by their worst moments and who was also, on an ordinary Tuesday, writing a letter and thinking: I wonder what you look like now. I wonder if you still laugh the way you used to. I wonder if you are okay.
That is not one story. That is a person. Give them a person.
Here is how you write the letters.
You start with the date. Always the date, because the dates are proof – proof that you did not forget on that specific day, in that specific month, in that specific year of your life and theirs.
Then you write about the ordinary things. What you ate. What you were reading. What the weather was like. What you dreamed. You write about the memories you carry. The way they mispronounced a word when they were small, the question they asked once that you have never forgotten, the sound of their laugh. You write about missing them. You write about being sorry for whatever you are sorry for. You write about the future you hope they will have – not the future you imagine for yourself in it, but the future you want for them, regardless of whether you are in it.
I have sat with people while they wrote their first letter. What stops them, almost every time, is the belief that what they have to say is not enough and that their ordinary day, their small observations, their imperfect love, does not deserve the page. Write it anyway. The ordinary is exactly what your children will want. Not the grand declarations. The specific, ordinary proof that you were living and thinking of them at the same time.
You do not perform. You do not argue. You do not defend. You do not write letters that are secretly addressed to judges or attorneys or your ex-partner. You write to your child. You write the truth of what you feel, on this day, in this moment, knowing they may not read it for twenty years.
Then you seal it. You label it with their name and the date. You put it somewhere safe.
And then you write another one.
I know this because I have done it. I am doing it still.
I used to imagine the worst. The letters sitting unread. This boy I love was never coming. I used to lie awake turning that possibility over and over, looking for a way through it.
I don’t anymore.
Not because I know how it ends. I don’t. The boy I love may never come looking. The box may stay sealed. The questions may never get asked. I have made my peace with not knowing, because I have finally understood that the outcome was never mine to control.
What was mine was the telling. The showing up on the page. The love made visible, made specific, made into something that can outlast my own need for it to matter.
I have told my story. I have presented my love. I cannot do more than that.
Now it is the love that does the work.
I see the moon, and the moon sees me.
The moon sees the one I long to see.
Write the letters.
The moon is watching.
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