Three words that changed everything
So my daughter messaged me yesterday. She’s 18 now, been talking to me for about 8 months since she found me on Insta. Things have been going really well, slow but steady, you know? We chat most days, she tells me about uni, her job at the local bakery. I’ve been so bloody careful not to push, not to ask the hard questions.
Yesterday she said “Dad, I need to tell you something.” My heart just stopped. I thought here we go, she’s changed her mind, mum’s gotten to her again.
But then she said: “I remember you.”
I remember you. Three words that completely floored me.
She said she remembers me making her breakfast every morning before kindy. She remembers our Saturday trips to the playground near our old place in Thornbury. She remembers me reading her stories at bedtime, doing all the voices. She said for years she thought she’d made it all up, that mum had convinced her those memories weren’t real.
I’m sitting here crying writing this. For 6 years I thought she had no memory of our life together before the divorce. Her mum told everyone I was never really involved, that she barely knew me. The court believed it. I started believing it myself sometimes.
But she remembered. She always remembered.
We’re meeting for coffee on Saturday. First time face to face since she was 12. I’m terrified and excited and I barely slept last night.
I just wanted to share this with people who get it. After all these years of being told I was nothing to her… she remembered me the whole time.