Momma… Does My Daddy Still Love Me?

The cereal in her son’s bowl had gone soggy. He stirred it lazily, eyes fixed on the silent TV screen, waiting for a morning cartoon that would never start.

She hadn’t turned it on. She hadn’t moved from the kitchen doorway since the call.

"He's been taken into custody. There will be a hearing soon."

She gripped the phone even though the conversation had ended minutes ago, holding onto it like the words might change if she kept listening. But they didn’t. He was gone. The weight settled fast. Thick. Suffocating.

“I should have seen this coming.” She should have stopped it, made different choices, warned him harder, walked away sooner. “Maybe then, my son wouldn’t be sitting at the table, waiting for the father who wasn’t coming home.”

In her mind, she had failed them both. The world outside moved forward, indifferent to her unraveling. At daycare pickup, she felt the questions before they were asked, the glances, the hesitant greetings, the unspoken “Do you need anything?” That wasn’t really a question but a confirmation of judgment. She knew how the story was already being written.

"She chose him."

"She ignored the signs."

"Now her son is the one paying the price."

That thought gutted her. She could handle blame, but what about her son? Would his future be a shadow of this moment? The fear took root, tight in her chest, deep in her bones. But beneath it, something else stirred: anger. Was this really her burden to carry alone? Did society hand her the entire weight, expecting her to take responsibility for everything, for every decision he made? Still, logic didn’t quite guilt.

She had no plan for healing, only survival. At first, she resisted the idea of sharing her thoughts. But late at night, after putting her son to bed, she found herself scrolling through forums. Spaces filled with stories like hers. Women who had loved someone who got caught up in the system. Women who wrestled with blame, shame, and survival.

"You think you're the only one carrying this?" one woman wrote. "You're not."

Those words sat with her for days. They gnawed at the edges of her isolation, challenged the narrative she’d been repeating in her mind. She wasn’t alone. And maybe, just maybe, she wasn’t entirely to blame. The first time she said it out loud, it felt foreign.

“I think I blame myself,” she admitted to a woman who had seen the same system take someone she loved. The woman didn’t judge her. Didn’t rush to contradict. She just nodded. “Of course you do. We’re taught to.” That response startled her. As if self-blame wasn’t an innate truth but something handed down, something ingrained.

“You ever get tired?” she asked, her voice quieter than she meant.

“Tired of carrying it alone?” The woman met her gaze. “Yeah. But I stopped letting it own me.”

She let those words sit, let them breathe. Stopped letting it own me.

Her son asked questions. Small ones at first, ones with answers she could tiptoe around. But soon, there were harder ones. One’s she had no perfect response for.

“Mommy, does my Daddy still love me? Is Daddy coming back?”

She could lie. She could stall. But that wouldn’t help either of them. So she answered with honesty, with care, with hope. Not the hollow kind, real hope.

“He loves you,” she told him. “And no matter where he is, that doesn’t change.”