The graduation photo sat on the mantle, mocking me. In it, Maya was beaming, wearing the yellow dress I had helped her pick out. I was standing next to her, my arm around her waist, looking like the proudest mother on earth.
That was three months ago. Today, my phone is a brick of silence.
I met Maya when she was barely out of diapers. She was a toddler with wild curls and a suspicion of strangers. I won her over with patience, goldfish crackers, and endless rounds of “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” I raised his daughter from age 2 to 18.
I was the one who taught her to tie her shoes. I was the one who held her hair back when she had the flu. I was the one she called when she got her first period, and when she got her heart broken for the first time. Her biological mother was out of the picture, a distant memory. To Maya, I was “Mom.”.
Then, the marriage crumbled. My husband, Tom, grew cold and resentful. We agreed to divorce. I was heartbroken, but I told myself that at least I still had Maya. She was an adult now, eighteen years old. Our bond was independent of him. Or so I thought.
The week after I moved out, I called her. Straight to voicemail. I texted. Read 4:00 PM. No reply.
I drove to the house to see her. Tom met me at the door, blocking the entrance like a bouncer.
“Where is she?” I asked. “I need to talk to her.”
“She doesn’t want to talk to you,” Tom said, crossing his arms.
“That’s a lie,” I spat. “She’s my daughter.”
“No,” he smiled, a cruel, thin expression. “She’s my daughter. When we divorced, he told her she didn’t have to speak to me anymore because we weren’t blood“.
I stared at him. He had played the ultimate trump card. He had used his biological leverage to guilt her into cutting me off. He had convinced her that loyalty to her father meant erasing her mother.
“She’s eighteen, Tom. She can choose.”
“And she chose,” he said. “She’s staying with her real family.”
He slammed the door.
I waited for her to rebel. I waited for her to sneak a call. I waited for the girl I raised to realize that love is thicker than DNA.
But the call never came. She stopped calling.
I drove home alone, realizing the sickening reality of my position. I had invested sixteen years of my life, my heart, and my soul into a child. I had built a human being. But because I didn’t share her genetic code, Tom decided he could simply revoke my access.
He didn’t just divorce me; he repo’d the child I raised. He treated her love like a leased vehicle that I had defaulted on, taking her back and leaving me standing on the curb with empty arms and a heart full of memories that legally didn’t belong to me.
