“You can’t protect your kids from life, because life gets us all in the end.”

— Fredrik Backman, Anxious People

Lately, I’ve been thinking about a question my daughter hasn’t asked yet. I imagine it will be something like:

Where is my dad?

She’s only ten months old, so for now, there is no absence to explain.

Her world is perfectly whole. Made up entirely of people who have always been in it.

People who know her and love her as fiercely as I do.

But ten months is still long enough to see your baby start to become a little person.

I expected to love her. I had no idea how much I would enjoy getting to know her.

Every day, she gives me something new to marvel at.

Lately, I’ve found myself increasingly aware of how much of her there is to miss.

Sometimes to a fault, I am someone who likes to plan ahead. And the more time I spend with my nieces and nephews, the more I learn that kids need a lot of answers.

I started searching, reading and trying to understand how you explain an absent parent to a curious kid.

What you say when they are two or three. What they begin to understand at five or six.

How the questions become more layered as they get older.

Him and I were strangers, mostly. Certainly not together long enough to build anything real. I didn’t expect a pregnancy to change that.

When I decided to have her, I knew I was making that decision on my own.

That’s why his absence never felt like a loss to me.

But I have always known that eventually, it might feel like one to her.

Someday, as her world expands, she may notice that other kids have dads around.

It will be natural for her to wonder about hers.

And that part I can answer.

I can explain the circumstances. I can give her the truth in whatever way she is old enough to understand.

The more challenging question will be why.

Why isn’t he here?

That one is harder. Because how do you explain to a child that his decision, at the time, was not really about her?

I can make sure she never has to look around at the life we’ve built and question her place in it.

I can try to help her understand that his choice had more to do with him, than it did with us.

But I can’t say whether that will make it hurt any less.

I think, sometimes, our choices have bidirectional consequences.

Recently, I’ve found myself feeling sad for him, too.

I don’t like to admit that because it’s easy to mistake sympathy for absolution. I don’t necessarily mean it that way.

But I don’t really blame him, either.

He made his decision. I made mine. Mine gave me her.

And now I am raising this amazing little person, who inherited pieces of people she may never meet.

There is something profoundly sad about that.

For him, certainly. But also for his family.

I don’t know what they know or if they’ve even been told anything. To be completely honest, I don’t think he ever gave it a second thought.

All I know for sure is how much those people are missing.

Sometimes I look at her and see him. Her eyes. Her laugh. That disarming, wide-open smile that pulls strangers right into her orbit.

She is fearless and outgoing in a way that reminds me of him, too.

That’s just genetics, of course. But motherhood has a way of widening the frame.

Maybe one day she will want to find him.

Maybe not.

Maybe he will come around before she ever has to ask.

Maybe he won’t.

Either way, we’ll carry on.

Perhaps absence works the same way in reverse.

Years pass. The baby becomes a toddler. The toddler becomes a child. The child becomes a person with her own preferences, personality and stories you weren’t around to hear.

Life keeps moving.

Eventually, the thing you walked away from is no longer an abstract responsibility you avoided—it’s a whole human being.

I know now how quickly ten months fly by when they’re so full of ‘firsts.’

I know the uneventful days are just as precious as the unforgettable ones.

And I know that while he hasn’t played a role, she has been happening anyway.

Someday, the tricky questions may come.

I will answer them honestly without making him a monster when they do.

Until then, my mission is to give her a life grounded in love and to accept that I can’t keep this world from hurting her anyway.