I have never attempted to make her dislike her father.
That relationship belongs to her.
She will come to understand him in her own time.
What I can control is what she sees whenever she looks at me.
She sees a mother who says no when she means no.
A mother who speaks.
A mother who takes up space.
And I can already recognize some of that in Sophie.
When another child takes something away from her at the playground, she speaks up.
When she doesn’t want something, she says it clearly.
She doesn’t apologize for existing loudly.
That matters more to me than anything else.
Sometimes, I still think about that phone call.
Ninety seconds.
That was all it required.
Ninety seconds of hearing the truth from a man who believed I wasn’t listening.
For a long time, I believed it was the worst moment of my life.
Now I understand it differently.
The phone didn’t cause the betrayal.
The betrayal was already there.
The phone simply took away my blindness.
Without that moment, I might have spent years continuing to make myself smaller.
Trying harder.
Making excuses.
Believing that if I became easy enough to love, Elon would eventually turn into the husband I wanted him to be.
