My dad never expected to become a father at seventeen. Especially not the night before his high school graduation.
According to the story he shared with me my entire life, he was returning home from a late-night shift when he noticed something unusual propped against the fence outside his house. It was his old bicycle. And sitting right there in the wire basket up front was a tiny, sleeping infant.
Me.
A single note was tucked neatly beneath the blanket. Just two sentences: “She’s yours. I can’t do this.”
That was the first and final time anyone ever heard from the woman who gave birth to me. My dad hadn’t even realized she was pregnant. But the following morning, he walked into his high school graduation ceremony carrying his cap and gown in one hand and a three-month-old baby in the other, cradling her as if she might break if he so much as breathed too hard. We still have a framed photograph of that day hanging proudly in our living room—a terrified, exhausted teenage boy in a graduation cap looking down at me with absolute awe.
