After they took Caleb, I thought that would be the worst of it. I thought the pain of losing my son, of having him ripped out of my life by the very people who were supposed to protect us, was rock bottom. But I was wrong. The true hell wasn’t in the moment they took him—it was in everything that followed. The sleepless nights. The haunting silence. The suffocating, gnawing guilt that sat in my chest, weighing me down day after day, making it impossible to breathe.
There’s a kind of pain that doesn’t just break you. It buries you. And when I lost Caleb, I found myself drowning under the weight of a thousand different emotions. Anger. Betrayal. Helplessness. And then, of course, the question that kept echoing in my mind, like a taunt I couldn’t escape: How could I let this happen?
I spent days—hell, weeks—after it all went down, running that question over and over again in my head, like I was stuck on an endless loop. It didn’t matter how many times I replayed it. It didn’t matter how many scenarios I went over, imagining a different outcome, a different way things could have gone. The truth was always the same. They had tricked me. They had played me for a fool. And I had let them.
I was naïve. Hope and I both were. And that’s what tore me apart the most. It wasn’t just that they took Caleb—it was that they made us believe, even for a second, that we could trust them. That they were there to help. That they gave a single fuck about what was best for Caleb. When the reality was, all they ever wanted was control.
I didn’t get it at first. When they refused to give him back, it was like a slap in the face. I mean, these were people who had adopted me, who had taken me in when I was a kid and told me that family was everything. But here they were, holding my son hostage with impossible demands, setting the bar so high that they knew damn well I would never be able to reach it. Not with the way my life was.
A stable job? A house? A car? At that point in my life, I could barely keep my head above water, much less meet their bullshit conditions. They knew that. They fucking knew it. And that’s why they did it. It was never about Caleb’s well-being. It was about power. About control. About making sure I stayed under their thumb.
But it wasn’t just me who suffered. Hope, as much as I had my own issues with her, was shattered. I mean, how could she not be? Caleb was her son too, and they tore him away from both of us. And yet, instead of bringing us closer together, it destroyed us. We couldn’t even look at each other without seeing the cracks. The weight of our failure, the loss of Caleb—it was too much. So, she left. Went to live with her mom, and I… I went the only place I knew.
I went inward.
I wish I could say I fought harder. I wish I could tell you that I went to war for my son. But after the court sided with them, after the judge, another cog in their Mormon-controlled machine, slammed that gavel down, I knew it was over. It was like someone had cut the strings holding me together, and everything just fell apart. I was a mess of broken pieces, and I didn’t know how to pick any of them up.
That’s when I started making the trips to see Caleb. The first time, I thought it would be a chance to reconnect, to remind him who I was, to show him that no matter what, I was still his father. But they made sure every second of that visit was torture. It was like they were watching me, waiting for me to fuck up. They treated me like a criminal, like I was some kind of threat. Like I was going to steal my own son.
I remember standing outside their house, my heart pounding in my chest, waiting to see him. And when they finally brought him out, it felt like a dagger straight to my soul. He looked at me like I was a stranger. And I guess I was, in a way. He was just a kid. He didn’t know me. How could he? I wasn’t there to put him to bed at night. I wasn’t there to kiss his scraped knees or tell him that everything was going to be okay. Those moments had been stolen from me. And there was no getting them back.
I tried. I swear to God, I fucking tried to make it work. I tried to be the father he needed, but every time I showed up, they were there, lurking in the background, watching, waiting, suffocating any chance I had to just be with him. And slowly, the fight in me started to die.
I stopped visiting. It was too much. Too painful. Every time I saw Caleb, it was like being ripped apart all over again. I knew that as much as I wanted to fight, as much as I wanted to bring him home, I couldn’t. He was theirs now. And even though it killed me, I had to let go. I had to move forward.
But how do you move forward when your heart has been torn out? How do you just… carry on after losing the one thing that mattered most to you? The answer is, you don’t. Not really. You just survive. You wake up every day with this emptiness inside you, this hole that nothing can fill. And you learn to live with it. You learn to carry the weight of that loss, even though it never gets lighter.
The hardest part? Letting go. Not of Caleb—because God knows I never really let go of him—but of the hope. The hope that one day I’d get him back. The hope that one day, we’d have the life we were supposed to have. That’s the part that kills you. The hope is what makes the hurt last. It’s what makes every day after the loss feel like another betrayal.
Eventually, I had to stop hoping. I had to stop dreaming of the “what ifs” and face the reality of what was. And what was… was hell.
I still think about him. I wonder if he remembers me. I wonder if he’ll ever know the truth. But even if he does, even if he finds out one day what really happened, it won’t change the fact that I wasn’t there. I wasn’t there when he needed me most. And that’s a burden I will carry for the rest of my life.
They broke me. They shattered me in ways I didn’t even know were possible. But here I am. Still standing. Still breathing. Still surviving. Because as much as they tried to destroy me, they couldn’t take away the one thing that keeps me going:
I won’t break.
