"Dad, Mom said it was all your fault."
When Yerin lowered her head at the far end of the dining table, her fifteen-year-old voice still carried the faint scent of milk. Yet that single sentence burst every vein in my body. The illusion that I had endured my wife’s infidelity only for this child.
Mom is smiling—not beside Dad, but beside Uncle.
Throughout the divorce proceedings, Yerin crouched like a small mouse in the corner of the courtroom. The judge asked, “Do you wish to remain with your mother?”
Yerin looked out the window—toward my ex-wife and her man, not toward where I stood—and answered,
“Yes, I want to live with Mom.”
She was my daughter. The child who shared my blood had chosen the other side. From that day on I chewed and swallowed the name Yerin until I could hear my bones crack.
Ten years passed. At twenty-five, Yerin stood beneath the fluorescent lights of an underground parking garage. The cold stench of concrete pricked my nose. Her breath still reached my ears. The keys froze in my palm.
“Dad…”
A hospital diagnosis trembled in her hand. A lump in her breast. Mom had left for overseas with her new family; Uncle—no, that man—had vanished.
“I need… money. For the surgery.”
The car door stayed shut. The child wept. Those tears were the same icy, bitter drops I had shed ten years ago. I wanted to wipe them away with the back of my hand. But my hand refused to move.
This child abandoned me. And that hand may still be stained with my blood.
There was a man, Kim Hyun-su, fifty-two.
On his way home from work he received a call from his daughter Min-seo, the child who had sided with the wife who had left him. Now, she said, her husband beat her.
“If only you had taken me with you back then…”
Hyun-su hung up. The next day he went to the hospital billing office, asking if he could pay Min-seo’s medical fees.
The clerk asked, “According to the family register, she isn’t listed as your daughter.”
“Still… she’s flesh of my flesh.”
Those were the exact words Min-seo had used ten years earlier: Dad, she’s flesh of my flesh. I have to take Mom’s side.
Jealousy and pity are twins. The betrayed parent harbors two desires toward the child: May you suffer, and Return to my arms.
The psychologist Alice Miller wrote, “Parents never forget a child’s betrayal, yet the child never forgets that betrayal either.”
We devour one another. Blood, flesh, bone. Then again: blood, flesh, bone.
Tonight you set your phone down and stare out the window. You imagine your child running to you in tears—will you take that hand, or turn away in cold silence, or take it only to bite down once more?