When the Algorithm Doesn’t Know Your Heart

When the Algorithm Doesn’t Know Your Heart (Edited)

Facebook calls it a “memory,” a cheerful balloon that pops across your day like confetti.

Twelve years ago, it says—here’s something you’ll love.

And there she is.

Two photos, side by side: a little girl in a pink shirt, a careful smile, holding crayon-bright signs. The letters wobble with five-year-old confidence—big arcs, bumpy corners, colors pressed hard enough to shine. She made it for me. It says “Happy Birthday” and “Love.”

The notification is cheerful. My chest isn’t.

There was a time when I still saw her in therapy—fifty-minute windows where a clinician held the room steady enough for us to speak. That time is over. The court system has run its course. There are no more sessions, no more waiting rooms, no more calendars to circle. She is silent now. So are her two sisters. Three daughters, three silences. A house full of voices, all moved out to an address where I’m not listed.

This is what the algorithm doesn’t know when it brightens my screen.

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The Physics of a Punch

There’s a specific kind of pain that settles into estranged parents. It isn’t dramatic. It’s ordinary and relentless—like a dull toothache no dentist can reach. When the “Your memories” panel opens, the body answers first: a tightening across the ribs, a swallow that won’t finish. I think about closing the app. I don’t. I already fell into the picture, and now I’m scrolling a decade-old thread of comments—friends saying how sweet, how fast time flies.

They weren’t wrong. Time flew. It just didn’t carry me with it.

The algorithm assumes a reunion of feeling: you + nostalgia = joy. It doesn’t know about hearings and filings, the dry language of orders, the way “best interests” can become a locked door. It doesn’t know that sometimes love is not permitted an audience.

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After the Minutes

When therapy ended, the silence wasn’t cinematic. No slammed door, no last-speech monologue. Just a calendar that stopped asking anything of me on Tuesday at 3pm. I thought the end would feel like a cliff; it’s closer to a flat horizon. The days keep arriving. The phone doesn’t.

People who haven’t lived this offer what they can: “Don’t give up,” “Kids come back,” “Time heals.” I hope they’re right. I plan as if they might be. But the present tense is still the place I have to breathe, and in the present tense there’s no couch, no clinician, no safe prompt to get the next sentence started. There is only the work of staying the kind of person a daughter might one day want to meet.

I used to measure progress in therapy minutes—eye contact that lingered a beat longer, a drawing she decided to keep. Now I measure something quieter: my capacity to live without news, to hold love without proof, to forgive days that end exactly where they started.

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Ambiguous Loss, Times Three

There’s a name for grief without a funeral: ambiguous loss. It’s the absence of someone who is still alive. It’s grief that can’t get a casserole because there’s no obituary to pin it to. Now, multiply that by three.

Three different childhoods I memorized: three sets of favorite snacks, three bedtime rhythms, three very specific laughs. Three birthdays on a calendar I refuse to delete. Three people who know me as “Dad,” and three doors I can’t knock on.

Ambiguous loss makes liars out of our instincts. The mind says, “If they’re alive, there’s still control.” The truth is smaller and heavier: If they’re alive, there’s still hope—but hope is not control. Hope is a candle. You tend it. You don’t use it as a torch to storm someone else’s life.

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Temptations That Hurt Later

Rage is a loyal animal. It will heel when you call it. Cynicism feels like wisdom you earned the hard way. Blame looks like justice you can hold.

I know those temptations. I draft messages I’ll never send. I win arguments in my head. I imagine Facebook as a courthouse where the photo is Exhibit A: “See? She loved me. Case closed.” But families aren’t cases, and children aren’t evidence. I have to live with the parent I’ll be tomorrow, not just the pain I carry today.

So I do smaller, less satisfying things that actually help:

I breathe. I text one friend who knows the whole story and won’t try to fix it. I go for a walk and let the memory come with me like a stone in my pocket—present, not steering. I write something honest that isn’t cruel. I throw out drafts that are clever and mean. I try to let dignity win arguments I can’t.

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What I Would Tell My Daughters (If There’s a Door Someday)

If the silence ever cracks and we have minutes that aren’t measured by court orders or session timers, here is what I want ready:

I love you. I loved you then. I love you now.

I don’t need you to carry my sadness.

I don’t need you to choose me to fix me.

I want your life to be large, not careful.

If you look back through old posts and wonder where I went, I hope you find proof that I didn’t make a religion out of bitterness. I hope you see that I built a life that could hold your absence without punishing the world for it. I hope you find a ledger in which grace outweighed the debt.

And if the day never comes, I still want these sentences to be true.

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To Other Parents in This Quiet Club

If the app punched you in the softest part of your chest today, I’m sorry. You’re not alone. Here’s what sits on my own small list—revised for after the minutes:

Build beams under the roof. Therapy for you. Friends who know the unabridged version. Work that gives shape to the day. Habits that move your body when your mind is stuck.

Write to remember, not to convince. Letters you may never send. A simple chronology of effort. Notes that remind you you didn’t vanish.

Give the anger one safe place. A journal, a counselor, a walk that ends tired. Don’t put it in the feed. Don’t put it in the kids.

Shrink hope until it’s durable. Not “everything will go back,” but “I’ll be proud of how I waited.” Small hopes have longer legs.

Protect your dignity in public. No subtweets of a life. No courtroom cosplay online. Let the record that matters be the one your future self can bear to read.

Prepare for a knock you may never hear. Keep your home and your heart in a condition that could welcome them. Practice the tone you’d want to use if the phone finally rings.

None of this guarantees a reunion. Nothing does. But it increases the odds that, if a door opens, you’ll walk through it as someone you respect.

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After the Memory

I don’t press “Share.” Some mercies are private. I save the photo to the folder where I keep my quiet liturgy—notes, cards, old drawings, tiny artifacts of a life I love without access. I buy three birthday cards and write three gentle messages with no hooks, just presence. I do the most ordinary acts of faith I know: dishes, laundry, a short walk, a long breath.

This isn’t moving on. It’s moving with.

Twelve years ago, a little girl held up a sign that said love. Today there are three daughters who don’t speak to me. The signs are gone. The word isn’t. I hold it up anyway—unseen, unposted, unrequired.

I’m still here.