[Blarg]

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Am I doomed to be the dad that "left us when I was two..."? Do all kids grow up to view the parent who left as the abandoner?

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Unfortunately, unless the mother is motivated not to, she can fill her kid's head with whatever poison she wants to. She can also throw away your letters, etc. If she moves away, your kid will never have a real chance to balance it out by seeing you frequently in person. If you move away for job or whatever reasons, ditto. Your best ally in this regard is maintaining a good relationship with the mom, whether you want to or not.

A friend of mine had this problem. He never put his kid's mother down, despite the fact that she was pretty loony and liked to make vicious character assassinations against him to his kid. His kid would ask him about this kind of thing sometimes, and he would say, I don't want to be negative regarding your mom, but you can see for yourself how things are, whether I'm doing and saying these terrible things or not. And you can make your own judgments from there. He gave his kid trust, and respected his kid's intelligence. He tried hard never to descend to the level his ex-wife did, and never to use his kid as a pawn in a revenge scheme. I knew the kid myself, met him many times. Great kid. The kid grew up valuing and admiring his dad's unwillingness to drag everything into the dirt like his mom constantly tried to.

Key to this, too, was that his dad really loved it and showed it, and spent a lot of time with his son. His son had that constant positive reinforcement from his dad to help balance out the negativity and negative propaganda he got from his mom. Without spending that time over many years with his apparently perfectly reasonable and loving dad, who knows what he might have eventually have been led to think about him by his angry, loopy mother.