A letter to Dylan Phillips, published June 20, 2026
By Michael Phillips | Father & Co.
Tomorrow is Father’s Day.
You won’t call. You won’t be at the door. There won’t be a card, or a few hours at a park, or even a FaceTime that lasts longer than ten minutes. There will be nothing — because that is what Christina Avgerinos, your mother, has arranged. Not once. Every year. Since the day you were born.
This is that story. I’m writing it for you, so that when you’re old enough to find it — and you will find it, because it’s public record now — you’ll know exactly what happened, and who decided it.
What Father’s Day is supposed to mean
There’s a court order in Avgerinos v. Phillips, Case No. 168564-FL, Montgomery County Circuit Court. It was filed in Maryland. It has your name in it and mine. It says, among other things, that I am entitled to parenting time with you on Father’s Day, just like all the other holidays.
A court order is what two parents get when they can’t agree on anything themselves. A judge looks at the facts and draws a line. The line is supposed to hold.
For seven years, your mother has treated that line as a suggestion.
The record, year by year
2019.
You were barely a part of this world. You had just arrived. Father’s Day 2019 was my first as your father, and I spent part of it at a brunch with friends from my band — people with their own kids, people who knew me, people who were supposed to be in our lives. You were there. It should have been the kind of day a person remembers well.
What I remember is that your mother was yelling at me nearly every day by that point. Not occasionally. Every day. Every excuse available to her, except the one that might have explained it — that she get evaluated for postpartum depression. That was never on the table.
The friends from that brunch don’t talk to me anymore. I don’t know exactly what she told them. I know the pattern by now: the same campaign she ran on my own family, the same steady work of turning the people around me into people who doubted me. You probably still see some of those friends. Their kids may be people you know. They stopped knowing me because of your mother. I want you to understand that when you’re old enough to ask them about it.
Before any of the court filings, before the motions and the denials and the calendars marked red, I tried every human channel available to me. I reached out to Christina’s family — her parents, her brother. I reached out to her friends. I reached out to my own friends, people who had known us both. I asked for help. I asked someone, anyone, to intervene — to make it possible for me to see my son. I was ignored. Her parents ignored me. Her brother ignored me. Her friends ignored me. My old friends, the ones she had already worked on, ignored me. Not one person stepped in. Not one person picked up the phone and said: let him see his child.
I can’t even remember all their names anymore. It has been that long.
2020.
You were still a baby — born in 2019, not yet walking without holding onto things. Father’s Day that year fell on June 21st. I was living at my parents’ house in Finksburg, Maryland, having been removed from the marital home months earlier after Christina Avgerinos called the police on false accusations. My attorney, Erin Gibson, had to work after hours the night before Father’s Day just to get your mother to agree to allow a visit at all. When I arrived, her mother made me wait in the driveway for an hour before bringing you out to me. I got approximately two hours with you.
What I did not know in full until later — and what the record documents — is that Christina Avgerinos had been actively working on my own family behind my back, feeding them false accounts of who I was and what I had done. I wrote to a family member that day: “Mom and dad paint this picture like I’m a loser crackhead.” I was sitting in my parents’ house, the only place I had to go, a place I was forced to be during the COVID pandemic lockdowns, trying to be your father, inside an environment your mother had spent months quietly corroding. The visit was supervised not by any court order, but by the atmosphere she had built around me — in my own family’s home.
That is what two hours looked like on Father’s Day 2020.
2021.
You were two years old. On May 27th of that year, I sent your mother a message through Our Family Wizard — the co-parenting app the court had us use, so everything would be logged. I asked: “Do I even bother asking about Father’s Day?” She responded by turning my question into a list of new conditions and accusations. Standard. By June 14th, she had messaged that she would not allow the court-ordered weekend visitation or the court-ordered Father’s Day holiday visitation to occur. She offered four hours on Sunday morning — her terms, her window — with a Thursday deadline. If I didn’t confirm by Thursday, she would deny any Father’s Day visit at all.
I took the morning slot. I picked you up at 9 AM on June 20th, 2021. We went to an indoor play center. I took you to California Pizza Kitchen for lunch. You had a cake pop. You passed out afterward. I dropped you off, and she was waiting at the door, demanding to know everywhere we had gone.
Later, at a court hearing, she tried to introduce my credit card receipt from that lunch as evidence I had been drinking. California Pizza Kitchen. Father’s Day. That is the kind of thing that happened.
I wrote to a friend that night: “Seeing my son always reignites my frustrations because it’s always under duress — and he’s such an awesome, fun kid I love to be around.”
2022.
There is no single dramatic incident to report for Father’s Day 2022. What there is, is the record. The in-person visitation calendar for 2022, filed as a court exhibit, shows June marked in red. Red means: denied or caused by Christina Avgerinos. Father’s Day 2022 is red.
The visitation statistics filed in this case tell you what that year looked like in numbers. Out of 39 attempts at court-ordered weekend overnight visits across the tracked period, zero occurred. Not one. Of four court-ordered holiday visit attempts, one occurred — the constrained four hours in 2021 that I described above. Every year had the same structure: I would try to schedule time with you, your mother would find reasons it couldn’t happen, or impose conditions designed to make it not happen, and then the window would close. The calendar would turn red. There was no single door slam. There was just the daily grind of a father trying to reach his son through a wall that never announced itself as a wall. That is what Father’s Day 2022 was. That is what every day that year was.
2023.
The pattern continued. Parenting time that existed in a court order continued not to exist in practice. Montgomery County Circuit Court continued not to intervene in any meaningful way. And instead of a Father’s Day with your father, your mother took you to Greece to be baptized. Without me.
A baptism is not a weekend activity. It is one of the most significant events in a child’s life — a sacrament, a moment that gets photographed and remembered and talked about for decades. Christina Avgerinos planned it, booked the flights, flew you to another country, and had it done. I was not there. I was not asked. The trip is documented in the court record, including a dispute over whether it violated the vacation provisions of our court order. What is not in dispute is that your father was not present at your baptism. That decision belonged to your mother.
2024.
The last time I saw you in person for our time together was January 21, 2024. You were four years old. We had a weekend together, with your dog Otis. On January 23rd, my car broke down while driving home from a hearing at Montgomery County Circuit Court — the brakes failed. On January 24th, I had to notify your mother that I couldn’t drive. By the end of January, I had no car, no income, and a court system that had just denied my motion for relief, with a judge ruling I was voluntarily impoverishing myself. That is something I have never done. I don’t cheat the system. I have always tried to be an honest man and do things the right way.
I want you to understand what I told a friend on January 24th, 2024, the day the visits stopped: “I always want to see my son.”
After that, there were calls. Not many, and not long — but they happened, and I held onto every one of them. You were on the other end of the phone. That counted. Even those stopped, only occurring sporadically. The last being a few months ago.
2025 into 2026.
No visits. And now, no calls.
2026.
Today is Saturday, June 20th. Tomorrow is Father’s Day. You are seven years old. I have not seen you for our court-ordered time together since January 21, 2024. I last saw you at your school in August 2025 for a few minutes. Your mom wouldn’t let us spend time together afterward. The last time I heard your voice was a few months ago. Tomorrow there will be nothing — not a visit, not a call, not a card.
What I am not told
The denied visits are the visible part. There is another part.
I am not informed of your therapy appointments. As of this writing, you have been in therapy since last summer — since approximately the summer of 2025. I did not know this until May 2026. Nearly a year of your life, in which someone has been working with you on something significant enough to require ongoing professional support, and your mother, Christina Avgerinos, did not tell me.
I did not find out from her. I found out because I contacted your pediatrician, Dr. Mechak, directly — because that is what I have to do, reach around the wall she has built, and ask the people who have access to your life for the information I am supposed to receive as your father. Dr. Mechak gave me the name of the therapy office. He did not engage with my concerns. He does not engage with my concerns. He is your doctor and he is documented in this case record and he has never once, in my experience, treated me as a parent whose questions about his child’s wellbeing deserve a real answer.
I do not know what you are working on in therapy. I do not know what prompted it. I do not know what you have said in those sessions about your father, or what you have been told. I find out about things concerning your health and development when I chase them down — through Our Family Wizard messages that go unanswered, through questions that are ignored or deflected, through information that arrives late or not at all. The court order addresses communication. None of it has functioned the way it was written.
In January 2024, your mother threatened to tell your school to restrict my ability to sign up for anything — school events, activities, anything connected to your daily life there. That message is logged. It is the kind of threat that gets made when the goal is not just to limit parenting time, but to limit the entire perimeter of a father’s presence in his child’s world.
I ordered a USB of your holiday concert from your school. Your school billed it to the family account — the only way they could process it. Your mother used that as another point of conflict.
Every piece of information about your life requires effort to obtain. Therapy. School. Medical appointments. Activities. I have to ask. I have to follow up. I have to ask again. And when I do, the asking itself gets characterized as harassment, or pressure, or conflict. That is the design of it. A father who chases every basic fact about his child’s life eventually looks, to an outside observer, like someone causing problems. What he is actually doing is trying to remain a parent.
Dylan, I want you to understand: I did not stop trying to know your life. I was made to work for every piece of it, and then penalized for the asking.
And still — there are things I simply do not know. I don’t know who your friends are. I don’t know what you like to do, or what you’re watching, or whether you’re reading anything. I don’t know where you’ve been. I don’t know your shoe size. I don’t know what clothes fit you. I don’t know what you’ll eat and what you won’t touch anymore. I don’t know much of anything about who you are right now, because none of it comes from your mother. Christina Avgerinos has your whole life, and I have a court order that says I’m supposed to be part of it.
You are seven years old, and you are a stranger to me in ways that should not be possible. That is not something that happened. That is something that was done.
What you’re missing
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t about me.
I know what you’re missing because I knew you. I was there in 2019 when you were born. I tried to be there for you every day since. But someone else had something different in mind.
I was there in 2020, in that house on Jasmine Drive in Rockville, following you room to room while you ran laps with your drumsticks. You used to grab my hat and take off with it, then come back and hold it up to hand it to me. Like a gift. You talked constantly — nothing made sense yet, but you had a lot to say, and I felt like I understood most of it. You had your own language, and I was learning it.
You would toss your food to Otis from the high chair. You’d press the buttons on the tablet toy to hear all the music come out. You had the best belly laugh when I tossed you in the air. You always held your arms out for more.
I had food, and clothes, and toys set aside for you every time I was supposed to have you — and then didn’t. Decorations I put up for holidays we didn’t get to have. Plans I made and then unmade and then made again. I drove to Rockville and sat in the driveway. I showed up because that is what the court order said, and because you were on the other side of the door.
You are missing seven Father’s Days with your father. You are missing 882 days of knowing me as someone who shows up. You are missing Otis. You missed when Benny passed away. You are missing inside jokes we haven’t gotten to make yet. You are missing a father who has fought for you in courts, in filings, in published words, in every legal mechanism available to a man without money in a system that rewards whoever can afford to keep litigating.
I don’t know what sports teams you like. I have been robbed of influencing that — of being the one who puts a jersey on you, or sits with you through a game, or coaches your team on a Saturday morning. My Knicks just won the 2026 NBA Championship. I cried. Not because of the Knicks — because I couldn’t share it with you. The World Cup is happening right now, here in the United States, and I can’t share that with you either. WWE came to Baltimore last week, June 2026, and I thought about you. I couldn’t take you. Same with every time monster trucks come to town.
You probably don’t know that I was born in New Jersey. You probably don’t know your Irish ancestry. You probably don’t know that my grandfather — your great-grandfather — was born and raised in the Bronx, New York. He shaped me. He is the reason I grew up rooting for the Knicks, the Rangers, the Yankees, the Giants. He is also the reason I write. He became a newspaper editor on the Jersey Shore, near where I was born, and somewhere in that — the Bronx, the newsroom, the way he moved through the world — I became someone who believed that documenting things matters. That putting the truth on the record is worth doing even when no one is listening. That is why this letter exists. That is why Father & Co. exists. Your great-grandfather is in these words, whether you know it or not.
Those teams, that instinct to write — they are part of where I come from, which means they are part of where you come from. That is how it works when fathers and sons are allowed to be in each other’s lives. The things a father and grandfather passed to me were supposed to pass through me to you.
I was willing to meet you where you are. I started following the Orioles — your local team, Maryland’s team — so I could take you to games, so we could sit in those seats together and build something that was ours. I miss going to those games. I miss the version of it that should have happened, the one where I am the father in the stands with his kid, where you are learning the game next to me, the way I learned it next to my father.
That was taken from both of us.
You have never seen me play drums. I have never gotten to teach you what I know. There is a version of your childhood where you grow up in a house with music in it, where your father sits down at a kit and shows you something, where maybe you want to learn and maybe you don’t but either way you were there for it. That version was taken from you. Not by accident. By decision.
I don’t know what you like. You don’t know what I love. Christina Avgerinos made sure of that.
Your mother, Christina Avgerinos, made these decisions. She made them in Rockville, Maryland, documented in Our Family Wizard message logs, in court filings, in the exhibits of Avgerinos v. Phillips, Case No. 168564-FL. The record exists. It will always exist. This piece is part of it.
What I want you to know
I am not writing this so you’ll be angry at her. I’m writing it so that when you’re old enough to have questions — and you will have questions — you won’t have to wonder whether your father wanted to be there.
As of tomorrow, June 21, 2026, you will have been alive for 2,639 days. I have wanted to be present for every single one of them. Not just the 882 days since I last saw you. All 2,639. From the day you were born on March 31, 2019, through every Father’s Day documented in this letter, through every denied visit and unanswered message and court hearing and red square on a calendar — every day of your life, I have wanted to be your father.
I am thirty minutes away from you. Not across the country. Not on the other side of the world. Thirty minutes. You and your mother, Christina Avgerinos, live in Rockville, Maryland, in the house I briefly shared with you. I have never been far. The distance between us has never been geography. It has always been her.
Tomorrow is Father’s Day. You won’t call. You won’t be at the door.
I love you, Dylan.
I’ll be here. I have always been here.
Michael Phillips is a journalist, founder of Father & Co., MDBayNews, and Riptide, and the defendant in Avgerinos v. Phillips, Case No. 168564-FL, Montgomery County Circuit Court. The Still Here series documents his ongoing efforts to remain present in his son Dylan’s life. All claims in this piece are sourced to filed court records, Our Family Wizard communication logs, and court exhibits.
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