Adventures in Baby-Having

A while back, my friend Lime blogged about the birth of one of her daughters, by C-section, without benefit of anesthesia, while the power faded in and out at the hospital she was in. I can't top that, but it got me to thinking about some of the childbirth stories we've gathered, over the years. . .

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As you might imagine, in the course of bringing eight children into the world, Molly and I have gathered a rather considerable collection of childbirth stories. I am assuming that virtually all mothers have, at one time or another, been involved in a Childbirth Story Swap-Meet; I know that many of you positively relish those. And most fathers, especially in this enlightened age in which the father is most likely to be the mother's 'labor coach', have had their own opportunities to participate in them, as well.

It can become difficult for me, having been through eight of them, to keep all of the details sorted out, especially for the younger kids, but I do remember a few of them, which I'll now endeavor to share with you. Not that you asked, or anything. . .

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The first time Molly was pregnant, it was, as you might imagine, very exciting for both of us. And me, having been adopted, this was like my initiation into the 'normal way' of bringing children into the family.

We marked all of the 'firsts' - first time Molly felt the baby kick, first time I felt the baby kick, figuring out how to identify the various parts of the baby's body through the walls of Molly's belly, playing all the little 'push-and-push-back' games with the baby, picking names (a boy's name and a girl's) etc, etc. We had a lot of fun.

As we approached her due date, the excitement increased accordingly. There was false labor, and all the other things that subtly (or not-so-subtly) let us know that it wouldn't be long. One Thursday night, we headed off to bed. I was just drifting off to slumber-land, when suddenly Molly sucked her breath in sharply. I jolted awake, still not quite alert to the world. "What was that?" I asked.

"I think it was a contraction."

Oh, boy. Well, let's just see how things develop. Nothing happened for fifteen minutes or so, and I drifted off to sleep again, until another sharp intake of breath from the other side of the bed jarred me awake again.

"That was another one."

Hmmmm. . . this was getting interesting. And from there, the contractions started coming every ten minutes or so. Which meant that we had a cycle of drifting off to sleep and jolting awake. Finally, Molly got out of bed and called the hospital, and they told her not to come in until the contractions were every five minutes. So she got out of bed, checked the contents of the suitcase she'd packed, and generally engaged in nesting-type behaviors, while I contemplated the backs of my eyelids, and marshalled my energy for the events of the next day.

About 5AM, Molly awakened me, telling me that the contractions had been every five minutes for the last hour or so, and we should probably go to the hospital.

Now, in 1982, the concept of Dad-as-labor-coach was still fairly new. Some of our friends had done it, but it wasn't quite the 'default setting' that it was to become. I was game to give it a shot, but Molly was very clear with me that she wanted no part of any guy helping her have babies. "You don't have the parts, you don't know what to do," she told me. She asked a friend of hers, an older woman who'd had four kids of her own, to be her coach. And I was fine with that. I only asked that I be present for the actual birth, if possible, and Molly agreed to that.

So, she called her coach, and we headed off to the hospital. Once we got there, Molly headed off to the birthing room, while I went to chill in the waiting room. At one point, the doctor popped in on me, just to let me know that things were going well, and that he'd send one of the nurses down with some scrubs for me, when it was getting close.

It was a couple hours later that the nurse came in and tossed me a stack of scrubs to put on. Which I did, and sauntered down the hall to the birthing room. When I stepped through the door, Molly, in the throes of labor, looked at me.

"Um, honey. . . you need to leave." She didn't quite say, "YOU did this to me!" but I'm pretty sure it was in there. The nurse explained that she had just given me the scrubs to put on; it was still a bit before the actual birth, and why didn't I just go back to the waiting room, and somebody would come for me when it was time. So I did.

It wasn't really very long before the next knock came on the waiting room door, and I hustled back down to the birthing room. By this time, Molly was too deeply into the task of ejecting this baby from her body to much notice my presence. The doctor waved me over to look over his shoulder; I could see the hair on the top of our baby's head, and a little more with each push. At one point, the doctor, in an effort to relieve the pressure on Molly's pelvic floor, pushed the baby back just a bit. "You're not pushing it back IN!" Molly shrieked. And the doc used his best bedside-manner voice to assure her that no, he wanted the baby to come out just as much as she did.

The baby's outward progress sort-of stalled for a few minutes, so the doc decided to do an episiotomy. He grabbed his scalpel, and traced a preliminary cut-line, leaving a small line of blood as he did so. Instantly, the thought flashed through my mind, "HEY! You're cutting my wife!" But within seconds, the head was out, and there was a sudden flurry of activity, as the doctor began suctioning out all the openings in the baby's head. Then PLOOP! Out popped our baby girl. Along with a whole mess of blood and amniotic fluid, and placenta, and who knew what else. The doc cut and clipped the umbilical cord, and laid the baby on Molly's breast. "Oh, 1F, it's you! You're born!" Molly cried.

The nurses wiped 1F off, and laid her under a heat lamp while they checked her vital signs, and all that, and she started to look more like a human, and less like a bluish rubber doll.

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A couple days later, we brought 1F home for the first time. Molly and I both had twinges of, "Holy shit! We're the parents now! We don't know anything about being parents!"

And for me, being adopted, there was a special, unique sense of awe at 1F's birth - this baby girl was the first person I had ever known who was genetically related to me. . .

In the fullness of time, we did (mostly) figure out the whole 'parenting thing'. At least, 1F has survived to the present day, past her 27th birthday. And we had seven other children, besides. . .

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This post has gotten longer than I intended; I suppose I should probably do another installment, with some of the other stories. . .

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We'll be gone all next week. It's our community's annual kids' summer camp, and I'm back for a reprise of my role as camp clown music director. This year, Molly is actually on the staff, looking after the young children of some of the other staff (which also means we'll probably be able to share sleeping quarters; so for the first time, summer camp might not be a 'celibate' experience). 7M is our family's only camper, but 2F, 4M and 5M are also on staff, and 8M is coming as a 'tagalong', with Molly's group of younger kids. So our family will be well-represented. But as far as blogging goes, I'll see you all in a week or so. . .

Cycling In the Moonlight

My recent cycling post reminded me of another story from the Jones Family Archives. . .

Way back in 1984, when 1F was a two-year-old only-child, Molly and I took her on the PALM ride (Pedal Across Lower Michigan; ie, across the ‘palm of the mitten’, ‘cuz Michigan is shaped like a mitten, get it?), along with a few other couple-friends of ours. PALM is a six-day ride, crossing the Lower Peninsula from shore-to-shore, west to east. With the shorter distances involved, PALM bills itself as a more family-friendly version of more rigorous tours like DALMAC; many parents brought their small children along for the fun, and a few 8-10-year-olds even rode the tour themselves. So I put one of those plastic kid-seats on the back of my bike, and off we went.

And we really did have a good time. The three of us shared a week of life on a somewhat more ‘elemental’ level, with nothing but our own legs to propel us down the road, and sharing a tent together at the overnight campsites.

Of course, strapping a two-year-old into a plastic seat on the back of her dad’s bike for four hours or so, every day for a week, has its own set of challenges, in terms of her attention span, and her willingness to sit semi-still for such long intervals. We planned to take short breaks every hour or so, to let 1F run around a bit before getting back on the bike. And, with some regularity, there were interesting sights to be seen just in the course of rolling down the road. I recall stopping by a turkey farm once (the birds were so fat they could barely stand up), and getting passed by an Amish buggy at another point (note to my readers: many Amish really, really resent being taken for ‘curiosities’ by the ‘outside world’, and attempts to take their photograph can induce a pretty surly response, which may or may not include threatening to run your bicycle into the ditch with their horse).

Molly had recently taught 1F a cute little ‘waking-up-in-the-morning’ ditty, which became a daily staple of our first few miles on the road:

When cows get up in the mor-ning, they always say ‘Good Day’.
When cows get up in the mor-ning, they always say ‘Good Day’.
They say, “Moo, moo, moo, moo,” that is what they say.
They say, “Moo, moo, moo, moo,” that is what they say.

And so on, through a whole barnyard-full (or ark-full, as the case may be) of various animals, and how they all say ‘Good Day’ when they get up in the morning. By the end of the week, I’d heard about all I cared to about animals and the sounds they make in the morning. And I’m hopeful that most of my fellow-riders on that tour have either forgotten about it, or found it in their hearts to forgive us. . .

But, our best efforts aside, sometimes boredom set in for our beloved first-born. Seated as she was on a seat over my rear wheel, the things which were most immediately presented to her senses were things pertaining to my backside. Like my pockets, for one example (I was wearing ‘cycling gear’, where the shorts are those nifty black lycra things, and the pockets are in the back of my shirt). One time, Molly just happened to notice 1F pull my wallet out of my pocket, inspect its contents for a minute or two, and toss it in the roadside weeds, or I might have ended up washing dishes to pay for our lunch.

Another time, as I was pedaling along, 1F grabbed the waistband of my lycra shorts and pulled. Pants-ing me in the process. And putting my, uh, reciprocating moons on display for the benefit of all my fellow-riders in the immediate vicinity (it would be gratuitous, I’m sure, to describe said moons as ‘hairy’, so I won’t). Molly corrected her sternly for that, you can be sure. Altho, I gotta say, some of the effect of ‘stern’ is lost when you’re trying to stifle a belly laugh, and snot is blowing out your nose. . .

But, as I say, we had a great time. We finished the week, and marked it up as a really cool family vacation. And within a couple months, Molly was pregnant with 2F, and the family dynamic never really meshed with the idea of doing PALM again.

Which is probably just as well, for modesty’s sake, knowwhatImean?

Here, Girl!

All new parents go through a kind of 'break-in' period, during which they slowly figure out the real ways in which being parents is different from how they were before. For Molly and me, this lasted quite a while - even past 1F's first birthday, we were still discovering unanticipated ways in which our lives would never be the same.

Once, the three of us went out to dinner at a restaurant which the childless Molly and me would have counted very 'family friendly', and in fairness, it probably was, as long as none of the children were younger than five or so. 1F was about a year old on the evening in question, though, and by the time we finished our dinner, there was a circle about five feet in diameter, centered on 1F's high chair, littered with an assortment of food fragments, torn napkins, pieces of silverware, and other miscellaneous items. I left a very large tip, and we realized that taking 1F to a 'nice' restaurant with us was not going to be a live option for a while.

I've always been a bit of a gadget buff, but I really like gadgets that have a certain simplicity about them, and Kid-world is rife with elegantly simple, practical gadgets. When 1F was a baby, the little seats that you can sort of hang off the edge of the table were new, and we got one of those right away. Suddenly, we could eat at friends' houses, or church potlucks, or at a picnic table in a park, without having to pack a full-blown high chair with us. A very cool, simple contraption.

Around the same time, we met a couple who were visiting from Germany, whose daughter was just a bit older than 1F. They had a little leather harness that they put on their daughter when they took her to a crowded public place; they would clip a short tether to the harness, and they could keep the child close to them, without all the bad posture that goes along with holding her hand, to say nothing of the struggles that invariably occur when the child in question decides that she doesn't want to have her hand held anymore.

I loved it - so elegant, so simple, so practical. And all the moreso, because the child actually had a lot more freedom of movement - a lot more freedom to go where she wanted to, within a much larger radius, than she would if her hand were being held. We were so taken by this little item that we asked our German friends to send us one, since they hadn't appeared in the US market yet.

A few weeks later, we received a package in the mail from a German address. We opened it eagerly, and put it to use at our first opportunity. It worked really well, and we were pleased - 1F could roam about more freely, engage her curiosity more freely, and we hardly had to exert any effort to keep track of her. In fact, we were so taken with it that we decided to make a modest improvement - in place of the short tether, we used a 25-foot retractable leash, so 1F could have even more freedom of movement.

The Fourth of July was coming up soon, and the harness setup seemed perfect for such an occasion - a large crowd in an open public place. 1F could wander to her heart's content within a 25-foot radius, and, as long as we kept hold of the leash, Molly and I didn't need to worry about where she was.

Our first inkling that this would work out just a bit less than perfectly came as we walked into the park. We were walking alongside another young family like us, with the toddler being carried on his father's shoulders. They were looking intently at the harness/leash setup we had 1F in. I smiled, knowing that they were appreciating the ingenuity, the elegance, the simplicity, the practicality of it, and preparing to tell them how we had friends in Germany, and this was all the rage among European parents, and how they could get one for themselves. Instead, the dad sort of sneered and said, "Kind of a sick joke, man."

What?!? Sick joke? What the heck does he mean by that? Ah, well; obviously a philistine who doesn't appreciate ingenious gadgets when he sees them. We found a spot suitable to our liking to settle at, and we spread our blanket. Molly and I sat down on the blanket, while 1F wandered around on the end of the leash. When she reached the limit, she would just turn around, and poke around in a different direction, checking for bugs in the grass, or whatever else captured her eye. We were enjoying ourselves immensely, just watching her exploring her expansive little piece of turf.

While we were sitting there, a woman approached us to talk. I smiled in friendly greeting, but she immediately ripped into us. "How could you?!" she shrieked. What the hell? "Treating your child like an animal!"

No, wait, you don't understand - see, she's so much more free to roam about. . .
But the woman would have none of it. See, this was a leash, and leashes are for dogs, and that was that. At the very best, in her mind, this was an inappropriate transfer of technology; at worst, it was slam-dunk evidence of depraved child abuse. And nothing I could say would dissuade her.

Before the night was over, and all the fireworks had flashed, two or three other folks wandered by to very helpfully read us the riot act and call us colorful names.

We were more circumspect about taking the harness out in public after that, and we eventually decided that the elegance, simplicity, and practicality didn't quite outweigh the grief we had to endure from well-meaning idiots fellow-citizens.

So you see, a thing can be wonderfully practical, elegantly designed, and a vast improvement on the existing technology. But, if you don't take account of public reaction, you can still wind up with a marketplace failure. . .

(13 comments)

I've Looked at Adoption From Both Sides Now

Today I’m going to post a couple of shorter items that sort of coalesce around a theme of Adoption. . .

A couple weeks ago was the 17th anniversary of my reunion with my birth-mother. She called on the phone, just as she did 17 years ago, and we had a really warm conversation.

Once I decided to search for her, years ago, the actual search went surprisingly quickly. I had my birth name, from the adoption order my parents got from the court way back when (and which they were happy to give me). I contacted the agency that had handled my adoption, and they gave me a sheet of ‘non-identifying’ information (things like her parents’ and siblings ages at the time I was born, hair/eye color, what county the family had lived in, etc.). That basic information gave me enough to go on, and in two months’ time, I had found her.

I didn’t have the slightest idea if she would even want to hear from me, so I arranged for an intermediary to make the first contact – if she didn’t want to have contact with me, I wanted her to be able to say so without having contact with me in the process. But of course, she did want to have contact with me, and rather than wait for me to call her, she called me first. And the rest, as they say, is history.

About a month later, I flew off to meet her (she lives in a completely different part of the country from us, one that I would likely never visit if she weren't there), and since then, she has come for annual visits to our place.

I want to say something about ‘why’ – what motivated me to search? First, let me be as clear as I can possibly be that it was in no way related to any dissatisfaction with my adoptive family – our family wasn’t perfect, but it was ‘plenty good enough’. My parents did very well with some fairly challenging circumstances, and I feel nothing but love and gratitude toward them.

Mainly, I wanted something that they simply didn’t have to give me – my beginnings. I knew the history of our family, I knew I was adopted, but certain ‘big questions’ – where did I come from; who do I look like? – they simply couldn’t help me with. My knowledge of my life went back to the point at which I was adopted, but before that was a blank page. And on top of that, I was having children of my own – 1F was the first person I ever knew who was genetically related to me, and as I saw different characteristics of hers that had obviously ‘come from’ me, I wondered who I had gotten those things from.

Anyway, it’s been 17 years now. At first, our relationship was very emotional, very intense, but it’s long since settled down to a pretty ‘normal’ family relationship – kind of like an extra set of in-laws. But I’ve been surprised at the sense of solidity that it’s given me – what someone called ‘a sense of being rooted to the earth’. There’s a richness that I didn’t quite anticipate – and which I’m sure most people don’t even think about – in just being able to know where I came from.

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Also a couple weeks ago, 1F and Molly and I went for a visit with 1F’s daughter (I’ll call her AG) and her adoptive parents (call them AM and AF). 1F has gone for several visits by herself, but this was the first time that Molly and I had seen her since the day she was born.

It was a nice visit. It was good to get a look at our grand-baby, now 9 months old, crawling and pulling herself up, and assure ourselves that our gene-pool is doing OK. I was actually more fascinated than I had expected to be, just watching her move around and play.

Her parents are great people, and it was good to spend some time getting to know them a little bit. It would be very understandable for them to have some anxiety about AG’s relationship with her birth-family, but if they had it, they didn’t show it to us. And for our part, we are absolutely clear that they are AG’s parents; we know that we don’t have any claim on her, and we’re grateful to them for letting us have such relationship with her as we can.

It’s a new kind of thing for us – I never had a relationship with my birth-family until I was 33 years old, and my adoptive family never had to have anything to do with it, so we’re breaking some new ground here. But we’re committed to making it work, and so far, we’re as happy as we can be with how it’s going.

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*edit October 13*

O272 and Emily had questions from the above post, and I want to answer them here, since they're really good questions and require more comprehensive answers than I wanted to leave in comment-space.

O asked: How did [1F] deal with putting her child up for adoption? It had to be a very difficult decision.

In a related vein, Emily asked: Was there a specific reason that [1F] didn't want to raise the baby herself?

From what I know of her decision process, her decision was both easy and wrenchingly difficult. Easy in the sense that, looking at her own life and circumstances, she simply didn't have the wherewithal to raise a baby, and she was clear on that virtually from the moment she knew she was pregnant. She didn't have a job, let alone one that would provide support for herself and a baby, and she hated the idea of making herself and the baby 'wards of the state' on welfare. She wanted to go back to college, but she needed time and money to do that, both of which would militate against her raising a baby. Her psychological state was (and really, still is) more fragile than a single mother's would need to be. But most fundamentally, she wanted her baby to have a family, and that would never be the case if she raised the baby herself.

The baby's father . . . how shall I say it . . . was a shithead and a loser of the first order. He essentially dropped her as soon as he found out she was pregnant, and after that, his entire role was to try to obstruct the adoption, so as to maintain some form of lasting 'control' in her life (it was not terribly unlike a dog pissing on a tree to 'mark' it as 'his turf'). He showed up at the adoption hearings with his new girlfriend in tow, herself now several months pregnant. Wonderful fellow, this guy. . .

In the context of giving a child up for adoption, nine months gestation can seem terribly cruel. She made her decision for all the right reasons, and really, pretty early on. But all the little signposts that are usually markers of impending joy - the first time she felt the baby kick, the first ultrasound picture, etc - were, for her, markers of impending sadness. She could have the greatest confidence in the decision she had made, and the firmest resolve to see it through, but the day-to-day reality of being pregnant ran smack against what her rational mind was telling her. On a very basic level, which for all intents and purposes she had no control over, she was bonding with her baby, whether she would end up raising her or not. And that was the wrenchingly hard part.

Childbirth was poignant, as you might expect. There was great joy at the arrival of a healthy baby girl, at finally being able to see and hold this little person who came from her. The adoptive parents were present for the birth (AM cut the cord), and their joy was very gratifying. If this was a difficult time for 1F, the pain was mitigated by the knowledge that something wonderfully good - a family was getting a daughter, and her baby was getting a family - was coming of it.

Emily asked about 1F's, and Molly's and my, relationships with the adoptive parents, and how they were 'chosen'.

1F chose the adoptive parents, although, for the adoption to be finalized, they had to be evaluated and approved by the agency which handled the adoption, and ultimately, by the court. She wanted her baby to be raised in a Christian community like the one she had been raised in, but she didn't really want her baby to be the same town as she lived in. So we made some inquiries among several other communities in the US, related to ours, and found a young couple in a community near ours (but not too near) who were childless after seven years of marriage. They were loose acquaintances of ours; although I couldn't say that we really knew them, we knew who they were.

The 'open' adoption arrangement that 1F has with AG's parents is purely informal - there are no legally binding 'agreements' in force. If the parents decided tomorrow that the arrangement wasn't working out and they wanted no further contact with 1F or with us, they would be within their rights, and we would have no legal recourse. That's just the rules of the game, and we all knew it going in.

But, as I said, they are good and gracious people, and, at least so far, they are happy to include us in the life of their daughter. And, as I said previously, we are completely clear that, in every meaningful way, they are her parents, and we are grateful to be included.

As an interesting aside, within a month of AG coming to live with them, AM was pregnant, and that baby is now due any day. . .

Emily was also impressed that Molly and I, as the 'birth-grandparents' are included in the 'open' arrangement. I actually hadn't thought of it as all that unusual, but I suppose it might be. I can say that, of all that has come into my own life as a result of being reunited with my birth-mother, the relationships we've formed with my extended 'birth-family' have been the most surprising. My own grandmother was sick and scant months from death when I appeared on the scene, but her reception of me was incredibly heart-warming; it hadn't occurred to me that other members of my 'birth-family' would have been all that strongly affected.

There is a kind of 'kinship' that is almost 'built-into' us genetically. I've been amazed, as I've met my own biological aunts and uncles and cousins for the first time, at the way that we're 'like each other' in some innate, undefinable way. With my adoptive family, there were differences that would crop up from time to time, and we mainly dealt with them with good humor. But with my 'birth-family' it was almost the opposite - we would discover unanticipated ways in which we were like each other, or just understood each other in some intuitive way.

So, ladies, I hope that this gives a helpful answer to your questions, or at least helps you understand the situation a little better. . .

(7/4 comments)

This Week On 'All My Children'

Things with us are actually in a relatively peaceful state, right at the moment. 1F is through with all the court haggling - her baby's adoption is final, and her relationship with the adoptive parents is working out pretty well. She's working, and this fall she's back in school, studying speech pathology. So her life is in as good a place as it's been in a long, long time. It’s a little hard being a 24-year-old college freshman – all her age-peers have long since graduated and gotten on with their lives – but that’s a pretty minor complaint, compared to where she’s been.

2F is still doing well – she’s one or two classes away from getting her initial ‘professional’ certification, which will allow her to make more of a real living for herself. She moved out of our basement ‘apartment’, and in with some single women from our Christian community. When she completes her certification, she’s giving serious thought to doing a year of voluntary missionary work.

Even with 3M, things aren't as bad as they've been. He's starting to see the fruit of the crap he's been throwing around for the last several years, and starting to think that he needs to take a different approach. He actually told Molly recently that he wants to start turning his life around. Of course, we're all in favor of that, and we want to encourage him to do that. But he's spent years forming bad habits that he's going to need to break if he really wants to turn his life around. It won't be easy, and we told him that. But at least the need is recognized, and the desire is there.

In other ways, he’s sort of floundering right at the moment. He can't seem to find a job, but he bought himself a beater van. But he's got no money to put gas in it, so he leaves it parked on the street in front of our house. . . . At any rate, he's only got a month or so to go before his life starts running according to somebody else's script for a while.

4M is back in school for his sophomore year in high school. His date with the magistrate in August went as well as it possibly could have – all the charges against him were dropped, since he’s got no prior record, he’s a good student, and an otherwise upstanding citizen. He’s got ‘points’ against him just sitting there, waiting for him to get a driver’s license, but he’s in no hurry for that right now (and neither are we, given what his insurance rates would likely be). He seems to have been chastened by the whole experience. That would be a good thing. We keep getting flashes of hot-headed defiance from him that we’d rather do without, but some (most?) of that falls under the heading of ‘teenaged male’.

The younger kids are pretty much status quo, at least per this previous post. Growing in wisdom and stature, and all that. But we’ll see what adventures they’ve got stored up for us, when the time comes. . .

(6comments)

The Apple of My Eye

Our oldest daughter, 1F, was very much the 'perfect kid' growing up - trustworthy, helpful, loyal, thrifty, brave, clean, reverent, and all the rest. She was a sweet kid, and as the kids kept coming along, she became sort of Molly's 'junior mom'.

We didn't allow our kids to date in high school. 1F mainly didn't fight us over that, but she wasn't terribly appreciative of it, either. During her junior year of high school, she had a 'boyfriend' more-or-less clandestinely, and when Molly found out about it, 1F continued with the relationship until the boy got tired of the drama and moved on.

1F graduated from high school in 2001, and took a year off before starting college. She got a job bussing tables at the local convention center, and moved out of our house, into a household of single women all belonging to our Christian community.

Late in the summer of 2002, about a month before she left for college, she started telling us about this guy she'd met at work, who was so charming, and paid such flattering attention to her. Molly and I were very uneasy about it, but we didn't have any real basis for saying anything much more definite than "be careful". Then she told us how she went out with him for a drink after work, after which he took her to a motel, "and stuck his tongue in my ear." OK, that set the alarm bells ringing!

She was completely out of her league with this guy, and I told her that she had no idea what she was dealing with, and she should run, not walk, to the nearest exit. But she couldn't bring herself to believe what we were telling her. Yeah, he might have 'issues', but they were because of his rotten parents or his rough upbringing. He was just basically a nice guy, who most people misunderstood (she really said that!), and she just soaked up the snake-oil he was pushing.

We consoled ourselves with the knowledge that she'd be going away to college that fall, and that would be that. But, it turned out that her two roommates were both borderline head cases, so she spent most of the fall immersed in roommate-drama, in addition to the pressure of college-level studies for the first time. And how did she deal with the stress? By calling her 'friend' (I'll call him 'F-bomb'), pouring out her anxieties to him over the phone.

One day in October, she just left - walked away from school without a trace. For two days, no-one had any idea where she was. We finally found her back in town, working at her old job at the convention center. Where F-bomb was. We convinced her to move back home, helped her finalize the administrative details of quitting school, and tried to help her come down from the stress she'd been under.

And she started seeing F-bomb again. We'd never met the guy, so we asked a few questions. How old was he? About 32, she said. A big red flag, since she was only 20. Her behavior became more and more outrageous - she'd go out on dates with him, and not come home until 5AM. When we confronted her on that, and the bad effect it had on the life of the rest of the family, the bad example to her siblings, etc, she just said, "Fine - I'll move out." So she did - and moved in with F-bomb, two weeks before Christmas.

After that, we barely heard from her over the next few months. She wouldn't tell us her address or phone number, so the only way we could contact her was for Molly to go to her place of work, and in due course, she quit that job, so we couldn't contact her at all; we could only wait for her to contact us.

It became pretty clear that F-bomb was playing her like a puppet. She systematically cut off all of her closest friends, including her best friend since they were both in diapers. One woman, a family friend who had been something of a mentor to 1F, tried to talk to her, and 1F threatened her with a restraining order.

1F had a credit card, and he rang her up for $10,000 and a used SUV, ruining her credit in the process.

Also, it turned out F-bomb wasn't 32 - he was two years younger than I was. He had an ex-wife and two kids, who were in high school with our other kids. One day, his son grabbed 3M in the hall and said, "My dad is dating your sister; how weird is that?"

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Over the course of the next three years, she left him and went back to him more times than we could keep track of. One time after they'd fought, she was wandering alone in his neighborhood at 3AM (probably the worst neighborhood to be found in our town), and was attacked and raped. To this day, nobody has any idea who did it to her, but she was left lying unconscious on the sidewalk across the street from F-bomb's house. F-bomb and his brother threw her in the back seat of his car, drove her to the hospital, dumped her by the ER door, and left.

About two years ago, she moved out from his place for the last time, and back in with us. She had a good job, and was getting her feet back underneath herself. But she couldn't stay away from F-bomb. She hated herself for it, but once or twice a week, she'd miss dinner without calling us, which we knew meant she was seeing F-bomb.

All this time, we consoled ourselves with the fact that she hadn't gotten pregnant. Maybe he was 'shooting blanks'. But alas, she finally did get pregnant, and that was the last she saw of F-bomb.

Our grand-daughter, who I'll call AG (Adopted Girl, get it?) for blogging purposes, was born this past winter.

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For the last several months, 1F has been seeing a counselor who is helping her deal with some of the issues that made her particularly vulnerable to someone like F-bomb. Molly and I have sat in on some of her sessions; as you might imagine, several of her 'issues' radiate out from her upbringing. We are still very much 'in process' with the whole thing, but we have learned a couple things.

The 'junior mom' role that we reserved for her was not a healthy thing; it effectively robbed her of a lot of her 'childhood'. As a kid, 1F was almost freakishly responsible - the 'first-born pleaser', in spades, doubled and redoubled. Which was nice for us, but she'd have been better off with a bit more freedom to just 'be a kid'. And, she felt like she always had to 'fix' everything, so when I lost it, or Molly did, or chaos reigned, as it often does in large families, 1F felt like it all fell on her to 'make it better'.

And the thing is, I could often see that going on with her. I could see her trying like mad to just 'make it better', to restore control. And it bothered me - I knew what she was trying to do, and I knew that she shouldn't be taking that burden on herself, but I didn't know how to get her to relax and let it go.

And somehow, a guy like F-bomb, who needs 'fixing', especially a streetwise guy who knows how to look like he 'needs help', is exactly the kind of guy who would hit her at her vulnerable point. Add to that her own insecurity at being out on her own in the big, wide world, and his 'father-figure-ness', his ability to 'show her how it's done', and she was easy pickings.

Today, I think, she's a stronger, wiser young woman, albeit with scars on her psyche. She has restored most of her lost friendships, but the years of traveling in 'different circles' sometimes make for awkwardness. And, her story has gotten around - not everyone knows quite how to approach her.

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