Grandbaby Memories

Eighteen years ago, my daughter, who was incarcerated in a juvenile detention facility, gave birth to a beautiful, violet-eyed,  little mite of a baby girl.  I remember holding her in my arms on the day she was born, peering into her baby eyes, and wondering if I'd ever see her again...

My sixteen year old, acknowledging that she was in no way equipped to parent, had been determined to find "the perfect parents" for her baby.  I remember agonizing about the potential that I would take the expected child on and raise her myself.  It was a time when my own two were nearly launched, and I was seeing the light at the end of the tunnel.  I knew that my own chance to finally exit the rotten bargain I'd made when I married, was there within sight at the end of my active parenting years.  What if I chose to begin again with an infant?  The cost of doing that was going to be very high from a personal perspective.  As it turned out, I had no reason to worry.  My own child had other plans for her child.  She wanted the best.  She wanted a stable family with the resources to give her baby all the things she might ever need or want.  She wasn't too crazy about me in those days, and she was no way having me raise her baby.  Probably, she saved me from talking myself into something that would have been a bad deal for us all.  In the end, she found an open adoption and the little one went off to be "their" daughter.  They did, in fact, do all the wonderful things that I could never have afforded to do ... AND, they kept their hearts open and made sure that my daughter and I were always able to be in touch with them and with that grandchild.

On Friday, that little one will graduate from high school.  She has grown to be a lovely, talented, brilliant young woman.  Tom and I will leave here on Thursday morning, and drive to our nation's capital so that we can be there to help celebrate the event.  I am so excited to be able to be there; so happy that it all turned out this way; so thrilled to have been invited.  It feels like this is one of those mysterious places where the stars all aligned, and everything turned out just perfectly.

swan