The puppy with the puppy! I love that. I very much enjoyed reading your blog and have added it to my reader. Lovely words, thank you.

I have a huge, enormous miracle to share:

One dog August afternoon, I walked barefoot along the outskirts of campus. I carried my Dr. Scholls, and sang Hurts So Good and Centerfold like I was a rock star.

He stepped out of the dark canopy of trees and grabbed me. He had a knife. He raped me. I don't remember his face or his height. I can still hear him, the way he hissed "don't look at me.” I remember one part with multicolor slow motion clarity. He grabbed my right hand and deliberately broke three fingers, pinky, ring finger, middle finger, snapped them like chicken bones.

Two months later my fingers were healing, but my stomach felt worse, like fire and gunpowder. I didn't know I was pregnant until my breasts swelled. I called a clinic. They told me to bring six hundred dollars cash, a friend to drive, and an empty stomach. I didn't have a friend or six hundred dollars so I stayed home. I had a baby daughter. I gave her up for adoption.

I keep talking around the rape and birth. I'm a sheepdog circling the events, corralling them, pushing them into storage pens for slaughter. I'm a blue merle sheepdog with watery eyes and a limp and all I know is to keep circling, keep those sheep from running free, I don't want them to break formation.

My birth daughter turned 21, called Catholic Charities, and they called me. I said yes. Yes.

I drove to her parents’ home. I thought about the years between the rape and now, the adventure of campouts and school field trips and pizza Fridays, all the x's in my cross stitch life, how I added color and texture, how I always left a corner undone. I'm so different now. I'm not that girl in the woods, that girl with broken fingers and no friends. I'm not that girl. I thought of the photos my birth daughter sent, how she looks like that girl, looks like a young me. I know so little about her. She looks like me but she's a stranger.

I turned at a blinking red light and shifted down. My daughter stood at the edge of the gravel drive, and I stepped out of the car and backwards in time, to the night of her birth, into her arms.

All I know is you get what you get. I got an old new daughter, not a stranger, a real child just like her brothers, and my heart and arms and mind couldn't find a difference.

I don't remember anything I said to her or anything she said to me. But somehow a million million busy cells swapped stories and memory and we found ourselves on the black lake behind her house, in a blue paddleboat with a candy striped canopy, alone on the lake, drifting, drifting, not paddling, resting, letting the water transform two decades into glass shattered reflection, into nothingness.

Now, a few years later, we've developed a beautiful relationship. I don't know who I am to her, really, but to me she is my daughter, my full, living, breathing daughter who I have loved every minute of her life.

First of all, great post Lil! I absolutely loved the moment when he announced his black belt. I'm very glad you and your daughter were able to get out of that situation safely.

I was born with a cleft palette, and I was supposed to be born with a cleft lip. When I was born there was a hairline scar running from my nose to my lip. It turns out that my cleft lip was healed in utero, this is extremely rare. I can only imagine that had I been born with a cleft lip my life would've been very different. Also had the surgeons not been able to repair my cleft palate, my life would've been vastly different -imagine having no barrier between your mouth and nasal passage. It turns out that I was very lucky to have been born at the University of Michigan and had some very capable surgeons repair my palate. It took a series of 3 major surgeries between the age of 2-3.5, grafting skin from the back of my throat to the roof of my mouth. Some of my earliest memories are of being in the hospital. So, I'm not sure that it qualifies as a miracle to have been born with only a hairline scar instead of a major gap on my face… But I feel pretty damned fortunate, if nothing else for the doctors that had the faculty to repair me.

But the real miracle came when this little girl was born, and the first thing I did was look at the roof of her mouth and thankfully… It was intact :-)

She does, however, have a major problem with facial hair.

Miracles, eh? Is anyone around here familiar with the Insane Clown Posse?

But really I shouldn't joke, since others have responded with personal and beautiful stories.