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.