This is the groundwork for all that has become my family's life. You may be thrown off by the title of my posts as you read. That's OK. I want to tell a full truth so that I can get sound advice. I refuse to just air what is wrong with my now-teen step daughter without disclosing what has happened to her. She might very well be "evil" now, a term I use with humor btw, but she, like everyone else, has a past to contend with. So here goes.

Over a decade ago, my friend (who became my husband) got a phone call from the folks at child protection services.

Seems that his daughter, who lived with her mom, showed up to a major family function with bruises and other marks on her face and body. He was asked to pick her up and keep her until a hearing was held.

He complied.

He took photos of her injuries. I saw these shortly after the fact, and I have to tell you, they were horrifying. The girl was just under two years of age, and she looked like a seasoned vet from a boxing match. There were bruises on her little forehead in the shape of knuckles, of all things. There was one on the apple of her cheek.

Her tiny blue eyes peered out from those pictures like some lost and confused refugee that'd seen things that no adult should see....much less a child. My heart broke for her.

The date for a hearing came, and it turns out that her mom hadn't done the beating. No, she had been at work and had left the girl under the care of her live-in lover. Apparently, when the child wouldn't stop crying while under his supervision, the lover hit her and hit her to shut her up.

Bastard.

Anyway, her dad won custody...leaving the mom to see her only every other weekend. As a judge, I would have allowed no visitation, but I digress.

He and I saw less and less of each other through this period, and I understood why. He had to give his child everything he had! Who wouldn't, ya know? So the next portion of what you hear is what I got from him when we started hanging out again.

One year after the notorious bruising incident:

The girl went with her mom for a weekend. Her mom worked at a day care center, of all things, and then babysat on weekends for extra dough. Most of this work was in high-end neighborhoods; good money, well-to-do families.

She took her daughter along on these gigs a lot. On one particular weekend, something terrible happened. I don't know what this woman was doing (sleeping, knowing her), but her daughter was molested by an older child in the household. I believe the boy was 12 or so.

The girl said something to her dad about it, and the unsupervised weekend stuff came to a halt almost at once. He, along with her very wealthy maternal grandmother, found a well-renown psychiatrist to help her work through it.

The biological mother made one last attempt a bit later to get full custody. This attempt was, as you can imagine, a huge joke in the eyes of the law.

At this point, the child in question was somewhere around the age of 4. What a life so far, huh? It was all very dark and horrible for her.

She and her dad started coming around me again at that point. When I looked at her my heart ached, but I also felt hope, and love, and the dire need to help her get through things and feel good about her life.

I fell in love with her.

I loved her before, as she was the child of my friends and I was even asked to be her G*d mother. But something else was happening, too...I was loving her in a deeper, more maternal way. Much like I adored my own sons. I decided that I had to be around. If for no other reason, she had to have a positive female role model.

My own bio father took off when I was one, and that was bad enough. But what her bio mom did (or allowed to happen)was unspeakable. I suppose I had a touch of "It Takes a Village" in me...because I let her in, and mentally swore that I'd do whatever it took to help her.

Things get a little crazy from there...but I'll save that for another post.