Once upon a time, there was a Daddy who loved his little baby daughter. This Daddy wasn't married to the baby's Mamma, but nonetheless, he loved the child their coupling had created. When the child's mamma decided it wasn't fun to be tied down with a little baby daughter, she left her with the Welfare Department and went back to being a child herself.
The Daddy in this story, however, used this opportunity to become more of an adult. He petitioned the court for the right to be his daughter's Daddy, and after many months, he won. But this was in a time when courts and Welfare Departments and, indeed, society in general thought that a single man wasn't quite up to the job of raising a child by himself. In order to be more acceptable to the courts, the Daddy married the first woman who accepted his proposal. They settled down as a happy little family.
Unfortunately, we haven't gotten to the "happily ever after" part yet.It seems that the Daddy's selection of wife/step-Mamma for his baby daughter also decided that being a mamma wasn't her cup of tea, and she, too, left.
When the Welfare Department heard about the latest defection, they began to pressure the Daddy about giving his daughter the kind of life she "deserved". Loving her as he did, he could deprive her of nothing that he was truly convinced was best for her, and eventually, he terminated his rights to being her "Daddy". In the process, his heart was broken.
Not many months later, the Daddy found a truly wonderful woman (for he was a truly nice man!)and they were married and he became to her daughters what he hoped someone somewhere was being to HIS daughter: a loving, protective father.
We still haven't reached the "happily ever after" part, though. You see, the Daddy could never replace one child with another. No matter how much he loved the other children he parented, the loss of his first born daughter was more than he could bear. As time passed, and his little baby grew into a young lady, he thought of her every day. He carried with him the last picture he had of her, and when people asked about his children, he always mentioned her, too.
One day, he thought that surely she must be old enough to be found by him. He contacted everyone he knew for advice on how to proceed, and eventually found a search organization that helped people like him to find people from whom they'd been separated by adoption. He anxiously contacted them and was very disappointed to learn that under the laws of their state, his daughter wasn't yet old enough to be contacted by legal means. He counted the days and weeks until she would be old enough and, in the mean time, contented himself with helping other people to search.
Unknown to the Daddy, the young-woman-who-had-been-his-baby-daughter had begun to want to know answers to the questions she had about her adoption. She had received an amazing amount of true information from her adoptive parents, yet it was never ENOUGH. One day, she wrote a letter to the court house in the town where she'd been born. The people in the court house had received a few of these letters before, and they had decided to forward them to someone who knew how to help, a leader of a search organization.
Well, you're just too smart if you think that the organization they forwarded the letter to was the same one the Daddy had contacted!! As the person read the daughter's letter, she was sure that it was the Daddy's little-baby-all-grown-up! She was so excited, she could hardly wait to confirm her suspicions. But the letter writer hadn't included her date of birth or a phone number!!!!!!! Contact was, however, made through the mail and eventually all the facts were confirmed as matching. The Daddy was FINALLY able to talk to his not-so-little-anymore-baby-daughter.
On Thanksgiving, the Daddy met his daughter again for the first time in over 20 years. Hopefully, we have NOW reached the "happily ever after" part!
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