Addendum to previous post...

I knew there was something that I forgot to say in the last post and it's a very important part of this story.

For the nine years that we dealt with this situation and most especially the time between that horrible Christmas in 2004 and last year, I tried to "fix" things. I tried every way I knew to restore the peace, make things better, and heal hurts. Did you get that "I" tried. It wasn't until I realized that this was out of my hands and really learned to "let go and let God" that things began to change. (Things were changing without my knowledge almost immediately after I "let go".) Once I was able to do that I was then able to truly forgive this person. I read a lot about forgiveness and truly didn't think it was something that I was going to be able to do. But I kept remembering a quote that I had read that said, "To refuse to forgive someone that has done you wrong is like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die". (I didn't want him to die, but I sure wanted him to change!) And, so, I decided that I was not going to allow him to affect my life like I'd been letting him affect it for all these years. I truly forgave him. I prayed for him. I prayed for my daughter and I left it in God's hands. I continued to send her loving emails and birthday presents and just accepted the situation for what it was. I knew that "someday" we would have her back. In short, I quit fighting the situation and just loved her where she was whether she loved me or not. Once I did that, I had a peace that I hadn't had in a very long time. And what I now know is that when I did that, things started changing on the other end.

I don't know how any of you feel about psychics, but I talked to one in June. She told me things about all my kids. She told me that Sarah would be pregnant with babies in late summer or Fall( she got pregnant in the Fall! we shall see if it's baby or babies!). She told me that Patrick was going to be getting engaged to a very sweet girl with dark hair (the next month he proposed to sweet dark headed Amber!), And then she told me that I had a dark haired daughter that lived out of city or state and that she was married to someone that was mentally cruel to her and that she was very unhappy and missed her family. She said that she would be leaving him and that we were going to be very happy about this news (this woman knew nothing about our situation). I asked her when this was likely to happen and she said it would be within the next 12 months. The VERY NEXT DAY, Emily emailed her sister and told her that she had moved out!!! I called her immediately and she was home for a visit within two weeks!

The point of this post is to prove the power of "letting go" and truly forgiving. I am convinced that if I had not done those things we would still be missing our girl.

I also want to say that as horrible as these years have been, Emily and I both have said that they were worth the pain and anguish to have what we have now. Some very important life lessons were learned by all of us, they were learned the hard way. I would go through it again to have the sweetness that we have now.