My Miracle Baby Girl

A Daughter of Criminals

My life in my younger years had always been a series of decisions I've made thinking "how out of control can I make this?". I would literally weigh the different options available to me at any given moment and intentionally choose whichever was the ‘bad idea’ on purpose. I was obsessed with pushing things beyond their limits. Most people called it a 'death wish'. Naturally, this shines an ugly light on my life and who I was. However, the story of my oldest and only biological child is one worth telling. She's the reason I believe in miracles. 

My daughter is the result of a 15-year-old boy hooking up with a grown woman. A woman who was the wifey to a G in the gang I was beefing with. Yes, I did it exactly for the reason you're thinking. She saw me as her dirty little secret and I saw her as a means to do damage. I was trying to 'get caught'. I'm not saying it's right, my motivations, only that it happened. I wasn't a good person and intentionally made reckless decisions, remember?

When I discovered she was pregnant I knew I was the father. I also knew that the odds of my being correct in that assumption were overwhelming against me. However, I 100% knew. This realization immediately changed how I viewed the situation. I went from feeling dominant to feeling like a piece of garbage. My goal had been to do harm to them however not this kind. I wasn't worried about being a dad for selfish reasons. I literally had nothing. However, I now saw this as something I was doing to someone else. I felt guilt for a child who hadn't even been born yet. When all you do is harm people on purpose, this is an unsettling feeling to grapple with.

The mother and I spoke in secret and while she acknowledged that I could be the father she also stated clearly "there ain't no way you the daddy". Referring to the fact that everyone's life would be in danger should what we had been doing come to light. I was a mess. Getting caught had actually been the whole point for me but now there was someone else in the mix. Someone in this den of thieves that mattered.

We broke it off after that discussion however I didn't disappear. I became a ghost in her life. I was very good at being sneaky. Though she wouldn't admit it out loud, she'd speak to me the way a woman would speak to the father of her child. We'd even argue about names. She hated my picks for a boy or a girl though I had only one for each. Yet they were determined dead on arrival.

Then the day came when my daughter was born. She didn't tell me, but I knew anyway. I was at the hospital when they were wheeling her out following discharge. Faking an injury in the waiting room as they passed. No one noticed me as I stared at the girl in her arms from under my hood. She told her man he was the father and he was acting like it. I didn't learn until later he hadn't signed the birth certificate or that she'd given that little girl the name I had wanted. The name she had sworn wasn't an option.

I was a father and at the same time, I wasn't. Anything I could've done would have only made that little girl an orphan. While I had been fine with that outcome at one point, I wasn't okay with it any longer. I didn't know what to do and I never figured it out because not long after I was arrested and on my way to prison for a very long time.

Months turned into years and nothing happened. I tried to keep tabs; however the longer I was gone, the fewer resources I had in the real world available to me. Quickly the day arrived when I had no way to learn anything. I used to look through the new phone books each year, trying to track down any name I could remember in hopes of reaching someone who knew something. All in vain. I wrote letters to her I never mailed. Who could I send them to? Year after year, I dated and signed letters to a little girl who had no idea I even existed. Placing them one after another into a box under my bunk. A dozen years' worth of piling letters which spilled over the sides.

Then came the day I called my wife. It was just a call except when she answered she didn't say "hey baby". She said we found her, speaking my daughter's name over the phone. My head swam, what did that even mean? While my wife knew about her, I was very open and vocal about the situation, she wasn't looking for her. I couldn't introduce her to that world, subject her to the dangers. Yet here I was unable to understand what was happening. I just stood there, listening and shaking, as she explained to me the way miracles unfold. This is the timeline as I ultimately learned it to be.

Approximately 3 years earlier, my daughter learned that the man she believed to be her father was nothing of the sort. Her mother was fighting with this man as she was packing her things to leave him. At 9 years old she plead for her daddy to stop yelling at mom and he turned to scream in her face, "I ain't your fucking daddy!" I don't know to this day when he found out but I know exactly when she did. So my daughter and her mother fled the city. 

Her mother made a go at the straight life however it would seem it wasn't interested in making a go at her. For several years they jumped from one man's house to another until they eventually found themselves in a homeless shelter. With no other options, desperation drove her mother to do something she had never considered before. Finding me. My daughter knew the man she had grown up with wasn't her father however she still didn't even know my name. Her mom refused to tell her even in the years that followed. The first time her mother mentioned me to her she told my daughter my street name because she couldn't remember what my real name had been.

Following the only trail she could think of, she drove to the city and to the one place anyone was able to tell her I had lived. An apartment my mother had moved out of a decade earlier and one I hadn't seen since I was 14 years old. The current occupant wasn't home so she attached a note to the door and left. That should have been where the story ended.

The apartment's current resident returned home that evening to find the odd letter and, not knowing who any of the strangely named people were, stuffed it into her purse and gave it no further thought until days later when she showed it to a coworker over lunch. Asking this coworker what she thought of it.

As this other woman read the letter, the street names mentioned struck what felt like a memory. Leading her to call a girl she had gone to college with but hadn't spoken to since graduation years before. This old friend answered the phone and screamed through the receiver upon hearing the letter read to her because this 'old friend' was my wife. Apparently, she too had been open and vocal about my missing little girl.

Let's recap. My estranged daughter's homeless mother, who couldn't remember my name, went to an apartment, based on a tip, which my mother moved from 10 years earlier. Then left a note found by a stranger who didn't throw it away. A stranger who then took it to work and allowed a coworker to read it. A coworker who somehow remembered names mentioned by a college friend many years earlier and then reached out. A college friend who was astonishingly my wife.

Are you sure you don't believe in miracles?

My wife immediately called the number and spent hours figuring out how things got from A to B while explaining my current situation in prison. My daughter's mother dismissed me saying "he ain't no good to me then" to which my wife replied, "you really don't know him, do you?" Having been with me over the years, she knew better than anyone what I was capable of now. I quickly moved money around to get them out of the shelter.

Getting my visitation permissions took too long after she agreed to allow me to meet my daughter, yet the day came. I ironed my 'dress blues' as we called it and waited for the call. I had to wait even longer as the prison would not allow my daughter's mother entry dressed as she was. Deeming her clothes inappropriate for a prison visiting room. Forcing her to drive to a nearby Walmart to buy a less revealing outfit.

I was an absolute ball of nerves walking out into the visiting room that day. I had planned out what I would say for as long as my daughter had been on this Earth yet drew a complete blank. I was the guy who didn't even get worked up in a riot and here I was petrified to my core by a preteen sitting on the other end of the room. To this day I still can't believe how much she looked like me. It's as if the only thing she had gotten from her mother was girl parts. She sat quietly and barely spoke. Her mother made small talk and was uncomfortably flirting, which I ignored. I was too focused on the girl across from me. I didn't push for a profound moment, I simply fell into the fact that she was there at all.

I made certain they had enough for the next couple of years to keep from having to repeat the shelter experience. I'd call and write letters. Being careful to never ask the kind of questions that would make her feel obligated to respond if she didn't want to. I simply introduced myself slowly over an extended period of time. I told her that I had always known and she naturally asked why I ignored her. I told her how I couldn't find her and at the next visit brought her the box of letters. She wasn't even able to lift it and a guard helped by carrying the box to their car when they left. As she told me years later, she had gone home and figured out the order and started by opening a letter I had written when she was still an infant. She read holiday letters, birthday letters, and random Tuesday letters and examined the pictures I had drawn for her. As she told me just a few years ago, she realized back then that I had always been there, just not with her. She felt I had been taken from her the way I felt she'd been taken from me.

Then came the day I got out. I hadn't realized until then that her mom was now fully lost in a drug addict's life. The money I had been providing was being spent on everything but providing a life for my little girl. In fact, I was supporting this woman and her latest boyfriend's party lifestyle. My new home was in a new town, but for this, I returned to the city that had made me. I did not arrive quietly.

Letting myself in I realized immediately that my daughter lived in a trap house. Ironically, busting into these places to take what I wanted felt like an old familiar friend. However, this was the first time I had done it to take only what was mine. There was a righteousness in my anger I hadn't known before. That day I was the greater evil yet the one who was right at the same time. My daughter's mother entered the room in response to me barking her name with a fit of booming anger. I had learned to growl in my years away. I ordered her to bring my little girl to me. I could have yelled my daughter's name instead but the fury in me demanded that I make her do it. I wouldn't allow this woman to convince herself later that she was simply helpless to stop me. I needed her to feel the pain of voluntarily handing her over. One of the men present stepped to me to speak, I harmed him instead of listening. Kneeling where he lay on the floor with my hand still on his neck I roared at that woman, "Now!"

She obeyed. Moments later my daughter hurried over to me as I explained to the room how things were going to play out. The ends I was willing to go to. I finished by explaining to her mother that if she didn't force me to act on any of my threats, I would continue to fund her lifestyle as I apparently already had been doing. I remember watching her expression change at that moment. It actually caught me off guard. Where I had prepared for rage and further violence I found acceptance. This drug addict just sold me my daughter. I saw it in her eyes, she actually believed that she’d won. We left together facing no further resistance and never returned.

Some months later, after I had established paternity for legal reasons alone, we found ourselves standing outside a courthouse as I handed this woman a literal bag of money. I had cashed out everything I had in the game. Making many men inside my prison very happy. Inside the courtroom, we answered questions with attorneys passing paperwork back and forth as she signed custody over to me. Full unencumbered custody.

My little girl is a woman now with a family of her own. She has a career in nursing she genuinely loves, a cute little home only a couple of miles from my own, a husband that makes her laugh and a three-year-old son who calls me Baba. She astonishes me to this day because were you to meet her, you would never know the world she came from. She's sweet and accidentally funny, and considerate. She's light like bubbles. A petite, pretty, soft-spoken girl you would never know could walk off or handle absolutely anything. She brought coffee to me at work while I was writing this very story. An impossible human being. My perfect miracle baby girl. This criminal's daughter.