March 19, 2008
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On Grandparents Rights and Some Casual Observations on the Coming of Spring
Last night I had a dream about my *lost* granddaughter, Teri Lynn. She’s been in the possession of her biological father now for about 10 years and I woke up crying about all the love that both she and we have lost out on. In some ways, I feel responsible for her ending up with her father. Her mother had dropped her off with me for *a while* that went into weeks with little or no contact with her mother. It was taking her toll on my granddaughter who missed her mother. In an effort to make my daugher become the mother that Teri Lynn needed, I told my daughter that it *wasn’t fair* that she just left her here and wasn’t spending any time with her daughter. Teri NEEDED her mother and felt abandoned. We also already had custody of another granddaughter and just didn’t feel that we should shoulder that added responsibility when Teri’s mom was perfectly capable of it. She was just having herself a good old time working and partying because she knew that her kid was taken care of by us, her grandparents.
If I had known what my using guilt tactics would bring, I would tear out my tongue now. A few days later, my daughter showed up to let me know that Clint Buchanan (yes, that’s the bastard’s name) and his new wife were coming to get her, I would have moved heaven and earth to have things be different. If my daughter had just given us custody of Teri Lynn, we would have kept her and raised her as we did the other granddaughter.
Let me tell you a little about Clint Buchanan. When my daughter first got mixed up with him, I had to admit, he had some appealing looks. I could see why she would be attracted to him. But he was bad news on the hoof, from a more experienced point of view. I grew up with a lot of guys like him. Bad boys, rebels, wild and quick to fight. He had a bad rep we found out from one of the cops that lived in our neighborhood. My daughter was a little on the wild side but overall a good kid. Her wildness was a love for excitement. She loved mudding out in the everglades and didn’t care if she looked like some monster from the bog when the day was done. She would just hose herself off, be laughing and go shower and change for a night of playing pool or darts or whatever her current passion was at the time.
I knew she liked to smoke marijuana from time to time but it wasn’t something she did ALL the time and it was strictly forbidden in our house (at least while her father or I was around and the smell was always cleared from the house before we got home). She worked, had an outgoing personality and was well-liked by her customers and her wide circle of friends. Some of the guys she liked we really never knew, others we got to know fairly well. We didn’t always agree with her choices but it’s all part of the growing up process. God knows my parents didn’t know half of the guys *I* was hooked up with and some were little more than gangster wannabes. But I always knew, deep in my heart, that it was just something I wanted to *taste*. My goals were not to live like the people I grew up around. I wanted to own my own home someday, have kids and live a normal, nice and, hopefully, interesting life. I didn’t want to be always involved with the police or visiting my hubby, boyfriend or family members in prison or jail. That’s pretty much what a lot of the family’s took for granted in the area of Chicago I grew up in.
Clint, I knew, would be one of those guys. Somehow or other, he would end up in prison or worse, dead, from a bar fight or some such thing. It showed (to me and her father anyway). My daughter was enthralled however and there was no changing her mind. The next thing I knew, she and Clint moved clear up to northern Florida (town of Lake City) and that is where she became pregnant.
I knew she wasn’t happy after a while. Even before the pregnancy but had no idea why. I could guess but she wasn’t saying. We later found out he was *one of those*….a guy who gets drunk and beats up the wife or girlfriend. He actually broke her arm once but we never knew about that. He also threw her down a set of stairs when she was about six or seven months pregnant. That was something else we found out about later from our son who happened to be staying with his sister at the time. She swore him to secrecy because she was afraid of how her father would react.
Along came Teri Lynn, finally. The sweetest, most adorable (yes, I am a grandmother but she was beautiful) little girl. Sweet dispositioned and perfectly formed. She even had long dark hair. I loved her from the moment I saw her.
Still, my daughter stayed with Clint, thinking the baby would make a difference. His folks lived in the area and I guess she hoped that would help out too. We didn’t get to visit much but I called, sent gifts and tried to keep in touch while her dad and I were building our business. We often sent money.I took a trip to N. Carolina to visit with a cousin of mine that I had been close to much of my life when I found out she was dying of cancer. I stopped at my daughter’s to pick up my son so he could make the trip with me and I found out that Clint was beating her up. The bruises were a dead giveaway. My son told me much more on the trip and my heart just sank. It seems Clint’s father was a convicted child molester. He had spent time in prison for molesting his own daughters and there was some controversy about a child conceived by one of them. They refused to have anything to do with him (can you blame them?) but I was horrified to find out that my daughter often left HER daughter with the grandmother when she was working. Guess where the grandfather lived since getting out of prison? I thought there were rules about that. I know more now than I did then and would have reported the situation to the police if I had known. The only blessing was that Teri was a baby then. Not quite the age that the grandfather had started molesting his own daughters. I even met the man before I knew his history. He and his wife lived in a trailer on a big piece of property in an area called O’Brien, Florida. No paved roads, drive the garbage to a central collection point for pickup, ATV tracks and dirt bike trails everywhere and miles away from any conveniences. Chickens and roosters free-ranged all over the place. Not that I think that’s necessarily bad but it’s also far from law enforcement and I swear everyone there had rifles in their pickups. It reminded me of an area where white supremists would live. Kind of scary.
My daughter finally left Clint after one particularly scary night when he tried to kill her and she went running through a cornfield with her daughter in her arms. She returned the next day with the cops, collected what she could and returned to South Florida. We found out that Clint was NOT named as the biological father on Teri’s birth certificate (and I doubt a dna test has been performned to this day). How Clint got her, I’ll explain later.
My daughter seems to have finally gotten Clint out of her system and ended up dating a commercial airline pilot. He seemed like a nice guy, also seemed fond of Teri Lynn and she of him (you learn to look for those signs) and they began living together. Clint was a thorn in our side because he kept calling, wanting to talk to our daughter, who mostly dodged his calls but told him flat out NO SHE WAS NOT COMING BACK and to LEAVE HER ALONE. It got so bad that the pilot finally took a commercial freight job in Texas to get them out of the area and away from the jerk Clint.
I have actually forgotten why they ended up back in South Florida (although I have my suspicions) but end up back there they did. I loved it and got to see a lot of Teri Lynn. I just adored her. She had the most wonderful imagination and was an incredible *mommy* to all her doll babies. She would feed them, change their diapers, take them for walks, sit out in the sun with them or have them resting in chairs while she and my other granddaughter were playing in our pool. Then it became nap time and she seriously put them down for their naps and act so relieved that she finally had some free time for herself.
It always cracked me up when she would, out of the blue, suddenly lift her head and say, *Oh, the babies are up!* and run back to her bedroom to get them up from their naps. She even put them in *time outs* when they misbehaved. I tell you, that kid had an incredible imagination. It was a pleasure to have her around but she broke my heart when she would ask if her mommy called or was going to come and see her and I had to tell her NO….she wouldn’t let me make excuses. She would just sigh and say, *Oh well.* So you can see why I felt it was time to try to make my daughter be the mother she should have been.
The day she came to my home to pack up Teri’s stuff because her father and Ginny, the new wife, were coming to get Teri, I could have died. I admit, I had spoken to Ginny several times when Clint had called about seeing his daughter. I actually suspected he didn’t care but his wife expected him to and that was why he was doing it. Ginny had two boys she had been raising by herself (she had a good job in Tallahassee) and they were renting a house there where she had prepared a room for Teri Lynn, the daughter she didn’t have and had wanted. My heart was broken but I knew as long as Ginny was around, Teri would have the mother she needed.
It wasn’t long after they left (and Teri was terrified when she had to get into the car with them) and I had cried a river of tears over my stupidity that I found out the marriage had blown up. Clint started drinking again (he had quit in order to get Ginny to marry him but I guess she wasn’t the cash cow he hoped for). He beat her up, she threw him out and divorced him. I got a phone call from her and she apologized to me because she couldn’t keep Teri with her since she wasn’t her mother. I got the creeps after that call. I knew if we ever heard from her again, it would be few and far between. I was right.
I actually got a phone call once when Teri was about 10. Clint let her get on the phone with me and even emailed me some pictures of Teri Lynn that I lost when my hard drive died on that computer. The only pictures I have of her are ones when she was 5 and under. She is now about 15 years old.
My daughter married an incredibly nice man a few years ago. This is after they had lived together for five or six years. He took up the cause of trying to locate Teri Lynn because Clint is the type that is always one step ahead of the law or the bill collector. He is constantly on the move, changing jobs (he works construction and his last known location was in Tallahassee area). He is some kind of block finisher and talented from what I understand. I don’t think he will ever leave the Florida area because of that but you never know. I just know that he totally disregarded the legal agreement he made with my daughter about custody sharing and being able to keep in contact with her mother.
The last time I talked to Teri Lynn, she asked about her mother. She wanted to know if her mother had gotten married or had any other children. I told her *No, honey. The only baby she ever wanted was YOU.* I found out Clint had told her that her mother wanted to get rid of her when she found out she was pregnant. Nice guy, huh?
Even if it were true, it’s not a thing to tell a kid. He said the only reason she was alive was because HE wouldn’t let her get an abortion. Yeah, right. The throwing her down the stairs was an attempt to end the pregnancy. My son said he was very disappointed that it didn’t happen and my son was fearful it would happen again. It didn’t, thank god, but she might as well not be alive right now. In fact, we have no reason to know if she is or isn’t. We haven’t heard hide nor hair from her again since that time and we’ve moved several times since then. The last place she knew we lived was Margate, Florida. We’ve since moved to Port Charlotte, Florida and now to Alabama. I could pass her on the street and never know her. I’m sure she thinks we all just disappeared on her and don’t even think about her.I dreamt about her last night and woke up in tears because she lashed out at me and said…didn’t you love me? Didn’t you care? How could my mother leave me with HIM? How could she not keep looking and looking if she loved me? I had no answer for that. Just tears. Not too many people read my blog but who knows. If anyone knows a girl born on January 25 who is now 15 years old, her name will either be Teri Lynn Buchanan or Teri Lynn Vancil, please let me know in the comments area. I need to know and so does her mother. She and her hubby were spending lots of money on private detectives that would find Clint and then, with some sixth sense, he would suddenly disappear again with Teri Lynn.
(drying tears again) As for the Observations on Spring that I was going to go into, I think I will come back in a day or two. I’m really drained.
I love you. And remember from this experience, you just never know when someone you love will be torn from your life and never be seen again. Keep the people you love close. I pray I get to see her again before I die.
