In the newspaper recently, a story chronicled a set of parents allegedly kidnapping their pregnant 19-year-old daughter and taking her across state lines to force to her have an abortion. They were charged with kidnapping, assault, and terrorizing; the parents deny they were forcing her to have an abortion and, since one didn’t take place, I wonder if the charges will stick.

Five years ago, those parents could have been me. Five years ago, Mrs. T, my 17-year old daughter’s then boyfriend’s mother, called me at work to say she thought Eel was pregnant, and, like the parents in the news story, I panicked. I told my boss there was a family emergency at home and fled the office as if my arriving at home any sooner would change the situation, as if it were all a bad dream or a bad joke that would miraculously vanish as soon as I stepped into my house, as if my being home would erase the problem. Eel, angry, sullen and supine on the sofa, refused to speak to me, or budge from the sofa. She needed a pregnancy test and so, like a drill sergeant I ordered her with a lot of yelling into a car so we could get one. At a clinic. At an abortion clinic. She reluctantly arose from the sofa but didn’t move toward the front door or the car and all I could do scream the words that today make me realize the depth of my folly: "How could you do this to me?"

In retrospect, through the prism of a cooler perspective, Eel’s pregnancy had nothing to do with me but everything to do with her. Her choices, her missteps, her consequences. The issue I faced spoke to my hopes, aspirations and dreams—all dearly held—and the expectations of our extended family for my child, intangibles that threatened to vanish into the existence of an unexpected zygote.

Eel had just graduated from a Catholic all-girl high school that cost this single parent the amount of a world-class race car, and within the week of Mrs. T’s frantic call, this beautiful, talented, smart girl was scheduled to leave for a college nine-hours south to begin an undergraduate career as a marine biology major. She absolutely could not be pregnant now! Fury, fear, and despair colored my thinking. In fact, her leaving for college filled my every thought. Baby blankets and booties didn’t enter the picture, and so crying and screaming, I threatened to kill her dead if she didn’t get into the car. I hoped and prayed a pregnancy test would be negative, consternation due to a late period, and that we’d simply laugh about the ordeal later. I trembled as I drove and my stomach twisted into a knot.

Angry, we glared at each other, mother and daughter tied by that invisible thread that keeps us circling the constellation of each other in a love/hate dance. We drove around Baltimore to a half a dozen clinics, none of which would see us without an appointment. Desperate, trying to imagine the locations of other clinics without having a telephone book handy, I drove toward a major thoroughfare via a side street and spotted a huge, red "Crisis Pregnancy Center" sign; assuming it was a clinic, we, crying for different reasons, parked and entered. As soon as we did, a heavy-set receptionist whisked Eel into an examination room for a pregnancy test while an elderly receptionist motioned me to the waiting room. Focused like a laser on getting that pregnancy test, I had ignored the surroundings, but as soon as Eel had disappeared into the back, and I faced the waiting room, I saw it and that’s when I began to weep inconsolably: A large picture of Jesus adorned one of the walls, the same picture of Jesus that had graced just about every classroom I ever sat in as a Catholic school student. From the moment I saw that picture, I felt doomed. I knew Eel wasn’t getting an abortion that day or any day, and I sat in the waiting room, crying like Lucille Ball, imaging Eel’s college career over before it started, her potential professional woman status, her future economic independence, her having the world by the tail, all my hopes and dreams for her evaporate into nothing. Powerless, I sat and cried, my world spinning out of control because of an unwanted pregnancy.

"Why are you crying? New life is always a joyful thing," the thin, elderly receptionist said.

I scowled. "What about college? What about school? She wanted to be a marine biologist..." I said between sobs, so certain that the majority of young mothers who’d entered into the center’s doors hadn’t been college bound, like Eel. I wrung my hands, wishing for time to fast-forward to some point in the future when the situation would hurt so much.

"God makes everything possible. You don’t’ know God’s plan for this girl, and you don’t know what path she is supposed to walk." Obviously a volunteer, the gray haired receptionist with horned-rimmed black glasses, no make-up, no style, and a thick East Baltimore attempted to sooth me with her religious perspective but I felt venomous and bitter.

I wanted to reach over and strangle this Bible-thumper, knowing in my heart that after three pregnancies, three children of my own of whom Eel was the middle child, I could never choose abortion as an option for myself. But Eel was different, I thought. She had so much to live for yet before being tied down by such a heavy responsibility. I had never considered myself religious in any sense of the word, but I had considered myself spiritual. Many of my friends had gotten abortions for a variety of reasons, but I could never bring myself to do it.

I recalled the incident with a former neighbor who I helped after she had been laid up in bed for two days after an abortion. At the time my youngest child was just two months old and my then-husband had walked out. In between caring for an infant, Eel, then a year and a half, and my four-year-old son, I ran back and forth across the street to my neighbor’s apartment to clean up, do her laundry, and bring her food. I told her how sorry I was that she had to make such a hard decision and I meant it sincerely. With three kids under age four, I knew the hardships involved with parenting and felt sad that this young, single woman would find herself in such an untenable situation.

"It wasn’t hard at all," she told me. "It’s my fifth one." I remembered feeling surprised that this woman—no older than I at the time—had been using abortion as a birth control. Wasn’t that want I wanted for Eel then as I sat in the waiting room contemplating her potentially aborted college career? As a parent, I didn’t want to face this situation. Either way, something was about to be lost.

"You can’t tell her what to do in this situation. She has to decide for herself. No matter what you push her to do, she’ll resent you later if it wasn’t what she wanted to do," the receptionist said. "If you force her to have an abortion, later she’ll hate you. If you force her to keep it, later she’ll hate you. It has to be her own decision. She was adult enough to get pregnant, she has to be adult enough to face the consequences." I listened, sorry that we came to this crisis center with a large picture of Jesus hanging on the wall.

How did such a clear path into my daughter’s future become so muddy? Fear and panic prevailed: how would I tell my traditional parents who head a family of overachievers that my 17-year-old daughter was about to become a single mother? How overachieving is that in a city where its teen pregnancy rate make national news? How could I tell them that this baby is biracial? How was Eel going to continue her education? In my mind, she needed at least a bachelor’s degree to be successful in life. What about graduate school? What about studying fish. What about success and failure. A pregnancy meant failure, Eel’s and mine.

The receptionist must have read my mind. "You don’t have faith," she said, her lips pursed. "Maybe your daughter will have a more interesting life than the one you had envisioned for her? You can’t sit there and think that her having this baby is going to ruin her life. You have no right to predict how her life will turn out. Only God can do that."

I wanted to scream, pull out my hair. I sat, stood, paced, wrung my hands. And cried a river of tears until my head began to ache. How can a pile of diapers make her life more interesting? How can sleepless nights and the burdensome responsibility of raising a child as a unwed mother without a proper education an a suitable income be the fodder for an interesting life? I imagined drudgery for her. I didn’t say it but wanted to. I wanted to shout that I had better dreams for Eel than being a cahier at a chain store or a supermarket, or struggling from one low-wage job to another, just to get ends to wave at each other, much less meet. Eel simply couldn’t be pregnant now when she wasn’t prepared for life, much less motherhood. And most important, what about college? I hadn’t imagined the impact of her pregnancy on my life. It was as if college and the pregnancy happened and played out in a vacuum that didn’t include me.

Eel emerged smiling. The lady in the back had confirmed the worst: she was pregnant. The lady had given her a colorful pamphlet of photos of embryonic development. "My baby is this big already," she said using her thumb and forefinger to demonstrate length of the embryo growing within her. "I want to keep my baby." The lady in the back had also given her information about ob-gyns in the area.

"She’s leaving for college." I spit the words when the lady handed Eel the list of doctors and information on prenatal care.

Not quite resigned to the fact of an abbreviated college career or that Eel was about to turn me into a grandmother long before I was ready, I said nothing. Lips sealed shut, head aching, disappointed, scared, I couldn’t bring myself to say a word for fear that they would just dissolve into more crying. In the car on the way home, silence reigned until Eel flicked on the radio. The news came on and the top story reported the arrest of a Florida mother who at gunpoint drove 16-year-old pregnant daughter to an abortion clinic. I burst out laughing. Had I owned a gun, that would have been me just a few hours earlier.

After a successful college semester, Eel returned home to have her son, born in what would have been her second semester of freshman year and born exactly two days before her 18th birthday. Mother and son had both been born on Superbowl Sunday, 17 years and 2 days part. In the delivery room, I looked at the squalling baby, thankful that he appeared healthy. And I fell in love with him. How could I not? Child of my child?

Eel enrolled in a college one state away that offered a women with children’s program enabling single mothers interested in pursuing college degrees to live in one dorm building. It didn’t offer marine biology, but an endowment from an alumnus paid for child care while these single mothers attended classes and worked. Eel and her baby stayed there one year before she dropped out. A pre-veterinarian major, she became discouraged when her fellow students—all experienced with rural animal husbandry—knew the difference between cow species while she, a city girl her whole life, saw a cow simply as a cow.

"Pre-vet is not marine biology," she said. "Not for me," she said. "I hate it here." Mother and son moved back, and the relationship between Eel and me grew tumultuous for a variety of reasons, often due to a clash of parenting values inherent in her inexperience and my over experience. I also became defacto babysitter, not exactly how I had planned to spend my time when just beginning to taste my own freedom from parenthood when first, my son and then, my youngest daughter left for college. I envisioned an entirely different life for myself, removed from diapers, from late night fevers, and from taking care of baby. I had imagined just my husband and I alone in the house, at last. I hadn’t imagined Eel and a baby. Soon after Eel returned, my eight-year marriage disintegrated for other reasons; her son, the child of my heart, the child with twinkling eyes, a joyful smile, became my savior, allowing me to focus on something other than my ex-husband’s betrayal, as this child’s needs enabled me to transform anger at a man into tender love and care for a two-year-old boy. At the gym, I kick-boxed my ex-husband's face into oblivion. At home, the baby ruled my world.

Now five years later, Eel and her son still live with me and my two other children, three generations in one house. Eel is both a mother and a student, set to graduate in a few months, her child, a kindergartener. She won’t be earning that bachelor’s degree that I had held so dear, but she’ll be an esthetician. After she passes state board examinations to become licensed to practice in our state, she’ll be able to support herself and her child and any subsequent children; she discusses how she wants to earn more certifications in her field and about finding her own apartment, or moving in together with her sister when the time comes. Translation? She has a plan and a goal-filled future. When she does strike out on her own, I’ll miss her and the boy who stole my heart the minute I saw him. I’ll miss them both terribly while embarking on my own delayed life as an empty-nester. And perhaps as the receptionist at the pregnancy crisis center predicted, Eel will, indeed, lead a far more interesting life than the one I had envisioned for her.