Member-only story
It begins slowly. My daughter met a boy, well actually he was a young man- age 18 years old when she was 16. As soon as I met him I had a bad feeling but I had nothing to base it on other than a mother’s intuition.
Always follow your intuition, it rarely fails you
I knew my daughter was struggling with her self-esteem but I didn’t know how to help her. When she was in 9th grade all of her “good friends” turned their back on her after she began dating an 11th grade student. He was popular and they were jealous. Losing all of her good friends so suddenly changed my daughter for the remainder of her high school years.
Her crowd of friends changed drastically and it scared me. But, I was hoping it was temporary and her old friends would come around- at best, I was hoping she would realize these kids were possibly going to lead to trouble and she would pull away. It’s not easy to pull away from your “new” crowd when you are in High School.
Near the end of of her junior year in high school she met “Mark” (not his real name). She brought Mark home one day to meet us and I had a sick feeling in my gut as soon as I met him. After Mark left, I asked her what she saw in him, and her reply was a typical teenage girl’s reply, “He’s hot and nice to me.”
