I am so glad that I talked recently by phone with my daughter’s fiancé and was able to get to know him, even if briefly.  My impression is that of a decent young man who fell in love with an illusion of my daughter rather than the real person…or at least the real behavior.

I had tried to find the fiancé prior to my daughter being taken into custody, however with having just his first name and occupation, a Google search was fruitless. He reached out to my husband through Facebook following the arrest and through that action we were able to learn his last name and then connect first by FB message followed by phone.

I was unsure how the fiancé would react. He was after all with her at the arrest. Would he be upset that his fiancée’s  parents had passed along the information that led to her arrest or would his predominant emotion be confusion?  It turned out to be the later case.

I would characterize the tone of the phone call as the state my husband and I have named “deer in the headlights”.  The illumination of previously unknown facts is bright and bewildering.  As a deer is frozen in the high beams of an onrushing  car, sensing danger but unsure how to fully understand and take action to avoid harm, thus it seems to be with this young man.

We have seen it before and understand that it takes time to fully comprehend the situation with my daughter. When we first met the birth father (who met us with his parents) when my daughter was pregnant with her first baby, one of the first statements we made to them was that our daughter was a pathological liar.

I remember driving away with my husband at the conclusion of the evening with them and discussing the fact that we got a “deer in the headlights” response to the pathological liar statement. My daughter looks so sweet and vulnerable that the understanding that my daughter really does fit the medical dictionary meaning of the term is difficult to grasp.   Yes, she really does lie when there is no reason to do so. Yes, she will even lie when to do so will clearly put her into a worse situation. The problem is that people can go their whole lives without seeing someone who fits the pathological definition and they have trouble recognizing it in a slightly built innocent-looking young woman.

My daughter’s fiancé asked if we could talk by phone to better understand her as he had recently come to realize that he had been lied to. I agreed and found that he had been manipulated according to a pattern we had seen before. My daughter became intimate with him then told him she was pregnant with his child a week or two later which was impossible as she was already 7 months pregnant with baby number three.  How this young man didn’t realize she was already pregnant I have trouble understanding. My daughter delivered her third baby in mid-January and then as has happened before, apparently really did get pregnant again and could be due as early as the end of this October with her 4th baby in 4 years.

This young man, not knowing that my daughter was on the run, proposed to her the weekend before her mid-March trial was supposed to start.  In another familiar pattern, he thought he was texting my husband for permission to marry her but was actually texting my daughter who was masquerading as her Dad by means of a phone app. In the meantime, she blocked us from her Instagram post that she was engaged. Though she blocked mutual friends and other relatives, she failed to block everyone and we found out about the engagement.  Because we learned that this young man was also a single dad, we were pretty concerned about the situation and consequently tried but failed to find and warn him.

By the time we talked by phone, the fiancé knew that my daughter had lied to him about the texting and carrying his baby last fall. What is amazing to me was that he was still talking to my daughter on a regular basis at the jail and was still trying to settle in his mind whether there was any chance for a future.

My daughter has been telling him she will likely get a plea agreement for probation and be out in a few months. I told him she would be going to prison, that she has had mercy with two court cases already and a scheduled trial means the prosecution is really going to prosecute her.

I asked the fiancé if he had checked his credit card statements. He had not. I advised him to check all of his financial statements/accounts to make sure that his finances are unharmed by theft or fraud. It’s the first thing I would have done but I understand more than he does.

“Deer in the headlights.”  The fiancé needs to turn his eyes from the glare of the situation and run. Run hard until he and his young son are safe from my daughter’s hold over him.  Only he can do the moving though.