About Isabella

"I just feel this is what God is leading me to do," Lisa, a preschool teacher and assistant administrator of a day-care center, said serenely.

When Lisa speaks of her former partner within earshot of Isabella -- which she tries not to do -- she is circumspect. "The Other Party had our van repossessed," Lisa said, whispering so Isabella wouldn't overhear. "But that's okay. God has always provided for us from Day One."

JANET JENKINS GREW UP IN A LARGE CATHOLIC FAMILY in Falls Church and attended parochial schools for much of her childhood. Her parents have been married for 53 years. Her father, a firefighter, retired as operations chief of the Arlington County Fire Department. "She's always been a tomboy," Claude "Bucky" Jenkins, 71, said of his daughter. "She's very strong, not only physically, but mentally. She's headstrong. She gets that from me." In her rebellious youth, Janet drank too much, even before her brother Ricky committed suicide when he was 22. She joined Alcoholics Anonymous and eventually changed her life, her parents recalled.

Janet meant to go to college, but she never did. As an adult, she was so private that she never even came out to colleagues at the Annandale florist shop where she worked, mostly as the office manager, for 15 years. "They called me the mystery woman," Janet said. "They'd ask me about my boyfriend, and I'd change the subject."

Rather than be in the vanguard of gay rights, she quietly lived for 13 years with her first lesbian partner, Lauretta Simmons, a political consultant who once worked for the Republican National Committee. Janet worked at various business ventures, including helping Simmons as a political fundraiser. "Janet is not afraid to try anything," her father said. "She'll grab ahold of anything that goes 'round."

Lisa Miller grew up just a few miles away, in Arlington. Her parents divorced when she was 7, leaving Lisa alone for years with a mother she describes as mentally ill. Lisa became her mother's sad caretaker, she said. "I never knew what was going to happen next or what I'd do that would set her off," Lisa said. She was sexually abused as a child, she said. Her mother forbade her to date. "I tried," Lisa said. "She would always find out. 'All men are evil.' That's what I grew up with. 'They only want one thing.' " At the same time, Lisa said, "all my life I was told, 'You'll never make it on your own.' I'd bring home A's and hear, 'Why didn't you get A-pluses?' " Lisa sought solace, order and companionship at a Baptist church in Arlington. "I was there every time the doors opened," she said.

She attended Northern Virginia Community College and James Madison University, earning an undergraduate degree in psychology and beginning work on a master's in special education. At 19, she met her first boyfriend, a fellow student, and married him three years later. The marriage didn't work out, and Lisa wasn't sure why. Given her childhood trauma, she said, it was difficult for her to be physically or emotionally intimate unless she felt very safe. "That was a huge issue, my childhood abuse," she said. "We never really worked through it. It just drove us apart."

For the first time in her life, she drank alcohol, and then came to believe she was drinking too much as a way to hide from her problems. When she met and befriended a lesbian at work, she wondered if maybe that's what she was, she recalled. She'd never had a sexual encounter with a woman. Still, she went once to a support group for gays and lesbians having difficulty coming out. "That was hilarious," Lisa recalled. "They were like, 'Are you sure you are in the right group?' " She wasn't sure. When she did eventually have a romantic relationship with a woman, what mattered to her most was the companionship, she said. "I did not feel sexually attracted to women," Lisa said. "It was kind of like: Wow! I feel needed, I feel wanted, I feel a part of something."

What made Lisa happiest, she said, was helping children. She alternately worked as an aide at a children's psychiatric hospital, as a day-care specialist with a social service agency and as a nanny. It was not a life that provided much income, or even regular health benefits, but she found the work rewarding, she said.

In December 1997, Janet and Lisa met at an AA meeting, Lisa said. Lisa, 28 at the time, was distraught that day. She was working as a nanny, living in a client's basement and barely scraping by financially. Her mother had died suddenly, alone in her condominium, and the body hadn't been discovered for a few weeks.

Janet, then 32, had her own troubles. She and Simmons had broken up and were waging a dispute over assets. Simmons was later sentenced to one year in prison for embezzling $84,000 from Tom Ridge's gubernatorial campaign coffer; Simmons said at the time that she was under extreme duress over a nasty breakup and embezzled the money to pay legal bills.

Within a few months after Lisa met Janet, she moved in with her.