Trying to Make Up for Lost Time : Homecoming: ‘Don’t rush her,’ ex-hostage Jesse Turner advises Terry Anderson. Both men have emerged from captivity to meet their daughters for the first time.

Jesse (Jon) Turner has some gentle words for Terry Anderson to remember in the days that follow the newly released hostage’s first meeting with the daughter he had never known.

“Go slow,” Turner said. “Don’t expect too much too soon. You can’t expect her to go ‘Oh, Daddy! Daddy!’ as if you’d just come back from the store. Let her approach you. Don’t rush her. It takes time.”

Turner, who returned to his Boise, Ida., home in October after 4 1/2 years of Middle East captivity, knows what he is talking about. His first and only child, 4-year-old Joanne, was born to his wife, Badr, five months after he was taken hostage. He met Joanne for the first time Oct. 23 in Weisbaden, Germany, a scant 48 hours after he was released.

“I’m letting her approach me for the most part,” Turner, 44, said in a recent interview. “I’m trying not to smother her, or overwhelm her with my presence . . . or scare her. She’s been very shy. She will approach me, and then back off. I’m her father, but up until now, I’ve been a stranger.”

Like many of the returned hostages, Anderson, the longest held American captive and the last to be released, will face dramatic changes in the world around him as he emerges emotionally and psychologically from captivity to freedom.

And, in a situation he shares uniquely with Turner, among the most poignant and intimate of adjustments he will confront will be a new relationship with the daughter who was born--and has gone from infancy to childhood--without him.

Anderson, former chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press who was kidnaped in March, 1985, also has an older daughter, Gabrielle, now 15, who lives in Tokyo with Anderson’s estranged wife, Mihoko.

His younger daughter, Sulome, 6, has been living with her mother, Anderson’s fiancee, Madeleine Bassil, in Cyprus.

Anderson will probably experience a range of extreme feelings about this aspect of his return: anger at his captors for having deprived him of precious years with his growing daughters and a kind of awe and joy that the children will come to represent--especially Sulome, experts say.

“Often the young child is a symbol of hope for the future,” said John Wilson, a Cleveland psychologist who is an international expert on post traumatic stress disorder. “A child who is innocent in youth and vitality and sheer young beauty becomes this enormous contrast to the horror and evilness of captivity, to this survival-mode functioning they’ve been in for five or six years.

“It’s so powerful,” Wilson continued. “And it’s a very healing force, potentially. Having endured and survived in the face of death, having been humiliated, having been deprived of the basics of life and isolated and controlled. Now, with this child, there’s this almost limitless horizon in how beautiful life can be again.”

Turner said he has felt such emotions during the month that he and Joanne have spent getting to know one another:

“Sometimes it’s hard to believe that she’s mine. She was more than 4 years old when I first met her. I didn’t grow with her. That’s what I miss. While I was in, I knew she was a girl. I knew her name. I knew her birth date. But I’d seen no pictures. I was awfully glad that she was there. She was a form of immortality.”

To be sure, he is pained over time lost.

“I felt cheated,” he said. “I never got to see her as a baby, I never got to hold her, even to do unpleasant duties like changing her. I’ve had virtually nothing to do with raising her until now. Not that I would have done anything differently, but I would have liked to have been a part of it.”

And now, he said, he is often perplexed by her behavior: “I love her, but sometimes it’s a little weird trying to figure out what she’s thinking. Badr knows. She knows how to take care of it.

“I haven’t been around children very much, and sometimes I don’t understand what’s bothering her. She’ll burst into tears, and I’ll say, ‘What did I do? What did I say?’ Or she’ll get upset and run from the room. I let Badr handle most of that because she knows her.”

Nevertheless, even after the short time he has been home, “she’s much more willing to approach me and ask me to do things for her. Prior to that, she wanted her mother--or nobody,” he said.

Turner and his wife understand that their daughter probably views him as an intruder into her relationship with her mother. Moreover, she probably will not initially see her parents as equals, particularly regarding discipline.

“She was very shy with him and trying to stay beside me most of the time, afraid that I would give attention to Jonny more than her,” Badr Turner said. “She is jealous when I give him attention. But this is improving, slowly, slowly. Now she is putting on a new dress and went in to show him. She gives him a big hug. And yesterday I discovered, when he was out, she asked about him--more than once--wanting to know where he had gone.

“But if he tells her ‘Don’t do that, don’t do this,’ she is surprised. She comes to me and asks: ‘Do I have to do that? Do I have to listen to him?’ She is used to taking orders from me.”

Edna J. Hunter, deputy chairman of the advisory committee on former prisoners of war for the Department of Veterans Affairs, described such reactions as normal.

“Just from habit, the child will tend to go to the mother because she’s the one the child has always responded to,” Hunter said. “The first time there’s a conflict, the child might come out with something like: ‘Daddy wasn’t here--maybe he should go away again.’

“With children, it’s sort of better to let them take the initiative. It takes a small child a little time to warm up, especially if there have been no other male role models around. A mother’s methods are usually a little different from those of fathers. A child may be frightened because she won’t really know what a father is. This is a time of learning for both of them.”

But she added: “I think a small child tends to want a father. I think a small child will be very ready to accept a father. A small child will look forward to seeing daddy. It’s a very emotional time for everybody. The family needs to pull back and allow time. . . . It will take time.”

Experts say, in fact, that it is considerably easier for a small child to adapt to a returning father than a teen-ager.

They predict that Anderson will encounter more adjustment difficulties with his older daughter--who was a child when he was kidnaped and is now 15. (Those problems may be compounded by the estrangement between Anderson and Gabrielle’s mother at the time of his capture and by the fact that he was establishing a second family.)

“The younger the child--the child who is very, very young or not even born--will probably do better with the whole situation than a teen-ager or a preteen (whose) father has been gone for many, many years,” Hunter said.

“Young children are more adaptable than children in the teen or preteen years. In some cases, they’ve been told for so long that they were the head of the household that they may resent the father when he returns.”

Young children are “resilient and adaptable,” Wilson agreed. “The older they are, the less they need the parent. With a 4- or 5-year-old, the hostage knows he will have a relationship with this child for a long time. There’s lots of time to establish that relationship.”

Joanne Turner was well prepared for her father’s return, Badr Turner said: “I was all the time talking to her about him, every day. Daddy looks like this--she looks like him a lot. I can see Jonny in her face all the time.

“When she was 3 and 4 she was beginning to ask questions about why he is not here and when he will come home. I told her I was not sure when, that he has business in Beirut. But she had a very good idea about him. There are pictures of him all over the house.”

She laughed. “When they released him, he was without a beard and she was confused,” she said.

Jesse Turner said he has not yet talked to his daughter about his ordeal, but he believes she is old enough to have some idea of what happened to him.

“She made a couple of comments that told me she had some understanding,” he said. “I think she knows the word hostage, although I don’t think she quite understands what it means. She was asking me today about something with me, where I was. I don’t want to tell her too much. I told her that I just couldn’t come back.”

He said she is beginning to show him some affection, but he is trying to move very slowly. “I don’t give her a bath or put her to bed--I don’t think she’d let me do that yet,” he said. “I wouldn’t try it right now. I think it would scare her. I help her on with her coat, minor things like that.”

But Turner said he is confident that, with time, life with his daughter will work out just fine:

“I think the best is yet to come.”

Times Staff Writer Ron Harris in Los Angeles contributed to this report.