It has been several years since my last post here and I am so pleased to be able to report that the unease has greatly eased! My own motherhood and lots of work on healing and moving forward, has brought me to a better place. I have matured and grown as a person, and my mother and I have done lots of work separately and together on healing the wounds that kept up bound to the past and in stagnation.
I am writing a memoir about my abduction (due 2017) and I have learned so much in the process of writing. Acceptance, love, healing, moving forward. It has been excruciatingly painful at times. I have reconnected with my father after 20+ years apart and it has been so painful to see his life deteriorating in sickness and loneliness in his tiny one-room apartment in Jerusalem, his new home. A documentary film about our story came out in 2015, called Sarah Cecilie, and it was helpful to find a path toward forgiveness and reconciliation with the man I hated and feared for so long.
He is flawed, perpetually defensive, and deeply wounded. I can move on now. I can take in the love that he has always had for me and allow it to nurture me, while at the same time let go of the many illusions I had about how his version of our life story would mesh with mine. He holds fast to his position and I stand clear in mine. He has mumbled a few words of apology only to add hateful words of pain to them. "Why don't you and your brothers thank me for all I did for you?" He asks. "I shouldn't have bothered," he says.
"I love you, Ta," I tell him. I don't bother to argue anymore. I love him despite his lack of ability to take responsibility for his actions that wrecked two families and caused so much unnecessary pain. He hurts, and therefore he has hurt others. It is not an excuse, but an explanation.
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