April 14th 2010

I quietly mark the 36th anniversary of my abduction on this day. There is an ache that won´t go away today. I ache for all the broken children affected by divorce and custody conflicts, forced to tear a hole in their souls by having to choose which of their parents to love.

This breaks children´s hearts. It broke mine, as with each passing day after April 14th 1974, the memories of my mother´s love got weaker. I forgot her face, her language, her family. It all faded as I was told terrible things about her, untrue things, and read the hatred on my father´s face. She became a stranger to me, a faceless stranger, as I struggled to survive my new life, life on the run. I was running away from my own mother.

I went along with the lies because I was too innocent to believe that my own father would betray my trust. And because I had no real choice. As I stopped missing her because I could not remember her, I absorbed my father´s hatred and made it my own. I became afraid of her as she became a faceless stranger who wanted to take me to a place I no longer identified with, and I became afraid to lose the life I had come to know. So I rejected her, hated her, to keep my father´s love. He was all I had, or so I thought for a long time.