Tiffany
My family has always been extremely dysfunctional. I was born to a drug addict and dealer. My father, at least since I can remember, was always very abusive to my mother. After their divorce, things were great with my mom, sister and I, until my mother was in a horrific car accident. My mother was completely disabled from the waist down and could not even get out of bed. She knew at the time that she could not take care of my sister and I so she looked to as many family members and friends for help. My bachelor uncle was willing to take one of us and my father was only will to take me (he has always denied that my sister was his). Not thinking that my father would treat me badly, my mother sent me to my father’s home in Texas and my sister to my uncle’s home in Northern California. I was only supposed to be there for three weeks while my mother was learning to walk again. When I first got to Texas, my father’s family threw a huge party to celebrate me visiting them. I was the only girl in the family so I was treated like a princess but after the three weeks passed, my father and I moved and I was not allowed to speak to my mother. I was then treated like a slave. I had to take care of 13 people within three homes and I was only seven years old. My father did not believe that women deserve an education so I only attended three days of school within nine and a half months. I remember one day that I was at my aunt’s house alone and my mother called. She told me not to tell anyone but she was going to come and save me. After a month passed, I forgot that she had called. I was also sexually abused by my sixteen year old cousin who still to this day has not been prosecuted. On the second from the last day of school, the state of Texas made my father take me to school(since I had missed so much). My mother walked in to my class and said that I could go home with her but I would have to leave all of my toys and friends in Texas. We both cried and I said that I wanted to go home with her. As we were walking away from my classroom, I remember my teacher telling my mom to be sure and sign me out of school. We walked right past the office and my mom told me not to say a word. We walked out to a small car with my uncle and cousin in it. My uncle drove us 8 hours to Austin, Texas and my mom and I caught a flight with nothing but the clothes on our backs. While my mom and I were on our flight, my uncle called my father and told him that I was with my mother. I later found out that the U.S. coast guard helped to find me. I still have not met any of the people that helped to save me except my mother and...
read moreSheri
Even after everything I’ve been through and the trust issues that accompany my childhood, I really do believe that people are generally well-meaning. They want to be there for their friends and family emotionally, but when there is a true rift between life experiences sometimes it’s hard for them to really grasp what another is feeling. This has been my experience. Until joining Take Root recently, I had never spoken to another person, other than my brother, who truly understood the ghosts that haunt me on a daily basis. Even the most well meaning of friends and family have always seemed to have the unasked (and oftentimes actually asked) questions of, “It’s over now. It’s been over for 20 years. Why can’t you get over it? Why does this still bother you?” What they don’t understand is what I had to give up just to be who I am and with the family I was supposed to be with. Essentially, I gave up childhood. At 10 years old I was told, “This is it. That part of your life is done. Move on to your new life now.” Kind of sounds like what a normal person does when they move from childhood to their adult life, right? So, basically that’s what I did. Don’t get me wrong. . . I still DID things kids were supposed to do, had fun, broke rules, drove my dad crazy, but that carefree childhood that everyone is entitled to was taken away from me and adult emotions were left in it’s place. I gave up an entire lineage. I adore my Dad and my family, but most people have TWO sides to their family. I have no mother. She’s dead to me, but still alive. My daughter will grow up without that grandmother just as I’ve grown up without a mother. To date I’ve still lost my younger half-brother (although I will never give up hope on that one). I have NO IDEA who my family even is on that side. I’ve never even met anyone on my mother’s side of the family. I can’t even completely fill out a medical record when I go to a new doctor when it asks for family history. I gave up MY history. I didn’t have a bad childhood with my abducting parent. Granted, I didn’t have an actual relationship with HER that I can really remember, but my relationship with my stepfather (or my “daddy”) was better than most little girls get with their real dads. I adored and despised my brothers alternately, just like any little girl is supposed to do. As an adult I see what my mother’s emotional abuse did to me and how it warped my perception of myself and others, but as a child . . . Quite honestly I just wasn’t THAT self aware. The point is, I thought we were happy. I thought I had a wonderful family. But now I can’t even look back at what really were happy times without being incredibly sad, because that time and that family and that little girl are gone. And because I know how much my Dad and that part of my family had to give up for me to have those times, which makes me feel guilty for even considering them happy times at all. And so I bury them. I bury them along with the Sheri that died in Canton, GA in November 1989. “Sheri, I’m not your father.” . . . Those are the words that killed her. This was after my Daddy drove down the road to get away from all the cop cars that were taking up our yard when we came home from dinner that night. Five words and one little...
read moreScatt
When I was three and a half years old, two men in black coats and hats lifted me up by the arms off the front lawn of our home. . .
read moreSam
My brother was born in December of 1958. I was born in June, 1962. At age 1-1/2, my parents separated. My father was extremely jealous and occasionally hit my mother. She says the last straw was when the dog, Moe, knocked my brother down a flight of stairs and my father ran for the dog first. At age 3, their divorce was final. My mother got custody while my father had weekend visitation rights. After one of those visits, I asked my mother, “what if Daddy doesn’t bring us back some Sunday? She moved to calm my fears by assuring me that he always would – the court had ordered it. Not long after that, of course, we didn’t return to my mom. My father, brother and I headed due North in his Volkswagen Beetle in March, 1969. We arrived somewhere in Canada, where my brother fondly remembers hockey games with our dad and I vividly remember ice-fishing. Not too long after that, probably in the summer of ’69, we drove across country and landed in Seattle, Washington. We had an apartment there, and Dan and I entered school. Life seemed fairly normal. My recollection is fuzzy about what we were told had happened to our mom. I think at first we were told that we were going on vacation with our dad, and then later, I believe he told us that our mom had died. I do not remember the conversation. I do not remember ever grieving, or maybe not even understanding it, but no one ever tried to contact her. In Seattle, we were joined by my father’s girlfriend, Sally. I do recall her asking us if we wanted to call her “Mom.” That was out of the question, so she remained Sally. My brother and I established friendships, raced the bus to school on some days, and mostly, got wet a lot in the Seattle rain. Meanwhile, back in Pittsburgh, our poor mother was going crazy trying to find us. She had a job, but worked day and night trying to get us back. She made phone calls, sent thousands of letters, hired private investigators, alerted the police, FBI, media, everyone. She even wrote to J. Edgar Hoover and Pat Nixon. Being a divorcee in the ’60s, official help was hard for her to come by. Most authorities seemed to feel that the “boys were with their father,” and this was a domestic dispute, so there was not a need for their involvement. There were no missing kids on milk cartons in those days. No National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to help her. She did, however, get help from a Pittsburgh policewoman named Teresa Rocco. I think her help and support, along with her family, meant a lot to my mom. They stuffed and mailed fliers to every school in the U.S. and Japan (my father served in the military there). When the flier first arrived at our school in Seattle, supposedly, the principal didn’t recognize us. But, as fate would have it, several months later in December of 1969, the folder containing our photos was opened, or fell open, in his office while the Assistant Principal was there. He instantly recognized us. They were hesitant about what to do, since they didn’t know who was the good guy or bad guy in this scenario. Fortunately, they phoned my mother and she leaped into action. Since she hadn’t had much support from the authorities up to that point, she decided not to involve them in our recapture and instead, flew to Seattle on the...
read moreRick
I was born in early 1951, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the son of an Argentine attorney married to an American woman (one of three sisters from Brooklyn, all of whom met and married men from Argentina). I was raised in Buenos Aires, speaking Spanish as my native language, and starting to speak English at around age three. When I was three and a half, I contracted polio, and was totally paralyzed. I gradually recovered all functions in my upper body and arms, and regained some limited function in my right leg. My improvement stopped at age seven, and I have walked with two crutches and using a long leg brace on my left leg ever since. My mother kidnapped me when I was six years old. Since she had been bringing me back to the States for medical treatment since I had polio three years earlier, traveling from Argentina to the States seemed in no way unusual. After we had been in the States for a couple of weeks, my mother told me that she had some terrible news; she said that my father and my grandparents ( father’s mother and father ) had all been killed in a car accident, and that we would simply stay in the States and would not be returning to Argentina. What my father found when he returned home from his office on the evening that we had left was a letter from my mother, informing him that he would never see either her or his only son again, and that he should simply forget about us. He also discovered shortly thereafter that she had cleaned out all of their bank accounts, leaving him totally and utterly broke. For the next several years, my father devoted virtually all of his time, energy, and whatever money he could scrape together to finding us. Since he had no way to raise money other than by trying to rebuild his law practice, he worked as much as he could, and did most of the searching through private investigators he would retain in the States. His best friend and confidant, who was a Catholic priest in Argentina, came to my father and told him that since my father needed to keep working, he (the priest) would gladly travel to the States to look for my mother and myself, if only my father would pay his expenses. This priest indicated that he could search for us more inexpensively than the P. I.’s that my father had been using. This seemed like a good idea, so my father funded several such trips for this priest. On each trip, the priest reported making progress, and often reported just barely missing us but being hot on our trail. What my father didn’t know until we had been gone for a couple of years was that my mother actually had been having an affair with the priest, that he had been actively involved in helping her plan the kidnapping, and that when he was “searching” for us (on my father’s nickel), he actually was living with us and continuing his affair with my mother. I don’t clearly remember at what point my mother told me that my father and grandparents were still alive. When she did, her story became that she feared being found by them. Her belief was that as an American citizen, she would certainly be granted custody in any custody hearing held here in the States. However, even a US court would likely grant my father the right to take me to Argentina during vacations. Under Argentine law, fathers...
read moreMic
My father was a criminal long before he abducted my siblings and I. It is hard now for me to believe there was a time in which I may have loved him. I know my attempt to put this story to words will not succeed in conveying even a small percentage of the evil he has inflicted on those who have had the misfortune to know him. I was born aboard a 32 ft boat while crossing the Atlantic Ocean with my parents and 10-month-old sister. My father choose this method of travel because my mother was an illegal and my parents could not marry because my father already had a wife and child in the US. A dark cloud hangs over this time as accusations of a crime of a much more serious nature had occurred. My father in his obsession with possessing my mother never felt he had enough control over her. During our time in the USA, my mother gave birth to two sons. All were born at home with no medical care. My father theorized that the more children a woman had with a man the more tied she was to him. This time was full of emotional and physical abuse to both mother and children. Children were always a means of control for him. The abuse began to escalate and my mother finally decided she had to take action to escape him or he may kill her. She discovered my father had never signed her papers to apply for citizenship so she had no real legal rights in this country. All documentation related to my siblings and I declared only my father as a parent. This time is the most violent in my memory. My father beat up my mother and she sported a black eye on multiple occasions. My mother went to the police with information on the crime mentioned before. My father was arrested and held while the police questioned both mother and children. They questioned us on where my father’s gun was located. My mother would not tell. I feared for my mother’s life so I told them. I was only eight or nine at the time. My mother chastised me for disclosing this information later. I was confused and scared. Earlier that week my father had tried to run her off the road while we were in the car with him. I remember it all. My father was let out on bail several days later and my mother went right back to him. My father chastised me for telling the police where his gun was located. I always wondered why he had not beaten or killed me for this. I guess the police where watching…we moved soon afterwards, in an attempt to get out of the jurisdiction of that police department. We started a new school. When I asked why we were moving, my mother told me it was because of me. Shortly after moving, my father took us to visit his mother in North Carolina. This was without my mother, as they did not get along. While we were there, we observed him listening in on my mothers phone conversations. He bugged the phone. My father packed us up and took us to Mexico. He changed our names, forged many documents and we were on the run. It was open season on us. First order of business was to brainwash the children. He told us of how our mother was trying to kill us. Of how she didn’t love us, of how she was having sex with every police...
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