A love letter for the life
that never was

Present day.

So my Darlings,

It is time. I must say goodbye.

I can no longer pretend that you will ever return to me. The young children who left are gone; they no longer exist and haven’t been in my embrace for a quarter of a century.

It will soon be twenty-five years since you were kidnapped from me; from your country, your family and friends and all you held as touchstones of safety and normalcy.

There has now passed a lifetime. A lifetime that you would never live, though I had imagined it – as parents are wont to do – before you were taken and, after, if imperfectly.

We were all cheated, denied the chance to envision the ‘possible’, just as you were old enough to begin to imagine and plan and fail and try again. You were cheated of choice – and that is something I shall never forgive nor forget.

Life was meant to be yours to determine, to be nudged by me towards a journey of self-discovery, to find your true potential and motivation for love and fulfilment.

Bugger that twaddle: I just wanted you to have the guts to inhale life and spit out the parts you hated, to take risks and then find your feet even when you fell and needed a salve for your wounded pride.

I wanted you to have the faith in my love as your parent to be authentic people, to respond with immediacy to your inner voices and be ‘real’ – or whatever that meant to you. To feel, really feel and not be afraid of yourselves or others.

I wanted you to find compassion that flowed from a deep well of empathy, not splutter from a perceived duty to pay lip service to social and royal cues.

No box ticking, no calculations, and no subservience to what you have been told, taught, bullied or indoctrinated into thinking. Independent thought, Australian style.

Love and passion and joy as we know it, as your family here knows it to be: the messy, squishy, risk-taking sensuality of exploration and unadulterated infatuation with the ‘possible’ of love and life that makes your heart beat faster and your breath catch in your throat.

I wanted you to have faith in yourselves: to trust yourself and others without need for artifice, as a natural sentiment to help you stand firm against doubt. I wanted you to learn humility and acknowledge vulnerability without being crushed by the weight of others’ expectations of you.

Oh, my Darlings, wisdom and pragmatism must now take the place of hope and familiarity in my heart. Hope is extinguished. We are strangers to each other, made all the stranger by the fact that we’re not – or weren’t meant to be.

Someone ‘unjoined’ the dots.

I can no longer discern the patterns of your lives. The trajectories of your lives’ journey have been interrupted for too long, and now, forever. I will never understand what makes you tick or how and why you reason and react as you do. And though I have tried, perhaps foolishly, I have failed to find my boy and girl in the man and woman you have become.

So I must let go.

The unfettered joy of youth and the ‘possible’ evaporated for us all in 1992 – replaced by self-conscious positioning, calculated responses and aristocratic reserve where once there was natural emotion and constant, true connection.

Rage, rage, rage – fury and anger hold a foundation in your core and must be recognised to be quelled. I am so sorry that I cannot rock away the pain as I did when you were babies, if I could take it all into my soul I would, and in so doing, banish the demons of distress and loss and ‘what-ifs’ – for us all.

How I wish that our ‘possible’ had remained within our reach. How I wish that you had grown up here, with me, in Australia. How I would give my right arm to know – to believe – that you had lived an authentic existence just like all your friends here who grew and experimented and laughed at their own callow stupidity or successes, along with we who witnessed them.

I wonder if you are fully cognisant of what you lost on 9th July, 1992.

I believe that freedom of thought is paramount to intellectual and emotional growth and happiness – but at seven and nine years old, you were only just beginning to tentatively challenge the world around you.

Now, I fear, you never will.

Not like Australian children who roll with the punches and are allowed to make mistakes in order to cultivate resilience.

We all lost so much two decades ago – now I know you never came back and never will, but I will love you always and forever … as you were.

Goodbye, God Bless,

Mummy xx