I remember. It's complicated.
The kidnapper was a family member. He took me from daycare, wasn't himself, things were scary and wrong. I didn't have the words to say I was being kidnapped, but I understood I was being taken away, and at the airport I knew he was taking me far away from my mommy (which is when I made the comment about him being in trouble when she found out). I remember the long flight, wanting to play with the crying baby on the flight that never seemed to end, the adults screaming and crying when the plane almost crashed on landing. The RCMP eventually were involved. I remember the jail, the jail bars, and the kidnapper joking with me that they took his shoelaces away so he couldn't hang himself.
In a normal family being found would have been the end of it. But there's my ''family''.
We had flown to the other side of the country, so I stayed with family members in that province, but they were the kidnapper's side of the family and didn't like mom. She argued with RCMP to keep me out of foster care there, devil you know kind of thing. I just remember the whole jail thing, and thinking he wasn't even in real trouble yet because mommy would be way angrier and scarier than the cops when she got there. His family members restricted access to her mom (living in the same city), didn't tell mom that my hair had been chopped off, etc. Things were still wrong and I knew it, but they were nice to me. We went to pick wild blueberries and baked them into a pie, and had a bowl of blueberries in milk with sugar on top. Once we were reunited Mom took me to get the little hair I had left ''styled'', and made sure everyone told me it was ''pretty''. I heard that word a lot before we flew home.
I come from violence, on all sides and multiple generations, so I don't particularly remember being abused or seeing violence during that month+... I'm sure it was there, but it was just normal life for me.
