On a personal note

(I need to get something off my chest. So excuse me while a share a personal narrative.)

My sister, Trish, still lives in the house we mostly grew up in. It’s been the family home since 1922: my grandparents moved in a few months after it was built. My mother was brought up there and, when my parents separated, she brought us to England to live with Nanny and Granpa.

Six years ago, Trish was rummaging through some old papers when she came across a bundle of letters my father had written after we’d left the States. She was shocked when she found them, distraught when she read them and shattered by the truths they pointed to.

Trish and I have since learnt that a lot of the things we’d been told when we were growing up simply weren’t true. In particular, I learnt that I’d been lied to every time I’d asked “Where’s Daddy?” and “Why isn’t Daddy here?” I can remember asking those questions a lot after we came to England. But no one ever told me the truth. And the lies they told weren’t comforting fibs.

“Where’s Daddy?” - “Nobody knows.”
“Why isn’t he here?” – “Ask him that.”
“Why isn’t Daddy here?” - “What! Do you think he cares about you?”

And the big lie, the one that wrapped up all the others in a tight conspiracy, is the lie about how we came to be in England in the first place. No one ever told us the truth about that. We had to find it out for ourselves. And when we did, it broke us.

Does it matter what happened over forty years ago? It does when you’ve been lied to about it your whole life. It matters very much: because trust matters, because respect matters and because truth matters. And, most importantly, because I was taught that those things matter by people who lied to me for years.

The truth is my sister and I were abducted.

How do you come to terms with something like that? I really don’t know. But I'm fed up of suffering in silence.