My parents separated in 1973 when I was 3. We lived in Norway at the time. I lived with my mother but spent many weekends and holidays with my father, who lived a few hundred miles away. My mother often took me to see him, or he would come to see me.

On a visit one weekend just after I turned 4, my father told my mother that he was going to take me out to a park. But we never went to the park or returned to the dinner my mother was preparing for us. He took me to the airport instead, where we boarded a flight to New York.

I cried for my mother, both on the plane and in New York. When I asked my father why my mother wasn't with us, he told me that she didn't want to come but would stay in Norway. I missed her terribly. When I told my father I missed her, he got upset. I started having nightmares and waking up in the middle of the night crying. I had no idea that my mother didn't know where I was. My father told me that she didn't want to see me, and even told me once that she was dead, but later said that she was alive.

I began to forget what my mother looked like, what she was like. In the first year in New York my name was changed, I was converted to a new religion and learned a new language. My mother became a sort of shadow in my mind when I thought about her. It was hard to remember anything about my life with her, and I stopped missing her.

When I was six, things changed again. My father told me that my mother wanted to take me back, which completely confused me. By then she had become a stranger to me, a stranger who was going to take me back to a place and time I felt completely disconnected from. In the meantime, my father convinced me that I was better off without my mother, and told me all kinds of bad things about her. And so my father and I started to live life on the run. For the next 12 years I lived in hiding, running away from a mother I basically had forgotten I loved.

During those 12 years many questions about the past began to form in my mind. It would take many years though to find answers to those questions-answers that really made sense. I saw myself on a missing child poster--I hadn't thought of myself as a missing child before. It made me start to see things in a different way. It made me question my father's actions. Why had he taken me exactly? Why were we running? Am I a missing child like the other missing children on milk bottles? Was my mother really that bad that we had to run from her for so many years? I also began to question my father's tendency to exaggerate when anyone or anything made him angry, and this made me think that maybe his taking me away from my mother was an act of out-of-control anger, and unnecessary. Hidden memories began to surface, loving memories of my mother buried inside of me. I slowly began to realize that something was very wrong with what was going on. I knew my father loved me and that he wasn't a horrible person, but at the same time began to realize that what he did was done for the wrong reasons.

I thought about contacting my mother, but was nervous about it. I had no real idea what she was like 12 years after I had last seen her, and was worried that my father would go to jail, so I just avoided the whole issue by not contacting her at all for a while.

With time though, I began to I realize that there was no real reason for me to have to choose between my parents. I had two parents. I deserved two parents. I wasn't afraid anymore to have what I deserved. At 18 I finally made a call to my mother. Phase two of the drama of my life thus began to unfold.

Over the next few years my mother and I established a relationship, but it took time. Looking back, the closer she tried to get the more I pushed her away. I can only imagine my mother's pain when I didn't include her in my life right away, but it was going to take time. I had too many feelings to go through first. I did not really know what to do with all the feelings I had-feelings about my father, my mother, what had happened-it was overwhelming to deal with them all.

The hardest thing to deal with was that my father had led me to feel that my mother was somehow dangerous to me. He couldn't get over his feelings about the divorce and let them go, and dragged me into his problems and tried to make me feel guilty about wanting a normal life that included a mom. It took time to really let it sink in that all kids have a right to a relationship with each of their parents, that my dad had made a mistake by taking me away, and that I could disobey his wishes to have me hate or dislike everything or everyone that he didn't like. I felt like a bad daughter for a while, and the guilt was overwhelming. But I've since realized that just because he's my father doesn't mean he's always right about everything, and that we could disagree. Parents are just people, and people make mistakes.

Today my mom and I are close. We share our lives with each other, and I think she's a really neat person. Looking back, I can really see now that what happened was unnecessary, like I thought many years before. I still live in New York because it feels comfortable for now, but I love Norway (where my mom lives and where I was taken from) and am learning the language again (it's hard!). I'm getting to know what the other half of me is all about, and it's fun and exciting. I don't feel so torn anymore. I've come to recognize that I don't have to choose between my parents. I can make my own decisions about who I want to love and spend time with, without guilt and without fear.