I recorded and finally watched the Jaycee Dugard interview with Diane Sawyer last weekend.

After my travels through rage, heartbreak, and tears, I sat at my computer to emotionally rant about the despicable reality that the cesspools of society  are afforded more respect and rights that those who are their victims.   I yelled, screamed, ranted and cried my way through a very emotional post.

And then I stepped away from the computer, tired and spent, promising I would post my words the next day.

I am glad I did.  I reread the post right before it went live and decided that I was doing no one any favors.  All I did was spout off the exact same feelings that anyone watching it would have had.   All that does is perpetuate the sadness and anger.  In continuing that, I was suppressing Jaycee’s entire reason for doing the interview and writing her book, a stolen life.

To share hope.

Throughout her 18 year ordeal, birth of two daughters to her rapist in the back yard, and her belief that the world “out there” was worst than what she was living through, she still held on to hope.  Hope that one day, she would see her mother again.

She looked at the moon at night and imagined her mother doing the same, grasping onto memories of songs they would sing, sitting side by side on their porch.  I cried as she was talking about it… with a smile on her face.  As if she were still comforted by the thoughts several years out of captivity.

I marveled at her…  well, for lack of a better word, sanity.  I do not think that if I had gone through what she did,  I would be sober, much less sane.

The entire interview she was intelligent, well spoken, composed and reasonable.  I do not know if it is the amazing support she has, the intense therapy she and her girls go through, or just that she is the kind of person who sees things for what they are, categorizes them, and separates the past horrors from the new reality of freedom, real love, and motherhood.

Either way, though angry for her, disappointed in the fact that this was her youth, and the intense need to scream loudly in frustration at ‘the system’, I still draw from her hope.

Almost selfishly, I think.  For it is her – and her mother’s hope – that got her through.

But I still take it and infuse it into my mind.  I have hope that my daughters will never have to suffer harm because her story will, no doubt, cause change.  And so the man, or woman, that would have done this to one of my children will be locked away longer, released less easily, and monitored more stringently.

I borrow the hope that I will remember that childhood is short and that a hug and a kiss take a second, but can last a lifetime.

I steal the hope that my connections with my daughters will comfort them in times of trouble.

But in my thievery, I will always remember the little girl, taken and locked away from the world in a backyard of despicable disgustingness, staring at the moon and holding tightly to the hope that one day, she would be back on that porch swing, singing songs, and staring at it with her mother.

Spreading the message of hope for all to see.