Tom and Rita’s Story

I have written before about the evils of parental kidnapping, and how it is used as a weapon against parents who have won joint or full custody of their children. The gloomy procession of heart-breaking stories is never-ending: parents who have their lives destroyed because one day their children just disappeared, taken away in an act of vengeance and hate; children taken from their homes, taken to other states, other countries even, many times with their names and identities changed, children who lost one of their parents forever, unnatural orphans of living parents.

Because most of these stories have a sad ending, finding one with a happy conclusion is an uplifting experience. Recently I found one of those stories (Cabbie Hailed for Donating Kidney).

Tom Chappell, a Phoenix, Arizona cab driver, had to drive for the same always bad-humored client for a period of two months. Every time this client, named Rita, called the agency for a taxi, it was Tom who was dispatched. But when he realized that he was always driving Rita to a medical office to receive dialysis, he understood that her constant bad humor was the result of a severe kidney condition and the therapy she had to undertake in order to survive.

When he learned that Rita needed a kidney transplant, and that none of her friends or family was a suitable donor, Tom offered himself as a donor. Although Rita believed that Tom probably would not be a match, the required tests were run, and when the results came back, as Tom quotes, the doctors told them that “…if it was any closer we’d be siblings”.

Two important things resulted from this experience. First, that the surgery is planned for later this year and Rita will have the kidney that she so desperately needs. Second and most important, through the tests that were done for the transplant they discovered that the closeness between Tom and Rita was not accidental: they are father and daughter. Thirty years ago, after an ugly divorce, Tom’s ex wife took their daughter and disappeared. Now, thirty years after, and thanks to Tom’s act of generosity, father and daughter found each other precisely in a moment when, in Tom’s words, part of the reason he offered Rita his kidney in the first place is because he figured he did not have a whole lot more to live for anyway. But as he told Rita, “This has not just given you a new life. It’s given me another life.”

Never give up. Never lose hope.

Kidnap As an Instrument of Punishment

Recently it has become notorious the case on which a Brazilian woman, Bruna Bianchi Carneiro Ribeiro, who lived and was married in New Jersey, kidnaps her child and takes him to Brazil (http://www.redbank.com/blog/sean-goldman-usa-parental-abduction-brazil), forcing the father to engage in an intense international legal fight to recover his child. Thanks to this sad case, there is now a public discussion of the great problem of parental kidnapping.

Although there are international laws against parental kidnapping, these are poorly enforced and frequently manipulated for the convenience of the kidnapping parent, who usually takes the child to his/her country of origin. Ironically, in the above quoted case, Bruna remarried in Brazil, this time with an attorney specialized in family law, who has even spoken at The Hague on the issue of parental kidnapping. Bruna dies and is this attorney who has stopped the child of being reunited with his father. Human nature never ceases to be perverse.

I also say that we should use this opportunity to discuss the negative effect that the physical distance between separated parents has on the children and on the bond between them and their parents, specially with their fathers. I say this, because in very few states (I only know the case of Pennsylvania) there are laws that stop that a parent with joint custody could leave the state where he/she lives, putting this way distance between the children and the other parent.

Kidnapping their children is a tactic that many women use once they loose the custody of their children to their father. And moving out, sometimes thousands of miles away, is a strategy frequently used by mothers once joint custody is awarded to the father of their children. What is the difference between kidnapping children and taking them to where it will be impossible for them to stay in contact with their fathers?

In the movie Jarhead, there is a scene on which the soldiers, already in a camp in the desert, put something like a wall of shame, on which they put pictures of the women that that have betrayed them. One of the pictures show a women with a child, with the words: “I loved her and she took my kid and disappeared.”

Next time your ex-spouse tells you the she will take your children where you cannot see them, do not ignore her. Maybe it is not a threat. Maybe it is a plan.