I recently received the new age progressions of my missing children. I should be used to this by now as they have been gone for 35 years. But it is still a shock when I see the pictures. This time I knew they were coming. I was able to prepare for it, control the setting I saw them in, and made sure I was able to have time to process the mixture of grief, depression, marvel, and hope. But it still took my breath away for how long I am not sure. My children were abducted by their father when they were 2 1/2 and almost 4 years old. They are 37 and 39 years old now. They are adults probably with children that are as old or older than they were when they were taken.
People say that time flies. I don’t agree. I think when you have a missing loved one, time stops, goes sometimes painfully slowly, and then sometimes makes a violent jerk forward leaving you barely holding yourself together. An age progression is such a time. Since my boys were abducted the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) have updated their “pictures” several times. I am extremely appreciative of that. It is an important tool to help find them. NCMEC also assists in distributing those pictures in places that the children might be. Readers of this page and others who share the pictures on social media are very helpful too. After all, it was a picture on a poster of one of my boys that did help us locate him one time although law enforcement was not able to get there before they disappeared again. So, the age progressions are something that generates hope for a better future. And the pictures are indeed a marvel. It is amazing that an artist can show us, with oftentimes remarkable accuracy, what someone might look like in 35 years.
But NCMEC is only able to generate a new age progressions every 7 years. So, the first time they were done my toddlers became young teens overnight. These pictures, for whatever reasons, I was not forewarned about. So, when I saw the pictures by sheer happenstance it was like they were abducted all over again. Who were these young boys and what happened to my babies? The next time I was also unprepared for. As a left-behind parent, you get very attached to your children’s pictures. For many of us it is all we have. So, you grieve the loss of that old picture you had in your mind. You grieve the loss of the missing seven years with them, the things that you will never get to experience because your children are now past that stage in their lives. You are angry again at the abducting parent that took this away from you and took having their mother in their lives away from them. You feel very guilty and depressed that 7 years have passed and all the things you have done and others who have worked so hard with you have done still has not produced the desired results. You still do not know if your children are safe. You are afraid that there might be a need for another age progression in another 7 years.
In my children’s case, there was a need for more age progressions. These I was better prepared for, but the emotions are still there, and the new pictures still take time to process. But the hope is also still there. I need to believe that this is what my boys look like now. That they are smiling well-adjusted adults who are leading happy lives. I know that for many abducted children, even those taken by a parent, their life on the run is not at all a pleasant existence. But these stories are very frightening and what gets me though the days and years is the hope that these “pictures” bring. So please share them far and wide. We do not know where they are at present, not even sure they are in the United States. You may know them, or someone you know may have met them. Please let us know so that my boys know that their mother has never stopped looking for them and neither has their large extended family and many friends that they haven’t met yet.