Written by Lone Fathers Admin
Friday, 24 October 2008 06:02
27 December 2006
It is an undeniable natural instinct to protect your children. Here two women debate how far mums should go
By DOMINIQUE SMITH
It is an undeniable natural instinct to protect your children. Here two women debate how far mums should go.
When I gave birth back in September 2004, I . expected to instantly - hear my baby's cry, see her smiling face and be sitting up with her at my breast as soon as she entered the world.
That's not how it turned out. She was whisked away and placed on a table beside me. And there she remained with an oxygen mask for what seemed a lifetime.
I could see the smiling face of my mother and hear my obstetrician telling me how she would now be able to make the trip to Paris for a wedding she was attending.
I kept trying to get up. I told her I had to go over to my baby and feel her breath on my face. To see her move. The obstetrician told me not to get up. That's when something inside me kicked in and I felt this insatiable urge to protect.
I kept asking: "Why can't I hear her crying?" No words of assurance from this fully qualified trained professional could reassure me. They meant nothing. I was not thinking rationally - I had become the lioness shielding her cub. I imagine that is how Canadian Melissa Hawach felt when she allegedly hired mercenaries to , snatch back her children.
A huge part of her and her life had been ripped apart. I don't think a mother in that situation is thinking rationally or is able to reason.
It's hard to remain sensible or feel moderate after finding out your children's father has kidnapped them and is holding them in a foreign, war-torn land. Ms Hawach trusted her ex partner would bring Hannah, 5, I and Cedar, 3, back to Canada I when they were sent to Australia , for a three-week holiday with him.
As a mother you would hope you could trust your children's father. That he would want to put the needs of his children first. Instead he violates that trust and takes the kids to an unstable country.
I could not help but think, who are they with? Do they believe mummy has abandoned them? Is anybody hurting them? They are in war-torn Lebanon away from what is familiar and safe for them.
I would go to any length to keep my child safe from the world and I can understand why Ms Hawach is in hiding. Mothers can be like mercenaries too. The generic term for a mercenary is usually someone with little regard for ideological, national or political considerations.
This is probably true when it comes to your child. When confronted with "such a situation like this, I would probably do the same.
Dominique Smith is a children's entertainer and former childcare worker
By JENNY DILLON
Mother comes naturally to women, , just as fathering comes naturally to men. Together it's called parenting, sharing the responsibility of bringing up children.
Even when relationships go off the rails and parents live apart, there should be no reason why shared parenting cannot continue - regardless of who has custody.
But when the marriage of Melissa and Joseph Hawach broke up several years ago, she took their two children Hannah and Cedar back to her homeland, Canada.
Mr Hawach was left in Australia with no regular contact with the little girls he loved. He had no chance to see them start school, to console them when they lost their first tooth, play their first game of netball. He could not be there on their birthdays, at Christmas time; He couldn't get a hug on his birthday, even as kiss goodnight.
He had no chance to guide them morally, to instill in them the values that he held dear. There's a misguided belief that only a mother can fulfill these many roles.
Yet in an age when we are encouraging our men to find and cultivate their feminine sides, why is it unreasonable to assume that a father can feel no pain, suffer no sense of loss, not experience a deep yearning to be reunited with his children, to maintain the bond established when they were born.
And surely the children should be entitled to feel secure that their father is there for them, to know that while he no longer lives with them he is just down the road, not halfway across the world.
So far in the media coverage of this battle over "ownership" of two little girls, the sympathy lies with the mother and her desperate search for her children.
But surely when Ms Hawach took them to Canada in the first place, denying their father regular access to them, she helped set up the desperate situation both parents and the children now find themselves in.
Why should Mr Hawach and the girls be destined to a future of long periods of separation, with their brief times together consisting of the awkwardness that comes when meeting up with strangers?
While he did the wrong thing to try to hide them in Lebanon especially at the height of the war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas - the tit-for-tat behaviour is, in the end only hurting everyone, especially the children