Hostages

The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) have been holding Colombia's former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt, for six years. A captive recently released by FARC reported that Betancourt has hepatitis B and a tropical skin ailment, and the Colombian news is reporting that she's close to death. French diplomats and doctors flew to Colombia to try to save her life, but Rodrigo Granda, a senior leader of FARC, said that prisoner exchange was the only option for freeing Betancourt.

The Colombian military says it's ready to help facilitate the French doctors' finding and treating Ingrid Betancourt, who in the AP photo looks emaciated and frail, sitting on a chair made of roughly-cut, small logs tied together in front of a practically empty plank table -- a glass of something sits on the far end, but its contents are unidentifiable. Her hands are clasped on her lap, and her clothes don't fit now, if they ever did. Her hair falls thick to her lap, emphasizing the anorexically thin look of her arms. Her eyes are cast to the floor. It is impossible to tell if she has any spirit left; if she looked up, we may see it, but this is no evidence either way.

I wondered, as I read the article and looked at the picture -- one of the most striking images I've seen in a newspaper -- whether she would want this, all of this struggle on her behalf. I wondered whether she would want to be saved. Would it be enough to have doctors lay kind hands on her for moments, or hours, and then to leave again? Would it give her strength and hope to see them, or would it finish her off? To be so close to freedom and then closed off from it again, what would that do to her?

Would she prefer to die, now, the unmoving, unsmiling martyr, or to have to fight her way back to life and health and hope and happiness -- and who knows when?

It's been six years.

But I guess it was longer for me. When I think about it, my captivity lasted at least seven.

It's true what they say about just not having another option, those heroes who jump into riptides or run into burning houses to save people. I never ran toward her, toward home, but I can see the mentality in my past -- the waiting and watching and the barely suppressed hope of escape were, themselves, inescapable. I could not have shaken them, even for easier things like drugs or boyfriends or whatever people use to make their lives seem easier.

I had books. I had school. I had church, and God. I had a few friends. I had an entrenched and inexplicable desire to be better. I still have this. I did not try to find other answers because for me there was no question. Life was simply not easy.

I asked my mom the other day, under the guise of applying for health insurance, what her biological mother had died of. (It was complications from a stroke.) I remember getting the call at college, Mom saying she was at the hospital with Uncle John and that they were about to pull the plug, but it never occurred to me to ask what they were pulling it for. Her mother was never enough of a person to me to warrant a cause of death, I suppose. Her body, when they did unplug the machines keeping it alive, was donated to science. My mom watched the monitor flatline -- I imagine a green screen suddenly sounding its one long, high tone as the hill-and-valley spikes indicating a heartbeat are driven off the screen by a plain, straight line -- from outside the hospital room. She was never good at facing death.

This, her mother's death, though, I think might have seemed a relief to her.

Grandma -- my grandma, who agreed at my birth to be a surrogate, and has always been my only and true grandmother -- has told me stories over the years, things she heard about my mom's growing up, before Mom ended up with Grandma and Grandpa at fifteen, for a year.

The stories are all the same: Mom wanders to her older siblings' school at three, naked, to find someone to care for her and to find food, and my aunt's teacher puts a smock on her and returns her at the end of the day, to her home; Mom sits on the kitchen table, stealing stale bread from the cats; Mom is abused by male relatives.

Mom tells stories every now and then, when she's caught off guard, and only ones she thinks are funny -- like the time her special birthday hat fell off into the toilet when she was sick on her birthday, at a group home, one year. She laughed and laughed when she told us this story, but it made me feel that strange sort of shuddering sickness I always feel when I hear about good being wasted. It made me want to gather up my child-Mom in my arms and hold her, hard, against me. It made me angrier than almost anything that had been done to me, the loss of her hat; it became all that I hated and raged against -- for her and for myself.

If I did not love my mother (my captor), it may have been easy to turn away from hope, but I do love her -- I have always loved her -- and I cannot forget the connection.

Mom was held hostage by her mother, her father, her abusive and reprehensible relatives, and then by foster homes and group homes and orphanages, and I was held hostage by her. She was held by their hatred and selfishness and vindictiveness, and I was held by hers. She became what they wanted her to be -- emotions turned on and off like water from the tap, manipulation like second nature, dissociated from the reality of her self -- and I became what she wanted: her good parent.

If my two brothers -- the youngest more than the middle -- were my charges as much as my mom's, she was mine, too. They three were like my children.

One of my team leaders my second year in China said once, explaining why she hadn't started having kids until her late thirties, that she had already raised one family: her siblings, growing up. I nodded slowly as she talked, not realizing I was doing it until she had stopped.

Maybe this is why I never thought about whether I wanted children or not, I thought. It wasn't that I had decided that I didn't want them, or did want them, or wanted them but not right now; wanting was beside the point, it seemed. The question was nonsensical and I dismissed it out of hand.

Maybe it's because I already had them.

Maybe this is the difference between my mom's captivity and my own. Maybe being held by these people, my family, the way a parent is held by her children, is what has saved me. Wanting the best for them, despite them, has saved me.

I am hoping, then, that my mother is less relieved than sad that her mother is dead, despite her mother's vindictive and flagrant abuse.

I am hoping that in the incomparably more extreme hostage-life of Ingrid Betancourt, in the photo with her eyes turned down, she is thinking kindly of the people she knew and knows, and wishing goodness on them, and I hope this is giving her strength.