The lawn surrounding the house where Melissa Hawach lives is littered with the stuff of a young family - a netted trampoline, a tree house, bikes, a plastic jungle gym. As if on cue, a parcel of deer silently moves across the grass beyond a spinney of mature pine trees. The scene of idyllic life in the foothills of the Rockies, west of Calgary, could not be more perfect.
Yet the story that brought Ms. Hawach, 33, and her family here, reunited, was far from peaceful. On July 1, 2006, 10 months after she and her husband of six years, Joseph Hawach, had separated, he took their two young children, Hannah and Cedar, then 5 and 2, on a holiday to visit his Lebanese-Australian family in Sydney, Australia.
When she waved goodbye to them at the Calgary airport, she expected to see them in three weeks. It would be six months before she held them again. She would have to hire eight lawyers in three different countries and, later, a team of mercenary soldiers to locate the children in a resort in Lebanon, where their father had taken them at the height of the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict.
The story would make headlines around the world, and Angelina Jolie would express interest in playing Ms. Hawach in a movie version of the drama.
"None of us signed on for this much drama. He just thought he would scare me enough that I would sign over [sole] custody to him," Ms. Hawach says of her ex-husband.
When she got the children back to Canada, she had a debt of close to $750,000 and was on the verge of bankruptcy.
In her new book, Flight of the Dragonfly: A Mother's Harrowing Journey to Bring her Daughters Home, Ms. Hawach describes the frustrations she encountered with the Hawach family in Australia, who stonewalled her efforts to find her children, and with ineffective enforcement agencies, namely Interpol.
Asked what her greatest lesson was from the ordeal, she allows a long pause. Seated in the living room, in the middle of a domestic blizzard - including a cat, more plastic toys, and Cedar, now a talkative and outgoing 4-year-old - Ms. Hawach is calm and composed.
She has a new baby, Tristan, six-month-old boy, with her partner, Patrick Lalande, who was with her throughout the kidnapping ordeal. "The nice thing is that the world is still a really good place, despite this happening. For all the mistrust I should be feeling, I got so much trust and support back from people."
Still, Ms. Hawach has learned how to be tough and the importance of listening to her instincts. "Follow your gut," she says as advice for divorcing parents. She admits to suffering a lot of guilt for not paying attention to her doubts about her ex's actions as he prepared to take the girls on holiday. In the highly emotional period when she was making decisions about how to retrieve the children, she also had to trust her instincts.
The mercenaries suggested ambushing the hotel room where the children lived with their father and grandmother in Lebanon. Concerned about the psychological effect on the kids, she refused.
She waited until a moment presented itself when she could approach the girls casually as they were playing outside with a babysitter. She called to her elder daughter, who ran to her. The younger one followed. The unsuspecting babysitter allowed them to go with their mother, who took them into hiding until they could return to Canada, where the father had been charged with abduction.
A few months after her return, he contacted her, asking to speak to his daughters. She outlined the conditions for his contact with them, which a psychologist had helped her draft. Currently in Australia, he eventually complied.
