1
CALGARY — 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.
He had to apologize to them for taking them away from their mother. He is not allowed to ask where they go to school.
Later, standing outside, Ms. Hawach admits she was overwhelmed with anger once the abduction came to a close. Her ex-husband had been abusive, verbally and on occasion physically, and while she wants to believe he will do the right thing, she is not sure he will.
She expresses some discomfort with writing a book, which was heavily edited for possible libel, that exposes the abuse in their marriage and the shocking tale of how he and his family acted during the abduction.
"I wrote him an e-mail before it was published in Australia, a heads-up, and I explained that this is one of the projects I had to do for me and the girls from a financial point of view."
Having undergone therapy to help sort through her feelings about her marriage and her ex's behaviour, she expresses no regret about the marriage. "I have the girls," she says. "And the marriage wasn't all bad. We had some good times."
Her calm comes from the passage of time - there was a period when she suffered from what she calls post-traumatic stress - but mostly, she says, from having re-established contact between the children and their father, who phones them once a week.
She is keenly protective of the children's psychological well-being. "He is an important person in their lives, and I don't want to deprive them of that relationship," she explains, adding that she doesn't want to revert to her maiden name because "Hawach is the girls' name and I don't want them to be ashamed of it."
Her ex has floated the idea of a visit with the children. But he faces arrest in Canada. Does he want her to take them to Australia? "He does," she says. And will she?
She scrunches up her face, clearly conflicted. "Things are progressing in a positive way," she responds lightly. "But no, not in the foreseeable future," she says emphatically, as she watches over Cedar, who momentarily disappears among the trees in hide-and-seek approach to the deer.
