Audacious with Chion Wolf: Transcript for 'What two mothers who relinquished custody want you to understand'
Audacious with Chion Wolf
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Announcer 00:00
Support for Audacious with Chion Wolf provided by a generous contribution from Suzanne Hopgood in memory of Frank Lord.
Chion Wolf 00:11
From Connecticut Public Radio in Hartford, this is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. We don't like to admit this out loud, but when a father leaves his children, most of us don't even blink anymore. I mean, we've seen it. Some of us have lived it, and we've watched entire generations bend around that absence, and the statistics echo that familiarity. In 2022, the Census Bureau reported that over a quarter of American children lived with one parent only, overwhelmingly their mother. And so many factors go into it, divorce, illness, poverty, lack of education, mental health conditions, and just plain old life and how things go. So hearing about a dad who's gone, it just doesn't shock us anymore. But when a mother relinquishes custody, it touches one of the most sensitive corners of our cultural imagination, and it challenges the ideas that we've carried since childhood about what mothers owe, what they endure, and what they're allowed to choose, and maybe because of that, we rarely talk about it. We don't ask what was happening in the home. We don't ask about power or money or immigration status or threats or safety. We don't ask what it's like to feel like you're out of options, or like every option comes with a cost, or when the choice barely feels like a choice at all. So today, we're bringing two of those stories into the light, not as cautionary tales, and certainly not as morality plays, but as portraits of survival, power, love and impossible decisions. In a little bit, you'll meet Maria Abanga. She describes leaving her three young sons and Cameroon as the hardest, most life-saving decision she could have made, a decision that broke her and remade her at the same time. But first, the story of Rebekah Spicuglia and her son Oscar. Rebekah met Oscar's father in 1997 while working at a family restaurant in Santa Maria, California. When she became pregnant, his family welcomed her in. Oscar was born, and three weeks later, they married and began his father's immigration process, which required him to return to his hometown in Mexico. What was supposed to be a short separation stretched into months. Rebekah was in school and working and caring for a newborn with help from her in-laws, and when immigration officials said the legal process would take much longer than expected, she sent her one-year-old son to Mexico so he could be with his dad. Rebekah was only 18 at the time. Two months apart became eight, and the distance began to splinter their marriage. When the immigration case was finally approved, Oscar and his father returned to California, and the marriage ended soon after. But Rebekah was able to build a hopeful rhythm with Oscar. She had her own apartment, they shared time together. There was a real sense of moving forward. Then she transferred to UC Berkeley, more than four hours away, and the only way to have Oscar live with her was to secure family student housing, which had a wait list. So Oscar's dad kept him temporarily while Rebekah worked and studied, and when she finally got the housing, she was ready to welcome Oscar to San Francisco. But by then, he'd been with his dad for almost two years, surrounded by cousins, grandparents, a big, loving extended family, and his father refused to let him go. Now, Rebekah didn't have the money or power to put up much of a fight. Through mediation, she kept joint legal custody, but relinquished physical custody, and the future she'd pictured, the one she was working so hard for, slipped away. Here's Rebekah on how she coped with the reality of her situation.
Rebekah Spicuglia 04:03
At the beginning, I couldn't handle it. I had no words for what I was, I didn't have people to talk to. I didn't know how to explain it, so my coping was very much passing. No one would assume that I had a kid. I was not in therapy at the time. I mean, I was just like, trying to figure out, like, who I was without Oscar,
Chion Wolf 04:36
This next question is coming from a person who does not have kids. Never wanted to have kids. Love kids. I love kids. They're so cool. I am one, just in a 44-year-old person's body. And so are you.
Rebekah Spicuglia 04:50
I was gonna say. I 100% am!
Chion Wolf 04:53
I wonder if there is, was, any part of you, and I mean just a sliver, that was in some way excited about not having custody of Oscar, or maybe the word isn't excited and maybe relieved, and if that's not the word, interested in what the world could be like, the possibilities that you have as somebody who is not obligated to be in their child's life.
Rebekah Spicuglia 05:25
I definitely appreciated the freedom that I had. My family is so f*bleep* up that I also had seeds of doubt when Oscar's dad said that he thought he would be better with him. I questioned in my mind, like, I mean, maybe he would be. So, you know, there's some relief, and I definitely felt comfortable with Oscar living with his dad in Santa Maria, believing that he was safe there. Safe and loved and resourced in ways that I never had growing up, and, you know, certainly took the pressure off of me, even though it was torturous.
Chion Wolf 06:24
I wonder, as the years went by, and you would reunite with each other again, and you'd see him and 'Oh, my God, he's taller. Oh my God, his voice,' how would the vibe change?
Rebekah Spicuglia 06:37
We were always very loving with each other, even when he was, like, a teenager, he would say, like, 'I love you, Mommy.' I mean, I got to experience everything that there is about being a parent, where it's like, once you think you've got it down, you know, it's been five seconds, and they're a completely other person, and you're like, 'I thought that I had it down, but no. ' But as far as, like, the vibe, I mean, he was the light of my life. And it was always so wonderful getting to be in his presence, because he was so funny and so entertaining, such a good dancer. He was always coming in, I mean, he was very good-looking.
Chion Wolf 07:19
Very handsome.
Rebekah Spicuglia 07:21
And very stylish, very handsome and like, yeah, one time when we were in New York, he was with me and my friends, and we were going down to see a baseball game and fireworks at Coney Island, and we were on the train, and some girl crosses the train to, like, give him her number in front of all my friends. But he, he was always in with, like, the fresh slang. So it was like some, you know, 'fresh' or 'juicy' or, like, whatever the thing was at the time. And so kept me young.
Chion Wolf 08:00
I'd like to hear more about what he was like.
Rebekah Spicuglia 08:03
This is always the hardest question to put into words. It feels so small to try to encapsulate him. Oscar would light up any room that he was in. He had a lot of friends. He was a charmer. He was a Romeo. He was a good friend. He liked to make people laugh. Liked to cheer people up, a definite performer. A lot of confidence, a lot of - whatever he was doing, he had a lot of confidence in. I mean, certainly, I think because he was so athletic, and as a boxer and playing different sports, being good looking, and, you know, I don't know, he was just a very loving person. You can tell that he made people feel really special. And when somebody was having a hard time, you know, he wanted to cheer them up or be there for them in a meaningful way that they remember. So I think that he was pretty sensitive and non-judgmental.
Chion Wolf 09:21
People listening might clock the fact that we're speaking about him in past tense and to the degree to which you feel okay talking about it, what happened 10 years ago?
Rebekah Spicuglia 09:36
10 years ago, I received a call that Oscar had been killed. He had been shot multiple times. And it was really shocking. Santa Maria, California, is not a town where people were getting killed. Yeah, it was, it was really shocking. He was 17 years old, and at the time, I was on sabbatical from work with my partner in Nova Scotia, working on a book about the grief of being a non-custodial mom. And the irony that I was, I was just then trying to process the grief of what it had been like to parent him long distance and to lose him in so many ways, big and small, like over the years, and then to get this news that he was gone forever. A year later, MS-13 was indicted for killing not only Oscar, but nine other people in this community. MS-13 is a transnational gang that was started in Los Angeles with migrants from El Salvador, and they have a reputation for being notoriously violent. And so I had never heard of MS-13 before, and it was just incomprehensible at the time.
Chion Wolf 11:27
You put your finger on this a bit, but you know, here you are coming to grips with parenting from a distance and relinquishing custody and that grief and that dynamic, and now you are, for the rest of your life, separated from him in a physical sense. First of all, I'm so sorry for your loss, and having had 10 years to sit with this reality, I wonder how did losing him physically affect your feelings as his mother?
Rebekah Spicuglia 12:06
Such a great question. There's language around grief and bereavement that I don't think there is for loss of custody, missing your kids through quote, unquote, more normal circumstances. So in answer to your brilliant question, I think that I was able to process a lot of grief that I had over the years differently because I had access to community and literature and accepted social norms around grieving him. Nobody's expecting me to get over it, ever. I do think that there are people, who like us to move on from grief.
Chion Wolf 13:09
And maybe even parts of ourselves.
Rebekah Spicuglia 13:10
For sure, and so many people have said to me that losing a child is the worst thing that they could imagine ever going through, that is the worst thing that can happen to a person. And I don't believe in comparing griefs. I don't find that useful. I think that it's important to validate the significance of a loss. But, you know, you don't have kids, but you have the potential to lose somebody very important to you, that would be devastating, and sometimes that end can be painful and drawn out and, like, there are so many different ways to suffer in this world. So I don't find it comforting myself to think about grief in ways that, like, compare. It's certainly the worst thing that ever happened to me, but being able to talk about it has helped me a lot.
Chion Wolf 14:21
In my experience with death, I've been surprised at how much when I find out that they've died, I feel like suddenly they're everywhere. And it's a strange feeling, because they're everywhere to me and nowhere. I can't touch them. I can't see them. And I wonder if you see it the same way. You know, you spent so much of your adult life being separated from your son and cherishing, of course, the times that you had physically together. But now that it's been 10 years since his death, I wonder what your relationship is like with him.
Rebekah Spicuglia 15:02
I think my relationship is ever-changing, ever-evolving with him. In early years, I would fixate on pictures and artifacts and memories and wishes and a lot about the life that he had, a lot about the life that he would never have. Now, I'm very fortunate to be starting a PhD program at Johns Hopkins in Health Policy and Management. I'm a first year with a concentration in Health and Public Policy, focusing on gun violence. And I'm so grateful to have this opportunity and this outlet. It's momentous on the 10 year anniversary of his death, to have a way to honor him and channel the energy that I have, both the energy that I have in loving him, but also in caring about other kids his age, and wanting to protect people, like my maternal, parental instinct. So I have a really good friend in California. Her name is Esmeralda. She's from Oaxaca, Indigenous woman with really big heart, and she would always be telling me to talk to him. And people have said that over the years that I should write him letters, and people know that I'm a writer, and way too soon after he died, people were telling me, 'You should write,' and I'm just like, 'I could not make a bulleted list right now, if you paid me to.' Like, it took me a couple of years before I could write about anything related to him, you know. But last year, I wrote maybe my first letter to him. I mean, trying to open that connection was just like so painful and so hard. It requires a lot of self-compassion and patience to open that door. But at the beginning of this year, I started a journal where I was like, 'To him.' It's been pretty cool to see how that practice has changed me, because I'm like, talking to him about myself and my everyday experiences, and wondering, like, what he would think about this or that, sharing things that I'm like, 'Would I be sharing this with you if you were alive? I don't know. You'd be 27 today. I think you'd be old enough to, like, hear it. Maybe I'd be even more direct.'
Chion Wolf 18:03
Doing the work that you're doing now, this PhD program, in some ways sounds like you giving back in any way you can, and understanding even more, if possible, and having some sort of positive influence on something that was so devastating in your life. So it makes sense, not that it has to make sense to me, but I also wonder, are there parts of you, as you get into this PhD program that wonders if you're kind of playing with fire a little bit, just in terms of getting really close to the pain?
Rebekah Spicuglia 18:39
A hundred percent. Yeah, I'm very aware that working on gun violence is something that will impact me deeply. I attended the murder trials. And during this time, I had moved back to California in order to attend the trials, and I became the executive director of a small organization that was working with Latinx and Indigenous students in Santa Maria, high school students, who were struggling academically. We were also doing anti-violence advocacy work, and even if all gun violence ended today, there's still so much healing and recovery, and the ripple effects of those deaths will impact families for many years to come. So I know from the experience of being an executive director working on these issues, talking about Oscar actively all the time in community while attending these murder trials, like, I'll say that I've been through fire. So I know that this PhD program working on gun violence will bring up feelings that I have to work through, and I need to prioritize my well-being while I do it. It's hard to imagine that anything is gonna could even come close to that experience. So I think that I'll be okay, but I, but I am conscious of it.
Chion Wolf 20:28
That was Rebekah Spicuglia. When we get back, Rebekah widens the lens.
Rebekah Spicuglia 20:33
Custody is about power and all of the systems of oppression and interpersonal bias and various issues that we're dealing with as a country. It directly impacts family court and personal decisions about what we want for ourselves, what we think is best for the kids.
Chion Wolf 21:00
I'm Chion Wolf. This is Audacious. Stay with me.
Chion Wolf 21:19
This is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. When a mother doesn't live with her children, people often assume they know the story. They imagine distance means detachment, selfishness or lack of effort. But when you listen closely to the lives of many women who've lived this, almost nothing about their experiences fits these assumptions. Later in the show, you'll meet Maria Abanga, who faced a difficult situation in Cameroon. She left her three sons in order to stay alive, and now she uses her voice to dismantle the shame that follows women like her. Rebekah Spicuglia spent years mothering her son Oscar from a distance that she never wanted facing pressure from Oscar's father. She says the only way he'd let her see him is if she relinquished physical custody. But on July 28, 2015, when Oscar was just 17, he was murdered in his hometown of Santa Maria, California, shot to death by members of MS-13, a notorious international gang. But Rebekah hasn't stopped being Oscar's mother. You'll hear how she's taken trauma and turned it into purpose, studying gun violence, family separation and the systems that shaped both her life and her son's. There must be people who are listening to this conversation because they are a mother who has relinquished custody of their child, or because, for whatever reason, they had to step away from being a big part of their child's life, and they're grappling with what that means for their life, for their child's life. They've got a lot of questions and a ton of feelings, and I know that you've seen one parent relinquish custody, you've seen one parent relinquish custody, and you can only speak for yourself, but when you think about the people who are listening to this, I wonder what you wish they knew that maybe they don't about the situation they're in.
Rebekah Spicuglia 23:21
First of all, this happens every day. The idea that custody, first of all, is a one-and-done thing is ridiculous. Like, life is long, and circumstances change, parents change, kids change. And although people don't talk about it, there are plenty of moms who don't live with their kids, and that fact, in and of itself, is not something to be ashamed of. Also, custody is about power and all of the systems of oppression and interpersonal bias and various issues that we're dealing with as a country, it directly impacts family court and personal decisions about what we want for ourselves, what we think is best for the kids. So there's a lot of women who give up custody because there's been abuse, and they have to get out in some way, and they do what they can, and they're not able to take the kids with them. When I first moved to San Francisco, one of my housemates was a trans woman who lost custody of her kids and was blocked from seeing them when she transitioned. That was 20 plus years ago, and so when you look at, like, transphobia, homophobia, and institutional racism, you know, the way that we treat parents in poverty, parents with mental illness, you know, who aren't able to provide or maybe even, like, take care of themselves. You know, then you have mass incarceration, mass deportation. I mean, parents are being separated from their children left and right. When I worked at Race Forward, back in 2011, we put out a report called Shattered Families. It was the first report of its kind to produce national data on how many kids were ending up in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported, and that was under President Obama. And like one of the things that, you know, our investigators found happen, a woman might call the police for a domestic violence situation, and she could be taken and her kids put in foster care. You know, we know about the routine traffic stops, and now, you know, we're in a completely other world now, where things have, like, escalated to points that are just unfathomable. But I do think it's important to recognize that parents are separated from their kids every single day, parents of all genders for different reasons. Sometimes it's preventable, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it should be happening that, you know, the child needs to be protected from the parent in some ways, but we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that there's still continuity of communication and connection. But also addressing the trauma to the parents, because we matter too as human beings, but also, like, if we don't heal ourselves, what kind of people are we showing up in the world as? The more that we can acknowledge grief, work to repair what we can, if there's a possibility of reunification in some way, to make that happen, we'll just have a healthier world and also, like, healthier parents, especially if they're, like, parenting other kids.
Chion Wolf 27:22
How are you doing now? I mean, obviously you're starting this PhD program, so you're a lot of things, but these days, if you were to take a snapshot of your heart, how is your heart?
Rebekah Spicuglia 27:34
I feel very hopeful. I feel very blessed. I would not be who I am today without the various communities that I'm a part of and showing up for other people in grief, being willing to see and hear hard stuff with love and compassion.
Chion Wolf 28:04
Well, is there anything else that you want to make sure you say before we go?
Rebekah Spicuglia 28:09
You asked me if in losing custody, was some part of me relieved. And thinking about his death, there's a parallel feeling to that, which is not relief, like, in a good way, in any way, shape, or form. But while he was alive, I was deeply distressed and concerned for his well-being all the time, and trying to think about, when's the next time am I going to see him? How am I going to do this? It was, it was really, really, really hard in every way, parenting, long distance parenting at all, and when he died, some part of me died too. Died to all of that striving, that pretense at control of anything, but all of a sudden, I didn't give a *bleep* about a lot of stuff that I really had before, and a lot of that stuff, as it turns out, was social niceties, acting okay when you're not pretending at one thing, when it's the last thing you want to do, relationships that are not authentic. I was released from a certain kind of life, and I don't think that you need to lose somebody or go through a traumatic experience like that to get to this point, and I would give anything for Oscar to still be here. And I have thought about what I would want for Oscar were he still alive today, and I'd want him to be free. I'd want him to feel free to be his full, beautiful self, like, whatever he was. I would want him to see me as my full beautiful self, however I am. And I think that while I have lost people along the way, who just were not up for the journey with me, and that's okay, I have gained so many more people in deep, beautiful connection, because I am ever more my open, authentic self. Like I have talked publicly about things that I didn't talk so publicly about before, you know, like I had an abortion in college, like I'm bi, and queer, and poly and like, you know, I'm now living my best life, and I'm not scared of what people think of me. I'm really not scared of much at all, and I thank Oscar for that.
Chion Wolf 31:29
Well, Rebekah Spicuglia, thank you so much for talking with me.
Rebekah Spicuglia 31:34
This was awesome. Thank you.
Chion Wolf 31:38
After the break, meet Marie, a mother who knows the pain that comes after extremely difficult decisions.
Marie Abanga 31:44
When a woman tells me that she had to leave her children, I just want to hug her and say, 'I feel you.'
Chion Wolf 31:54
I'm Chion Wolf, this is Audacious. Stay tuned.
Chion Wolf 31:57
This is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. When you talk with Marie Abanga, you hear two things at once: the pain of what she lived through, and the clarity of a woman who survived it. A note as we begin: This conversation includes the topics of abuse, and suicidal ideation. In 2011, Marie's three sons were 7, 5, and 2. She describes her marriage as physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. Leaving her children felt less related to custody and parenting, and more like the last opportunity to save her own life. So she left Cameroon and began a long process of healing, rebuilding and reconnecting with her sons years later, on new terms. Here's Marie.
Marie Abanga 33:06
If I stayed there, I was going to die, and I didn't want to die, you know. Nobody could even understand what was going on with me. You cannot even explain. In Africa, nobody understands what a woman means. It could have been postpartum depression. It could be anything, but nobody can understand any of that. And then I met someone you know, and they told me, 'Well, if you are so sad there, why don't you leave? Are you bound to stay?' So I decided in 2009 that I was going to leave. So between 2009 and 2011, I was just saving up some money. I was just, I was just gathering that courage, you know, I was just waiting for that little baby to be weaned off, kind of, and I told them, I told my kids, like, five months before I left that I was going to leave them. They were very young, but they did understand somehow,
Chion Wolf 34:02
What was it like saying those words to them and what, what exactly did you say?
Marie Abanga 34:07
I told them that I'm very sad and that if I continue staying here, I might do something terrible. And they knew also that I was very sad because I had moved out of my, the matrimonial bedroom. It was a very, very dark period, and they used to come in there and spend time with me, because I could barely make it to, like, just do the normal things that you would do at home. If I could go to work, I would come back and just crash in that room. And sometimes just manage to feed them, or just be with them for a little while and just go into my room and just stay there. And so they knew that mommy, there was something going on with me there. And they are boys. Boys are sometimes so sensitive to their mothers. So I think that they felt it, something sad was going on, and mommy was going to take this difficult decision. And yeah, we had to be strong.
Chion Wolf 35:03
What do you remember about the day that you left?
Marie Abanga 35:07
Oh, yeah, it's a very vivid day, because I had planned everything. I had bought a ticket to leave the country that same day, and the kids had just finished writing their examination, and so I packed them up to go to my mother's house. I didn't want them to be there when I leave. I sent them to my mom with as much things as possible. I remember also my my ex-husband, leaving for work, and that day, I was, I was nicer than usual. I remember even giving him a kiss. For me, that was a goodbye kiss. But I don't think that he could imagine that that was what was going to happen because I was leaving straight for the airport to just board the plane and go to the UAE, and nobody knew about those plans, yeah.
Chion Wolf 35:52
What was it like knowing that you were saying goodbye to your children?
Marie Abanga 35:57
I just knew that I was making the right decision and that they will be fine at that particular time. For me, it was like, 'I'm doing this for all of us, either I stay here and I die, and you don't have a mother, or I leave and then, well, you have a mother.'
Chion Wolf 36:17
I am not a mother, so I cannot say firsthand that I know what it's like, but I'm an aunt, and I'm a human, and I understand that being a mother is all-encompassing, and having three young children around you all day is a lot. So what was it like when you were suddenly all by yourself?
Marie Abanga 36:38
Well, it was like, you have to do the most you can do, so that one day you're going to be united with those boys again. It was for them that I left. I just thought that I didn't have any use in this world anymore. Like, I was done. I just wanted out. But because of those boys, and given that they were young, I told myself, 'No, if you have not been able to take your life, it means that you still have to be strong for them. You have to live for them. You have to fight for them.' So I used to think about them a lot, and I used to, like, work harder, you know, like, for example, train for 90 minutes instead of 45 minutes, stay up late, do all kinds of things. For me, it was all for them. My life, I didn't have any life for the first two years, I didn't. Nothing made me happy. I was just thinking about the boys all the time, and just working harder and harder and harder for them.
Chion Wolf 37:34
Did you get any reactions from your friends, your family, your husband?
Marie Abanga 37:39
Yes, of course, a lot of people just cut me out. They thought that I was the most senseless person they have ever met. This was ridiculous. Women don't do that. A man can do that, but a woman no, because the children came from your womb. How can you do that? That is so heartless. Let me tell you. For the first 10 months after I left, I couldn't even talk to the children. You know, my ex-husband, he just blocked my number. He even went as far as telling her that I had died. He burnt my things, all the things I left. He made a big fire and burnt everything. So it was kind of a ceremony to show that I had died, and they should forget about me. And yeah, it was a very painful time. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you know.
Chion Wolf 38:27
I hear in your story that you speak with God for guidance and direction. And I wonder when you pull the camera back on your life and you try to make sense of what happened, why it happened, how it happened, what the meaning is behind all the things you've been through when you talk with God about this, about having left your children and made the decision to leave them in order to save yourself, in order to let them continue having a mother on planet Earth at the same time as them. I wonder, when you talk with God about this, the meaning of all of this with you, what you hear back.
Marie Abanga 39:05
I haven't really spoken with him about all of that. It mustn't make sense. And even if it makes sense, what am I going to do about it? Can I reverse things? And you know, sometimes you go through things so that you can also help other people tomorrow, who will be going through the same situation or who might need help. The best way to understand something or to feel some pain is to go through it. Sadly, that's true. I can tell somebody now I know what it feels to have post-traumatic stress disorder. You know, I can say all of those things, because I have been through all of those things. So for me, looking at it from all points, it's building my capacity as a woman who can empathize, who can help other women. You know, women go through a lot in my society. You don't know who to confide in. You don't know who can actually help you out, but if you know that someone has those kind of experiences, yeah. Women don't stigmatize women in my society for this kind of things anymore, because we now know that we all go through a lot of things, and so there's no point in stigmatizing another woman. Yeah, the men have lost that battle trying to get women to stigmatize other women. Things can really be tough. You know, things can really be tough, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do. So I think, to be honest, leaving him, leaving those children, was the best thing I could do for all of us, yeah.
Chion Wolf 40:38
Will you talk about what things are like right now with your children and your relationship with them?
Marie Abanga 40:44
Yeah, I mean, oh my God, they are all grown. And I mean, two of them are adults already, and one of them is an adolescent. And we are close. We are really close. I was away for just four years. I'll call it 'just' because some people have been away for longer, and when I came back, it took us, like, a year to build things back up, and then I found my own place, and I made sure that they were involved in the choice of the apartment and everything. So we started our lives together. And what I said to myself was, 'This is your do-over. And so you have to be there the best you can be, and be as available as possible, and give up a lot of things so as to be available for them.' So we had roundtables discussions a lot, like every other week. It was really, really a close-knit thing. So yeah, we had 10 years actually, to build things up.
Chion Wolf 41:44
I want to know why you felt it was important to be so open about this.
Marie Abanga 41:51
Yeah, because a lot of things people go through, they don't talk about it. And they don't talk about it, they suffer in silence. And I decided I was not going to suffer in silence
Chion Wolf 42:03
When you hear from other women who've made similar decisions, what kind of similarities do you notice?
Marie Abanga 42:10
I noticed that there is, first of all, pain. I noticed that the pain has been there for quite a while. I noticed that there is the hush-hush. I noticed that there is even the, let me call it, what, the physical pain. So the pain is, it has different dimensions, physical, there's emotional, there's even a spiritual pain. The pain can, it's too much to bear before they take that kind of a decision. You know, for me, it's like, to be honest, a last resort, that kind of a decision to leave your children. It's like cutting yourself up and leaving one party and going with, with, half, because the children are part of you, and they came from your womb. The truth is that the bond is different. You bonded with them for nine months. The father didn't have that opportunity. So you, for you to take that decision to leave them, audacity is the only word I can muster. So when a woman tells me that she had to leave her children, I just want to hug her. That's all. I don't think of any other thing other than to just hug her and say, 'I feel you.'
Chion Wolf 43:23
I wonder if, because you sound like a very compassionate person, and I can't help but think about when men leave their children, we have this idea that it is emotionally shallow, that maybe they don't feel the depths of despair and sadness that a woman leaving her children might feel. And I wonder if there's ever a part of you that when you think about men abandoning their children, maybe has some more compassion for them too. Or do you feel like it is different because they didn't carry the children inside them?
Marie Abanga 43:59
To be honest with you, I feel it is different, yet I also feel that they go through their own process, and I just honestly, I'm just going to be biased. I'm a woman, right? And I think that for them to take the decision is much easier, because I tell you, I took that decision in 2009, but I left two years later. I don't think, I'm a psychotherapist, I've spoken with men who have taken all kinds of decisions. Sometimes the process doesn't even take six months. Sometimes, even when one leaves, in before six months, there's a replacement, even when she dies. It is completely different, especially in my society, you know. So I can't even put us on the same scale.
Chion Wolf 44:42
Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Marie Abanga 44:46
No, I don't think I would have done anything differently because I didn't know better, and I didn't know how to ask for help, because my society, maybe today, people speak out more, but back in 2011, people didn't talk. To find people who talk about this kind of experiences, there are not many. What do you mean by postpartum depression? What do you mean by, just bother? Oh, yeah, a woman of faith, pray, pray until something happens. And sometimes it's like, 'No, no, no, no, no. You're not a woman of faith. You cannot talk about that, you know.' So I don't think I would have done things differently. I should be even thinking about it, because it would mean like I regret something. No, I don't.
Chion Wolf 45:31
I wonder if you could go back in time and speak to yourself on that first day without your children and tell yourself some sort of message. What would be that message?
Marie Abanga 45:45
Yeah, oh my god, yeah, Marie, you don't need to cry all of those tears. You'll be okay. So just come on, be strong for them.
Chion Wolf 45:56
Well, I've asked all the questions that I've really meant, I needed to absolutely ask. But I know we could talk about 1000 different things here. Did I miss anything? Is there anything else you want to say? Open floor.
Marie Abanga 46:08
I just want to say that sometimes, you know, people think about what people will say, how people will react, what will and what if. Just do what you have to do. If you have to save yourself so that you can be stronger for those children, by every means, save yourself. And pray, pray about it. It's not like it's only some particular category of people who deserve the Lord's mercy and compassion. No, everybody. My earnest, earnest prayer is that someone listens to this and doesn't give up on life.
Chion Wolf 46:50
Well, Marie Abanga, thank you so much for talking with me.
Marie Abanga 46:54
You're welcome. God bless you.
Chion Wolf 46:59
When I say Audacious is lovingly produced by Jessica Severin de Martinez, it's true, but this episode shows the full magnitude of her care. Whenever we dedicate our show to particularly sensitive topics and to guests who've had difficult experiences sharing their stories with the media in the past, it takes an extraordinary person to let them know that they're safe with us. Jessica connected with Marie and Rebekah with reverence. She learned their histories with care. She built trust slowly and honored the parts of their lives that they felt ready to share with us. With you. Now, a producer can learn these skills to a degree, but Jessica, I think in addition to that, she was born with these sensibilities, these instincts, this amazing heart, and she continues to cultivate it and inspire everyone here at Connecticut Public. So Jessica, who did not know I was going to include this in the credits, thank you for the extraordinary, loving work you've been doing on Audacious for all these years, for the steadiness of your ethics, for the gentleness you bring to preparing and reviewing every conversation. I admire you deeply, and I am so proud to be your teammate and your friend. That love circles all the way around to the other heartful members of our small and mighty team, Meg Fitzgerald and Robyn Doyon-Aitken, who are totally nodding their head in agreement about Jessica right now. You can find all of our conversations at ct public.org/audacious, and please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Stay in touch with me on the socials at Chion Wolf, and you can always send an email to audacious@ctpublic.org. Peace.
Back to episode >>
Announcer 00:00
Support for Audacious with Chion Wolf provided by a generous contribution from Suzanne Hopgood in memory of Frank Lord.
Chion Wolf 00:11
From Connecticut Public Radio in Hartford, this is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. We don't like to admit this out loud, but when a father leaves his children, most of us don't even blink anymore. I mean, we've seen it. Some of us have lived it, and we've watched entire generations bend around that absence, and the statistics echo that familiarity. In 2022, the Census Bureau reported that over a quarter of American children lived with one parent only, overwhelmingly their mother. And so many factors go into it, divorce, illness, poverty, lack of education, mental health conditions, and just plain old life and how things go. So hearing about a dad who's gone, it just doesn't shock us anymore. But when a mother relinquishes custody, it touches one of the most sensitive corners of our cultural imagination, and it challenges the ideas that we've carried since childhood about what mothers owe, what they endure, and what they're allowed to choose, and maybe because of that, we rarely talk about it. We don't ask what was happening in the home. We don't ask about power or money or immigration status or threats or safety. We don't ask what it's like to feel like you're out of options, or like every option comes with a cost, or when the choice barely feels like a choice at all. So today, we're bringing two of those stories into the light, not as cautionary tales, and certainly not as morality plays, but as portraits of survival, power, love and impossible decisions. In a little bit, you'll meet Maria Abanga. She describes leaving her three young sons and Cameroon as the hardest, most life-saving decision she could have made, a decision that broke her and remade her at the same time. But first, the story of Rebekah Spicuglia and her son Oscar. Rebekah met Oscar's father in 1997 while working at a family restaurant in Santa Maria, California. When she became pregnant, his family welcomed her in. Oscar was born, and three weeks later, they married and began his father's immigration process, which required him to return to his hometown in Mexico. What was supposed to be a short separation stretched into months. Rebekah was in school and working and caring for a newborn with help from her in-laws, and when immigration officials said the legal process would take much longer than expected, she sent her one-year-old son to Mexico so he could be with his dad. Rebekah was only 18 at the time. Two months apart became eight, and the distance began to splinter their marriage. When the immigration case was finally approved, Oscar and his father returned to California, and the marriage ended soon after. But Rebekah was able to build a hopeful rhythm with Oscar. She had her own apartment, they shared time together. There was a real sense of moving forward. Then she transferred to UC Berkeley, more than four hours away, and the only way to have Oscar live with her was to secure family student housing, which had a wait list. So Oscar's dad kept him temporarily while Rebekah worked and studied, and when she finally got the housing, she was ready to welcome Oscar to San Francisco. But by then, he'd been with his dad for almost two years, surrounded by cousins, grandparents, a big, loving extended family, and his father refused to let him go. Now, Rebekah didn't have the money or power to put up much of a fight. Through mediation, she kept joint legal custody, but relinquished physical custody, and the future she'd pictured, the one she was working so hard for, slipped away. Here's Rebekah on how she coped with the reality of her situation.
Rebekah Spicuglia 04:03
At the beginning, I couldn't handle it. I had no words for what I was, I didn't have people to talk to. I didn't know how to explain it, so my coping was very much passing. No one would assume that I had a kid. I was not in therapy at the time. I mean, I was just like, trying to figure out, like, who I was without Oscar,
Chion Wolf 04:36
This next question is coming from a person who does not have kids. Never wanted to have kids. Love kids. I love kids. They're so cool. I am one, just in a 44-year-old person's body. And so are you.
Rebekah Spicuglia 04:50
I was gonna say. I 100% am!
Chion Wolf 04:53
I wonder if there is, was, any part of you, and I mean just a sliver, that was in some way excited about not having custody of Oscar, or maybe the word isn't excited and maybe relieved, and if that's not the word, interested in what the world could be like, the possibilities that you have as somebody who is not obligated to be in their child's life.
Rebekah Spicuglia 05:25
I definitely appreciated the freedom that I had. My family is so f*bleep* up that I also had seeds of doubt when Oscar's dad said that he thought he would be better with him. I questioned in my mind, like, I mean, maybe he would be. So, you know, there's some relief, and I definitely felt comfortable with Oscar living with his dad in Santa Maria, believing that he was safe there. Safe and loved and resourced in ways that I never had growing up, and, you know, certainly took the pressure off of me, even though it was torturous.
Chion Wolf 06:24
I wonder, as the years went by, and you would reunite with each other again, and you'd see him and 'Oh, my God, he's taller. Oh my God, his voice,' how would the vibe change?
Rebekah Spicuglia 06:37
We were always very loving with each other, even when he was, like, a teenager, he would say, like, 'I love you, Mommy.' I mean, I got to experience everything that there is about being a parent, where it's like, once you think you've got it down, you know, it's been five seconds, and they're a completely other person, and you're like, 'I thought that I had it down, but no. ' But as far as, like, the vibe, I mean, he was the light of my life. And it was always so wonderful getting to be in his presence, because he was so funny and so entertaining, such a good dancer. He was always coming in, I mean, he was very good-looking.
Chion Wolf 07:19
Very handsome.
Rebekah Spicuglia 07:21
And very stylish, very handsome and like, yeah, one time when we were in New York, he was with me and my friends, and we were going down to see a baseball game and fireworks at Coney Island, and we were on the train, and some girl crosses the train to, like, give him her number in front of all my friends. But he, he was always in with, like, the fresh slang. So it was like some, you know, 'fresh' or 'juicy' or, like, whatever the thing was at the time. And so kept me young.
Chion Wolf 08:00
I'd like to hear more about what he was like.
Rebekah Spicuglia 08:03
This is always the hardest question to put into words. It feels so small to try to encapsulate him. Oscar would light up any room that he was in. He had a lot of friends. He was a charmer. He was a Romeo. He was a good friend. He liked to make people laugh. Liked to cheer people up, a definite performer. A lot of confidence, a lot of - whatever he was doing, he had a lot of confidence in. I mean, certainly, I think because he was so athletic, and as a boxer and playing different sports, being good looking, and, you know, I don't know, he was just a very loving person. You can tell that he made people feel really special. And when somebody was having a hard time, you know, he wanted to cheer them up or be there for them in a meaningful way that they remember. So I think that he was pretty sensitive and non-judgmental.
Chion Wolf 09:21
People listening might clock the fact that we're speaking about him in past tense and to the degree to which you feel okay talking about it, what happened 10 years ago?
Rebekah Spicuglia 09:36
10 years ago, I received a call that Oscar had been killed. He had been shot multiple times. And it was really shocking. Santa Maria, California, is not a town where people were getting killed. Yeah, it was, it was really shocking. He was 17 years old, and at the time, I was on sabbatical from work with my partner in Nova Scotia, working on a book about the grief of being a non-custodial mom. And the irony that I was, I was just then trying to process the grief of what it had been like to parent him long distance and to lose him in so many ways, big and small, like over the years, and then to get this news that he was gone forever. A year later, MS-13 was indicted for killing not only Oscar, but nine other people in this community. MS-13 is a transnational gang that was started in Los Angeles with migrants from El Salvador, and they have a reputation for being notoriously violent. And so I had never heard of MS-13 before, and it was just incomprehensible at the time.
Chion Wolf 11:27
You put your finger on this a bit, but you know, here you are coming to grips with parenting from a distance and relinquishing custody and that grief and that dynamic, and now you are, for the rest of your life, separated from him in a physical sense. First of all, I'm so sorry for your loss, and having had 10 years to sit with this reality, I wonder how did losing him physically affect your feelings as his mother?
Rebekah Spicuglia 12:06
Such a great question. There's language around grief and bereavement that I don't think there is for loss of custody, missing your kids through quote, unquote, more normal circumstances. So in answer to your brilliant question, I think that I was able to process a lot of grief that I had over the years differently because I had access to community and literature and accepted social norms around grieving him. Nobody's expecting me to get over it, ever. I do think that there are people, who like us to move on from grief.
Chion Wolf 13:09
And maybe even parts of ourselves.
Rebekah Spicuglia 13:10
For sure, and so many people have said to me that losing a child is the worst thing that they could imagine ever going through, that is the worst thing that can happen to a person. And I don't believe in comparing griefs. I don't find that useful. I think that it's important to validate the significance of a loss. But, you know, you don't have kids, but you have the potential to lose somebody very important to you, that would be devastating, and sometimes that end can be painful and drawn out and, like, there are so many different ways to suffer in this world. So I don't find it comforting myself to think about grief in ways that, like, compare. It's certainly the worst thing that ever happened to me, but being able to talk about it has helped me a lot.
Chion Wolf 14:21
In my experience with death, I've been surprised at how much when I find out that they've died, I feel like suddenly they're everywhere. And it's a strange feeling, because they're everywhere to me and nowhere. I can't touch them. I can't see them. And I wonder if you see it the same way. You know, you spent so much of your adult life being separated from your son and cherishing, of course, the times that you had physically together. But now that it's been 10 years since his death, I wonder what your relationship is like with him.
Rebekah Spicuglia 15:02
I think my relationship is ever-changing, ever-evolving with him. In early years, I would fixate on pictures and artifacts and memories and wishes and a lot about the life that he had, a lot about the life that he would never have. Now, I'm very fortunate to be starting a PhD program at Johns Hopkins in Health Policy and Management. I'm a first year with a concentration in Health and Public Policy, focusing on gun violence. And I'm so grateful to have this opportunity and this outlet. It's momentous on the 10 year anniversary of his death, to have a way to honor him and channel the energy that I have, both the energy that I have in loving him, but also in caring about other kids his age, and wanting to protect people, like my maternal, parental instinct. So I have a really good friend in California. Her name is Esmeralda. She's from Oaxaca, Indigenous woman with really big heart, and she would always be telling me to talk to him. And people have said that over the years that I should write him letters, and people know that I'm a writer, and way too soon after he died, people were telling me, 'You should write,' and I'm just like, 'I could not make a bulleted list right now, if you paid me to.' Like, it took me a couple of years before I could write about anything related to him, you know. But last year, I wrote maybe my first letter to him. I mean, trying to open that connection was just like so painful and so hard. It requires a lot of self-compassion and patience to open that door. But at the beginning of this year, I started a journal where I was like, 'To him.' It's been pretty cool to see how that practice has changed me, because I'm like, talking to him about myself and my everyday experiences, and wondering, like, what he would think about this or that, sharing things that I'm like, 'Would I be sharing this with you if you were alive? I don't know. You'd be 27 today. I think you'd be old enough to, like, hear it. Maybe I'd be even more direct.'
Chion Wolf 18:03
Doing the work that you're doing now, this PhD program, in some ways sounds like you giving back in any way you can, and understanding even more, if possible, and having some sort of positive influence on something that was so devastating in your life. So it makes sense, not that it has to make sense to me, but I also wonder, are there parts of you, as you get into this PhD program that wonders if you're kind of playing with fire a little bit, just in terms of getting really close to the pain?
Rebekah Spicuglia 18:39
A hundred percent. Yeah, I'm very aware that working on gun violence is something that will impact me deeply. I attended the murder trials. And during this time, I had moved back to California in order to attend the trials, and I became the executive director of a small organization that was working with Latinx and Indigenous students in Santa Maria, high school students, who were struggling academically. We were also doing anti-violence advocacy work, and even if all gun violence ended today, there's still so much healing and recovery, and the ripple effects of those deaths will impact families for many years to come. So I know from the experience of being an executive director working on these issues, talking about Oscar actively all the time in community while attending these murder trials, like, I'll say that I've been through fire. So I know that this PhD program working on gun violence will bring up feelings that I have to work through, and I need to prioritize my well-being while I do it. It's hard to imagine that anything is gonna could even come close to that experience. So I think that I'll be okay, but I, but I am conscious of it.
Chion Wolf 20:28
That was Rebekah Spicuglia. When we get back, Rebekah widens the lens.
Rebekah Spicuglia 20:33
Custody is about power and all of the systems of oppression and interpersonal bias and various issues that we're dealing with as a country. It directly impacts family court and personal decisions about what we want for ourselves, what we think is best for the kids.
Chion Wolf 21:00
I'm Chion Wolf. This is Audacious. Stay with me.
Chion Wolf 21:19
This is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. When a mother doesn't live with her children, people often assume they know the story. They imagine distance means detachment, selfishness or lack of effort. But when you listen closely to the lives of many women who've lived this, almost nothing about their experiences fits these assumptions. Later in the show, you'll meet Maria Abanga, who faced a difficult situation in Cameroon. She left her three sons in order to stay alive, and now she uses her voice to dismantle the shame that follows women like her. Rebekah Spicuglia spent years mothering her son Oscar from a distance that she never wanted facing pressure from Oscar's father. She says the only way he'd let her see him is if she relinquished physical custody. But on July 28, 2015, when Oscar was just 17, he was murdered in his hometown of Santa Maria, California, shot to death by members of MS-13, a notorious international gang. But Rebekah hasn't stopped being Oscar's mother. You'll hear how she's taken trauma and turned it into purpose, studying gun violence, family separation and the systems that shaped both her life and her son's. There must be people who are listening to this conversation because they are a mother who has relinquished custody of their child, or because, for whatever reason, they had to step away from being a big part of their child's life, and they're grappling with what that means for their life, for their child's life. They've got a lot of questions and a ton of feelings, and I know that you've seen one parent relinquish custody, you've seen one parent relinquish custody, and you can only speak for yourself, but when you think about the people who are listening to this, I wonder what you wish they knew that maybe they don't about the situation they're in.
Rebekah Spicuglia 23:21
First of all, this happens every day. The idea that custody, first of all, is a one-and-done thing is ridiculous. Like, life is long, and circumstances change, parents change, kids change. And although people don't talk about it, there are plenty of moms who don't live with their kids, and that fact, in and of itself, is not something to be ashamed of. Also, custody is about power and all of the systems of oppression and interpersonal bias and various issues that we're dealing with as a country, it directly impacts family court and personal decisions about what we want for ourselves, what we think is best for the kids. So there's a lot of women who give up custody because there's been abuse, and they have to get out in some way, and they do what they can, and they're not able to take the kids with them. When I first moved to San Francisco, one of my housemates was a trans woman who lost custody of her kids and was blocked from seeing them when she transitioned. That was 20 plus years ago, and so when you look at, like, transphobia, homophobia, and institutional racism, you know, the way that we treat parents in poverty, parents with mental illness, you know, who aren't able to provide or maybe even, like, take care of themselves. You know, then you have mass incarceration, mass deportation. I mean, parents are being separated from their children left and right. When I worked at Race Forward, back in 2011, we put out a report called Shattered Families. It was the first report of its kind to produce national data on how many kids were ending up in foster care because their parents have been detained or deported, and that was under President Obama. And like one of the things that, you know, our investigators found happen, a woman might call the police for a domestic violence situation, and she could be taken and her kids put in foster care. You know, we know about the routine traffic stops, and now, you know, we're in a completely other world now, where things have, like, escalated to points that are just unfathomable. But I do think it's important to recognize that parents are separated from their kids every single day, parents of all genders for different reasons. Sometimes it's preventable, sometimes it's not. Sometimes it should be happening that, you know, the child needs to be protected from the parent in some ways, but we should be doing everything in our power to make sure that there's still continuity of communication and connection. But also addressing the trauma to the parents, because we matter too as human beings, but also, like, if we don't heal ourselves, what kind of people are we showing up in the world as? The more that we can acknowledge grief, work to repair what we can, if there's a possibility of reunification in some way, to make that happen, we'll just have a healthier world and also, like, healthier parents, especially if they're, like, parenting other kids.
Chion Wolf 27:22
How are you doing now? I mean, obviously you're starting this PhD program, so you're a lot of things, but these days, if you were to take a snapshot of your heart, how is your heart?
Rebekah Spicuglia 27:34
I feel very hopeful. I feel very blessed. I would not be who I am today without the various communities that I'm a part of and showing up for other people in grief, being willing to see and hear hard stuff with love and compassion.
Chion Wolf 28:04
Well, is there anything else that you want to make sure you say before we go?
Rebekah Spicuglia 28:09
You asked me if in losing custody, was some part of me relieved. And thinking about his death, there's a parallel feeling to that, which is not relief, like, in a good way, in any way, shape, or form. But while he was alive, I was deeply distressed and concerned for his well-being all the time, and trying to think about, when's the next time am I going to see him? How am I going to do this? It was, it was really, really, really hard in every way, parenting, long distance parenting at all, and when he died, some part of me died too. Died to all of that striving, that pretense at control of anything, but all of a sudden, I didn't give a *bleep* about a lot of stuff that I really had before, and a lot of that stuff, as it turns out, was social niceties, acting okay when you're not pretending at one thing, when it's the last thing you want to do, relationships that are not authentic. I was released from a certain kind of life, and I don't think that you need to lose somebody or go through a traumatic experience like that to get to this point, and I would give anything for Oscar to still be here. And I have thought about what I would want for Oscar were he still alive today, and I'd want him to be free. I'd want him to feel free to be his full, beautiful self, like, whatever he was. I would want him to see me as my full beautiful self, however I am. And I think that while I have lost people along the way, who just were not up for the journey with me, and that's okay, I have gained so many more people in deep, beautiful connection, because I am ever more my open, authentic self. Like I have talked publicly about things that I didn't talk so publicly about before, you know, like I had an abortion in college, like I'm bi, and queer, and poly and like, you know, I'm now living my best life, and I'm not scared of what people think of me. I'm really not scared of much at all, and I thank Oscar for that.
Chion Wolf 31:29
Well, Rebekah Spicuglia, thank you so much for talking with me.
Rebekah Spicuglia 31:34
This was awesome. Thank you.
Chion Wolf 31:38
After the break, meet Marie, a mother who knows the pain that comes after extremely difficult decisions.
Marie Abanga 31:44
When a woman tells me that she had to leave her children, I just want to hug her and say, 'I feel you.'
Chion Wolf 31:54
I'm Chion Wolf, this is Audacious. Stay tuned.
Chion Wolf 31:57
This is Audacious. I'm Chion Wolf. When you talk with Marie Abanga, you hear two things at once: the pain of what she lived through, and the clarity of a woman who survived it. A note as we begin: This conversation includes the topics of abuse, and suicidal ideation. In 2011, Marie's three sons were 7, 5, and 2. She describes her marriage as physically, mentally, and emotionally abusive. Leaving her children felt less related to custody and parenting, and more like the last opportunity to save her own life. So she left Cameroon and began a long process of healing, rebuilding and reconnecting with her sons years later, on new terms. Here's Marie.
Marie Abanga 33:06
If I stayed there, I was going to die, and I didn't want to die, you know. Nobody could even understand what was going on with me. You cannot even explain. In Africa, nobody understands what a woman means. It could have been postpartum depression. It could be anything, but nobody can understand any of that. And then I met someone you know, and they told me, 'Well, if you are so sad there, why don't you leave? Are you bound to stay?' So I decided in 2009 that I was going to leave. So between 2009 and 2011, I was just saving up some money. I was just, I was just gathering that courage, you know, I was just waiting for that little baby to be weaned off, kind of, and I told them, I told my kids, like, five months before I left that I was going to leave them. They were very young, but they did understand somehow,
Chion Wolf 34:02
What was it like saying those words to them and what, what exactly did you say?
Marie Abanga 34:07
I told them that I'm very sad and that if I continue staying here, I might do something terrible. And they knew also that I was very sad because I had moved out of my, the matrimonial bedroom. It was a very, very dark period, and they used to come in there and spend time with me, because I could barely make it to, like, just do the normal things that you would do at home. If I could go to work, I would come back and just crash in that room. And sometimes just manage to feed them, or just be with them for a little while and just go into my room and just stay there. And so they knew that mommy, there was something going on with me there. And they are boys. Boys are sometimes so sensitive to their mothers. So I think that they felt it, something sad was going on, and mommy was going to take this difficult decision. And yeah, we had to be strong.
Chion Wolf 35:03
What do you remember about the day that you left?
Marie Abanga 35:07
Oh, yeah, it's a very vivid day, because I had planned everything. I had bought a ticket to leave the country that same day, and the kids had just finished writing their examination, and so I packed them up to go to my mother's house. I didn't want them to be there when I leave. I sent them to my mom with as much things as possible. I remember also my my ex-husband, leaving for work, and that day, I was, I was nicer than usual. I remember even giving him a kiss. For me, that was a goodbye kiss. But I don't think that he could imagine that that was what was going to happen because I was leaving straight for the airport to just board the plane and go to the UAE, and nobody knew about those plans, yeah.
Chion Wolf 35:52
What was it like knowing that you were saying goodbye to your children?
Marie Abanga 35:57
I just knew that I was making the right decision and that they will be fine at that particular time. For me, it was like, 'I'm doing this for all of us, either I stay here and I die, and you don't have a mother, or I leave and then, well, you have a mother.'
Chion Wolf 36:17
I am not a mother, so I cannot say firsthand that I know what it's like, but I'm an aunt, and I'm a human, and I understand that being a mother is all-encompassing, and having three young children around you all day is a lot. So what was it like when you were suddenly all by yourself?
Marie Abanga 36:38
Well, it was like, you have to do the most you can do, so that one day you're going to be united with those boys again. It was for them that I left. I just thought that I didn't have any use in this world anymore. Like, I was done. I just wanted out. But because of those boys, and given that they were young, I told myself, 'No, if you have not been able to take your life, it means that you still have to be strong for them. You have to live for them. You have to fight for them.' So I used to think about them a lot, and I used to, like, work harder, you know, like, for example, train for 90 minutes instead of 45 minutes, stay up late, do all kinds of things. For me, it was all for them. My life, I didn't have any life for the first two years, I didn't. Nothing made me happy. I was just thinking about the boys all the time, and just working harder and harder and harder for them.
Chion Wolf 37:34
Did you get any reactions from your friends, your family, your husband?
Marie Abanga 37:39
Yes, of course, a lot of people just cut me out. They thought that I was the most senseless person they have ever met. This was ridiculous. Women don't do that. A man can do that, but a woman no, because the children came from your womb. How can you do that? That is so heartless. Let me tell you. For the first 10 months after I left, I couldn't even talk to the children. You know, my ex-husband, he just blocked my number. He even went as far as telling her that I had died. He burnt my things, all the things I left. He made a big fire and burnt everything. So it was kind of a ceremony to show that I had died, and they should forget about me. And yeah, it was a very painful time. But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, you know.
Chion Wolf 38:27
I hear in your story that you speak with God for guidance and direction. And I wonder when you pull the camera back on your life and you try to make sense of what happened, why it happened, how it happened, what the meaning is behind all the things you've been through when you talk with God about this, about having left your children and made the decision to leave them in order to save yourself, in order to let them continue having a mother on planet Earth at the same time as them. I wonder, when you talk with God about this, the meaning of all of this with you, what you hear back.
Marie Abanga 39:05
I haven't really spoken with him about all of that. It mustn't make sense. And even if it makes sense, what am I going to do about it? Can I reverse things? And you know, sometimes you go through things so that you can also help other people tomorrow, who will be going through the same situation or who might need help. The best way to understand something or to feel some pain is to go through it. Sadly, that's true. I can tell somebody now I know what it feels to have post-traumatic stress disorder. You know, I can say all of those things, because I have been through all of those things. So for me, looking at it from all points, it's building my capacity as a woman who can empathize, who can help other women. You know, women go through a lot in my society. You don't know who to confide in. You don't know who can actually help you out, but if you know that someone has those kind of experiences, yeah. Women don't stigmatize women in my society for this kind of things anymore, because we now know that we all go through a lot of things, and so there's no point in stigmatizing another woman. Yeah, the men have lost that battle trying to get women to stigmatize other women. Things can really be tough. You know, things can really be tough, and sometimes you have to do what you have to do. So I think, to be honest, leaving him, leaving those children, was the best thing I could do for all of us, yeah.
Chion Wolf 40:38
Will you talk about what things are like right now with your children and your relationship with them?
Marie Abanga 40:44
Yeah, I mean, oh my God, they are all grown. And I mean, two of them are adults already, and one of them is an adolescent. And we are close. We are really close. I was away for just four years. I'll call it 'just' because some people have been away for longer, and when I came back, it took us, like, a year to build things back up, and then I found my own place, and I made sure that they were involved in the choice of the apartment and everything. So we started our lives together. And what I said to myself was, 'This is your do-over. And so you have to be there the best you can be, and be as available as possible, and give up a lot of things so as to be available for them.' So we had roundtables discussions a lot, like every other week. It was really, really a close-knit thing. So yeah, we had 10 years actually, to build things up.
Chion Wolf 41:44
I want to know why you felt it was important to be so open about this.
Marie Abanga 41:51
Yeah, because a lot of things people go through, they don't talk about it. And they don't talk about it, they suffer in silence. And I decided I was not going to suffer in silence
Chion Wolf 42:03
When you hear from other women who've made similar decisions, what kind of similarities do you notice?
Marie Abanga 42:10
I noticed that there is, first of all, pain. I noticed that the pain has been there for quite a while. I noticed that there is the hush-hush. I noticed that there is even the, let me call it, what, the physical pain. So the pain is, it has different dimensions, physical, there's emotional, there's even a spiritual pain. The pain can, it's too much to bear before they take that kind of a decision. You know, for me, it's like, to be honest, a last resort, that kind of a decision to leave your children. It's like cutting yourself up and leaving one party and going with, with, half, because the children are part of you, and they came from your womb. The truth is that the bond is different. You bonded with them for nine months. The father didn't have that opportunity. So you, for you to take that decision to leave them, audacity is the only word I can muster. So when a woman tells me that she had to leave her children, I just want to hug her. That's all. I don't think of any other thing other than to just hug her and say, 'I feel you.'
Chion Wolf 43:23
I wonder if, because you sound like a very compassionate person, and I can't help but think about when men leave their children, we have this idea that it is emotionally shallow, that maybe they don't feel the depths of despair and sadness that a woman leaving her children might feel. And I wonder if there's ever a part of you that when you think about men abandoning their children, maybe has some more compassion for them too. Or do you feel like it is different because they didn't carry the children inside them?
Marie Abanga 43:59
To be honest with you, I feel it is different, yet I also feel that they go through their own process, and I just honestly, I'm just going to be biased. I'm a woman, right? And I think that for them to take the decision is much easier, because I tell you, I took that decision in 2009, but I left two years later. I don't think, I'm a psychotherapist, I've spoken with men who have taken all kinds of decisions. Sometimes the process doesn't even take six months. Sometimes, even when one leaves, in before six months, there's a replacement, even when she dies. It is completely different, especially in my society, you know. So I can't even put us on the same scale.
Chion Wolf 44:42
Is there anything that you would have done differently?
Marie Abanga 44:46
No, I don't think I would have done anything differently because I didn't know better, and I didn't know how to ask for help, because my society, maybe today, people speak out more, but back in 2011, people didn't talk. To find people who talk about this kind of experiences, there are not many. What do you mean by postpartum depression? What do you mean by, just bother? Oh, yeah, a woman of faith, pray, pray until something happens. And sometimes it's like, 'No, no, no, no, no. You're not a woman of faith. You cannot talk about that, you know.' So I don't think I would have done things differently. I should be even thinking about it, because it would mean like I regret something. No, I don't.
Chion Wolf 45:31
I wonder if you could go back in time and speak to yourself on that first day without your children and tell yourself some sort of message. What would be that message?
Marie Abanga 45:45
Yeah, oh my god, yeah, Marie, you don't need to cry all of those tears. You'll be okay. So just come on, be strong for them.
Chion Wolf 45:56
Well, I've asked all the questions that I've really meant, I needed to absolutely ask. But I know we could talk about 1000 different things here. Did I miss anything? Is there anything else you want to say? Open floor.
Marie Abanga 46:08
I just want to say that sometimes, you know, people think about what people will say, how people will react, what will and what if. Just do what you have to do. If you have to save yourself so that you can be stronger for those children, by every means, save yourself. And pray, pray about it. It's not like it's only some particular category of people who deserve the Lord's mercy and compassion. No, everybody. My earnest, earnest prayer is that someone listens to this and doesn't give up on life.
Chion Wolf 46:50
Well, Marie Abanga, thank you so much for talking with me.
Marie Abanga 46:54
You're welcome. God bless you.
Chion Wolf 46:59
When I say Audacious is lovingly produced by Jessica Severin de Martinez, it's true, but this episode shows the full magnitude of her care. Whenever we dedicate our show to particularly sensitive topics and to guests who've had difficult experiences sharing their stories with the media in the past, it takes an extraordinary person to let them know that they're safe with us. Jessica connected with Marie and Rebekah with reverence. She learned their histories with care. She built trust slowly and honored the parts of their lives that they felt ready to share with us. With you. Now, a producer can learn these skills to a degree, but Jessica, I think in addition to that, she was born with these sensibilities, these instincts, this amazing heart, and she continues to cultivate it and inspire everyone here at Connecticut Public. So Jessica, who did not know I was going to include this in the credits, thank you for the extraordinary, loving work you've been doing on Audacious for all these years, for the steadiness of your ethics, for the gentleness you bring to preparing and reviewing every conversation. I admire you deeply, and I am so proud to be your teammate and your friend. That love circles all the way around to the other heartful members of our small and mighty team, Meg Fitzgerald and Robyn Doyon-Aitken, who are totally nodding their head in agreement about Jessica right now. You can find all of our conversations at ct public.org/audacious, and please subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. Stay in touch with me on the socials at Chion Wolf, and you can always send an email to audacious@ctpublic.org. Peace.