Ever since that morning over oatmeal when my mother told me that she was leaving, that she could no longer handle the burden of motherhood, that she needed to build her own life in her own way, my mother reflected to me the power of owning your own choices.  While I rarely agreed with the choices that my mother made after that, she did at least make her own choices.

By the time I was 25 I had graduated university, gotten married and began my career in Accounting. In those first two years after university, I and my then husband had moved to New York where I worked in New York City in a public accounting firm.

When I was 12, I was living with my father and my three little sisters, my father had met a woman who looked exactly like my mother albeit much younger. She and her 4-year-old son had moved in with us and that was when the trouble started. It was clear from the start that she wanted me, and my sisters gone as fast as possible. It was clear from the start that she wanted me gone first.