Living a Motherhood Nightmare

This story about Johnny Goshe really freaked me out:

DES MOINES, Iowa -- The mother of a boy abducted 24 years ago said she's bewildered by two photographs left at her front door, apparently showing her son and two other children bound and gagged. The old photos appear to show 12-year-old Johnny Gosch with his mouth gagged and his hands and feet tied. The boy is wearing the same sweatpants Johnny was wearing when he disappeared while delivering newspapers on the morning of Sept. 5, 1982, his mother said. "It's like reliving it," Noreen Gosch told The Associated Press on Thursday night. "But the bigger picture is, 'Why are they doing this?'

We moved to Iowa from Michigan in 1981- I know the Gosche disappearance was a pretty big story all over the country, but in Iowa of course it was enormous. (I was also 12 in 1982) It led to hundreds of stories of kids "disappearing". There was a sense in the early 80s that kids everywhere were vanishing.

Now we know that most missing children are actually runaways or taken as a part of a custody battle. A stranger just taking your kid off the street is very rare- however when one reads the words of Johnny Gosche's mom it is impossible not to understand that for 24 years she has been living a total motherhood nightmare.

(Cross posted at Mothertalkers)