Mum’s agony over missing daughter

SHE REGRETS the day that she made the decision to send her children to Barbados to seek “a better life”. According to this distressed mother, in her heart she believes that if she had not made that decision, she would not have had to answer “that call” – a call that has robbed her of a peaceful life ever since.Jamaican-born Judith Haynes is now living a life of pain and sorrow because her daughter Lydia Narcisse went missing “over two years ago” at 17 years old. Haynes told the WEEKEND NATION that she sent Lydia at seven years old, along with her five-year-old brother, to Barbados to live with their father’s mother. The still hurting mother, who was living in Jamaica at the time her daughter went missing, recalled how she received the heart-aching news in December 2007.“I got a call from her aunt saying that they can’t find her and they don’t know where she is. They told me that a body was found on the beach and they went to identify it, but it was not her. One of her aunts told me that they were going to put that she was missing in the paper and I told them yes. I can’t tell you if they did or didn’t do it, but as far as I gather they did not,” said the mother whose eyes were full of tears before the interview even began.Haynes, who made Barbados her home two years ago, admitted that “she does not associate” with the family of her children’s father. Recalling that she saw her children when they visited her in Jamaica, she said that “the Lydia I know and the Lydia who came to Jamaica were two different persons”.“Earlier up in the year [2007], around March or April, she was involved with this guy, and apparently she and him had a fight and he beat her up. Her family took her to the hospital and she had gone back to her grandmother, but she was back and forth between [her boyfriend] and the grandmother. I understand that she would spend two weeks at him and then go back to the grandmother.“When she was in fifth form at [St George Secondary], they found her smoking at school and the principal called her grandmother and her aunt. I did not know nothing about that until she got kicked out of school. I would call them like every week or two weeks, and they would not tell me anything, so I didn’t know,” she said.She has no idea of how her daughter looked when she was last seen. Other than the memories of the times she spent with her daughter, Haynes can “only remember she was always slim built”. But “every day, every night and everyday” she thinks about her daughter.“I don’t know which mother wouldn’t think about their child. Whether that child was bad or good. Sometimes I think that everything and anything has happened to her. But if she is out there and alive, I just want to know. I don’t want anything from her; I just want to know what has happened to her.“There are times when I dream and I see her coming home. I dream about her as a child. I dream that she is big with a child of her own. At least if I know that she is dead, my mind would be at peace and my soul would be at rest.“If I never find out, I will always be in turmoil, I will always be looking and wondering. I just want to know if she is alive, if anybody know her, when was the last time they saw her and if they know where she lives,” she pleaded, adding that “If it wasn’t for the grace of God I would give up on thinking about her and give up on life itself”.