You are not Lost. Your child is not gone.

How a poem saved me when our children were stolen.

In late 2024, as I was fighting to pull myself out of a long, dark chapter — one filled with grief and uncertainty — I stumbled upon the poem Lost by David Wagoner.

By that point, I had felt profoundly lost for years. Lost in the endless war of parental alienation, lost in the unique grief of mourning our living children, and lost in my own identity. I had become so tangled up in my pain that I couldn’t imagine being anything else.

Then, as poetry often does when you’re ready to receive it, this poem came to my rescue:

So, what do we do when we are lost?

As Wagoner said, we stand still. We listen.

Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you

Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,

And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,

Must ask permission to know it and be known.

If you are a targeted parent, you know exactly what it’s like to be “lost in the forest”. I certainly did. I couldn’t see a path forward; I didn't know if my family would ever be whole again; I didn't even know what I could do to simply move on. Because that’s our instinct, isn’t it? When things fall apart, we feel this frantic urgency to do, to act, to fix, to move. We believe motion equals progress. But what if this is actually a trap? A distraction designed to keep us from our own thoughts, our own selves? Maybe what we need to do is stand still and listen.

Parental alienation is a master at stealing the present. It yanks us backward, forcing us to re-analyse the past, over and over. We do it because we believe the past is all we have left. The memories with our children are the only proof we still existed as parents. At the same time, parental alienation keeps us stuck in the future. It becomes this exhausting fight between hope and anguish. We’re consumed by imagined scenarios of reunion, desperate for a resolution, while simultaneously terrorised by the possibility that it might never come.

So what happens to the present? What happens to the Here?

Wherever you are is called Here.

This poem is asking us to stop and look around. To ground ourselves to the reality of the life we are living. It tells us something counterintuitive: although we feel deeply lost, what surrounds us is not. The trees, the bushes, the ground beneath our feet — they are exactly where they belong. And if we can see that, we might just find our way back to gratitude; open our eyes to the small joys life has to offer.

Why do we need to ask permission to know it and to be known? Because we cannot hear if we don’t pay attention. Because healing demands a genuine desire. We need to practice silence; we must look within because we want to know who we are beyond the pain. We want to come out of this dark place and become who we were always meant to be. This journey is lonely and painful, so we must remain humble. We must ask permission to know our own soul.

The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,

I have made this place around you.

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

Listen. We must listen. And to do so, we have to turn down the volume of everything else. Also, we must not be scared to learn — or to suffer to reach knowledge — otherwise we give up and surrender back to the daily, mundane noise. When we quiet the noise, what rises up can be painful. But the forest — this place we find ourselves lost — already contains the answers. The healing is there, it’s just that it asks something of us.

And yet…

If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.

We don’t get one shot at this. We have an entire lifetime to get this right. Every moment can be the moment we try again. Every minute can be the beginning of an honest conversation with ourselves. We only need to show up and say, I’m here.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

No two branches are the same to Wren.

If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,

You are surely lost.

There’s an old saying: there are none so deaf as those who will not hear.

And I need to say something difficult here. I see so many targeted parents — and I was one of them! — get stuck in a place full of anger and resentment. Every conversation circles back to the injustice: the family court system is corrupt, their ex is a monster, and they’re waiting for karma to punish those who wronged them.

I understand it, as I lived through it; the anger and the injustice are real. But this is a wrong approach to the situation.

When we make the alienating parent the centre of our story, we empower them. We cut ourselves off from everything that actually matters — especially from our children’s experience. Having every right to be angry doesn’t make our children’s situation any better. In fact, it might make it worse. While we focus on the ‘enemy’, our children are still out there, alone, waiting for us to see them. The focus must be shifted back to what’s important: our bond with our child.

No two trees are the same to Raven.

We cannot treat our situation like every other alienated parent’s situation. We cannot paste a template over our child and expect that it’ll work. We know our child better than anyone — we have a duty to look for them. We must pay attention. The bond we shared with them is unique and cannot be treated generically.

Stand still. The forest knows

Where you are. You must let it find you.

This last part of the poem speaks to something we tend to undermine: the answers are already within us. We just need to stand still enough to hear them. To allow them to come to us. We know that, with immense effort and relentless commitment, we can find that connection back to our child. We must allow ourselves to heal, to evolve, to become the parent who knows how to do this.

And here’s the most hopeful thing I can tell you: that parent already exists within you.

The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you.

Thanks for reading.

Sienna

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