Cause & Effect: The Five Defining Moments in the Life of Christine Hargensen

1 - The Father

April 1967

Christine Hargensen is eight years old when her world is blown apart.

Her father, a successful attorney, is often out of town on overnight trips and Chris stays with her mother. They have a nice relationship – close, in fact, but everyone know that Chris is a Daddy's Girl. It's evident when he returns from his trips. She runs to him, he showers her in affection – the apple of his eye, the most important person in his life.

Chris, and her mother – nineteen years old when she marries Daniel Hargensen, only a year older when their daughter comes along. It's comfortable, but she refuses to depend on him, qualifying as a mid-wife before Chris takes her first steps through the school gates.

The overnight trips for work never last long – one night, two at most. And then he's home and there's lots of love and laughter and it's nice.

But when she is eight years old, it changes.

The business trips get longer. And when he returns, there's still a lot of love for her, but less for her mother. The laughter has disappeared too, replaced by rows.

And then there's this one business trip that goes on for almost two weeks before she smells a rat.

They tell her that her Daddy's working out of town, but twice her grandmother picks her up and takes her to see him. Both times he takes her out for dinner, spoils her rotten, big ice cream sundaes that she never even gets to.

After the second visit, she's in the back of her grandmother's car watching the lights on the freeway pass her by when it dawns on her.

Daddy isn't coming home. She doesn't speak another word for well over a week.

A week, until her parents finally sit her down and tell her they've decided they can't live together anymore.

The roadside diner visits stop at least, and her father moves into his own place. He gets to have Chris two nights a week. And so, Chris concludes, she belongs to her mother.

She doesn't mind belonging to her mother, but she misses him terribly.

At first, Chris thinks she might feel sad about it all.

But finally, after the endless car trips and the nights spent in two different beds, after listening to the endless squabbles about who would get Christmas and the relentless disagreements about what her father fed her or how late her mother allowed her to stay up – neither of which she got a say in – Chris comes to a different conclusion. She is no longer sad.

She is angry.