‘MY FAMILY IS EVERYTHING TO ME’
After her horror ordeal, the kidnap victim has lived with gratitude for everyday things—like sunshine and rain
Kidnap survivor Elizabeth Smart reflects on the simple pleasures life brings her.
AElizabeth Smart settles 8-month-old son James onto a picnic blanket, a familiar ballerina doll falls to the grass from the playground slide, discarded by daughter Chloe, 2, who, having found a real playmate, scampers off with another little girl. “Look at her,” says Smart, watching with a smile as Chloe frolics in a park in Park City, Utah. “She’s already made a new friend. She makes friends wherever she goes. I love that about her.”
For Smart, 30, that sentiment— natural and unremarkable for most mothers watching their children become part of the wider world—is nothing short of a triumph. Kidnapped from her bedroom in 2002 when she was 14 and then brutalised by her captors for nine months before being rescued, Smart says motherhood, even 16 years later, is a fraught tangle of dreams and nightmares. “I want to let Chloe explore and play,” Smart says. “But there’s a part of me that’s always thinking, ‘Are the windows shut? Where is she at? Who is by her? Can I see her?’ I don’t want to let Chloe out of my sight.”
Smart’s horrific ordeal, never far from her thoughts, will be retold in a television movie she produced, I Am Elizabeth Smart. But the teenage girl who walked away from physical, mental and sexual torture with her spirit intact—and faced her captors in court and forgave them—says she chose her path. “Life continued—certainly differently, but
it continued once I was back,”
she recalls. “And I wanted a happy life.” Just like she’s choosing her path today: “I will never regret being there with my children, watching them, making sure they’ll be OK. But I might regret not being there for them.”
So life now with her husband of five years, Matthew Gilmour, is a party of four. Smart laughs at the idea of datenight Fridays with just the two of them. “Let’s just call it Family Night Friday,” she says, describing an outdoorsy lifestyle of swimming, skiing and enjoying Park City’s mountain trails, where Smart runs with the family’s three dogs. Scottish-born Gilmour, 27, started his own holiday-home rental management company and regularly shares his lunch hour with Smart and the children. “Life is pretty perfect right now,” she says.
Between her travel as an advocate for victims of abuse and work on her second book, Where There’s Hope (out in March), Smart is a correspondent for the syndicated TV series Crime Watch Daily, telling the true stories of crime victims and survivors. She hopes her work—including a re-creation of her captivity, which she calls “the worst part of my life”— sends the message to struggling survivors “that they’re not alone, and life can be good again.”
It was, ultimately, her own suffering that taught her to live with thankfulness. “I’m grateful for rain, because when I was kidnapped, that meant I had something to drink,” she says. “I’m grateful for the sunshine, because it warmed me when I was cold.”
Someone else who appreciates simple pleasures is her mini-me, Chloe, who sheds her bright pink shoes at the edge of the park’s sandbox. “Don’t you want to keep the sand and wood chips out of your toes?” Smart asks. “No!” says Chloe. “My toes like sand!”