She has described learning to navigate these things with the support of her family and, eventually, through her own work with the JAYC Foundation. She has also described the specific experience of reconnecting with her mother after eighteen years, and the complexity of that reconnection given everything that had happened in the intervening years. Her daughters—now adults—have not sought public profiles, and Dugard has been careful to protect their privacy.
She has noted, in interviews, that people sometimes expect her story to resolve in a particular way—that the recovery should look like restoration, like a return to what was interrupted. She has pushed back gently on this framing, noting that the life that was taken in 1991 cannot simply be resumed. What she has built since 2009 is something different: not a continuation of what was stolen but a new construction on ground that the captivity has shaped.
In 2019, on the ten-year anniversary of her recovery, she gave an interview in which she reflected on the decade. She said she was doing well. She said she had learned to forgive—not for the Garridos’ benefit, she emphasized, but for her own. She said the JAYC Foundation’s work gave her a purpose that connected her experience to something constructive.
She also said that she thought about the years she could not recover. That was the permanent dimension of what had been done.
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## The Daughters Born in Captivity
Two girls were born into a compound behind a house in Antioch, California. They did not choose the circumstances of their birth. They grew up in an enclosed world, educated by their mother within the confines that Garrido had constructed, knowing the man who had abducted and imprisoned their mother as the dominant figure in their daily lives.