I wrote little love notes to my baby, telling him how I couldn’t wait to meet him. Jeff got in on the action, too:I just got home from the gym. Your mom is writing thank you notes for your baby shower.
First, I just want you to know what a wonderful mommy you are going to have. She is very pretty, warm and thoughtful. The two of you growing together for nine months has made her the happiest woman in the world. Your mom and I love each other very much and when you finally get here, I think we will even be closer.
I will love you,
And care for you,
Forever,
Daddy
As his due date came near, we waited for the baby to make his big entrance into the world. And waited. And waited. He was supposed to show up around August 27, but on September 18, he was still having a cozy womb rest. That was the doctor’s official deadline—he had told me that if the baby hadn’t arrived naturally by the eighteenth, we were going in after him.
Labor was induced, and after nineteen and a half hours of back labor (yes, I would do it again), Nicholas Samuel Markowitz was born, just an ounce shy of nine pounds, on September 19, 1984. I wrote to him in his baby book:Our world is blessed and honored upon your arrival. We have waited for such a long time to see your beautiful face. You have fulfilled my life. I knew you would, but it is better than I ever imagined. I feel so complete, so happy. I love you very much.
Your Mom,
Susan
Leah and Ben came to see their new half brother in the hospital, and six-year-old Ben was worried.
“His head looks like an egg,” he told us.
“It won’t stay like that forever,” Jeff assured him. “He just got a little squished on his way out into the world.”
Squished head or not, he looked perfect to me. The happiness didn’t wear off, either. Nick was a wonderful baby, and being with him made me feel like I had finally figured out my purpose in life. I was here to love and protect this little boy. His start in life was so promising, too—two parents and two sets of grandparents who loved him and wanted him very much, plenty of toys and attention . . . what more could a baby want?
It was important to me not to show favoritism, though. After all, Jeff’s two children spent every other weekend with us, and they had to feel loved and welcomed, too. I went out of my way to show them I loved them and was proud of them. Nick didn’t get any special treatment; they all had to live with the same rules, and I tried to be just as affectionate and attentive to all of them.
What we didn’t know then was that their mother had begun asking them about their “little bastard brother.” It took many years for Leah and Ben to tell us about that. We knew that Jeff’s ex was very angry that he’d moved on so fast after they’d separated, but we didn’t expect her to sink so low. She apparently grilled the kids about our every move, wanting to know all the details of our relationship and our comings and goings.
We bought a house, and while we waited for construction to be completed, we moved in with Jeff’s parents. Almost three months after Nick was born, Jeff’s mother ordered us to get married.
“You take a day off of work and you two get married,” she told Jeff. So that’s just what we did. On Pearl Harbor Day, December 7, 1984, Jeff’s parents watched Nick while we headed down to the L.A. Courthouse to say our “I do’s.” I wore Jeff’s mother’s blue quarter-length-sleeve wool dress, and Jeff wore a sports jacket with patches on the elbows. Aah, the 1980s. What a fashionable decade.
It felt a little like being in a Baskin Robbins at the Justice of the Peace, going up to the ticket dispenser to take a number and waiting to be called. I don’t remember much about the ceremony, though Jeff does—that’s my romantic man for you. We used Jeff’s father’s plain gold wedding band as my ring for the ceremony. Jeff bought me a wedding ring afterward, and said that we were doing everything backward for good luck. Being married didn’t feel very different; we were already married in our hearts. This just made it official.
Being a mother was everything I hoped it would be. The physical connection that started in the womb and continued through breast-feeding made me feel such a strong bond with this little person and his kissable peach-fuzzed head and chubby cheeks.
Nick was a terrific baby who turned into a sweet toddler in no time at all. By his first birthday, he said “Thank you” every time someone handed him a present and “Bless you” every time someone sneezed. At seventeen months, he could name the seven dwarfs, even when they were turned backward. He had them memorized by the color of their hats. Sneezy’s name, however, was “Achoo.”
His sense of humor was apparent right from the start, too. When he was two, after watching cartoons, he posed his Snoopy figurine at the edge of the bathtub.
“You’re going to fall down into the water, right after these messages!” he said.
Sometimes he was funny on purpose, and other times he didn’t realize he was being funny, like when he ran through the house looking for his grandfather, shouting, “Honey! Honey! Honnnnnney!” because that’s what he heard his grandmother call his grandfather. Nick was supposed to call him Papa, but if “Honey” was what Grandma called him, then “Honey” was good enough for him, too.
What I have now are the snapshots and the videos to remind me that Nick was real, and that he was ours, and that I’m not looking back on him with rose-colored glasses. He really was as cute and smart and wonderful as I remember.
There will never be another video of Nick, making the ones I have valuable beyond all measure. On one of them, Jeff had turned the clunky, old-fashioned video camera on two-year-old Nick—with his dirty blond hair with the slightest wave to it, white OshKosh overall shorts, and bare feet—kissing the dog and giggling and riding his blue motorized car across the lawn.
Then came a scene from Christmas: Nick sitting at the top of the stairs, waiting patiently while I finished getting him dressed in his special outfit with the red and green suspenders. His dad was trying to be patient, too, but it was tough for him. He had been waiting by the tree for us to come down and was bursting with eagerness . . . it was the first Christmas that Nick was old enough to appreciate his presents and understand what was going on, and that was definitely occasion to break out the old ten-pound video camera.
“I have one more sock to put on,” Nick reassured his dad. “I love you.”
A tall box with red wrapping paper was the first to be torn into. His first basketball hoop, just his height.
“Are you good at basketball?” Jeff asked.
“Yeah, I am good!” Nick replied, and proved it by “dribbling,” then walking up to the basket and depositing the ball into the basket. “I’m strong,” he added. “Very strong.”
We didn’t have Leah and Ben with us that day, but they came back to us the next day, which we dubbed the “second night of Christmas,” and the first night of Hanukkah. The video showed all three kids playing together—Nick waddling around in a diaper and red pajama top giving orders to his apparent teammate Leah: “You go that way.” They were sneak attacking Ben.
The next scene skipped ahead to Nick’s third birthday—a backyard dinosaur party where Nick steadfastly avoided the mild-mannered dinosaur character for the first half of the party, then assaulted him with balloon swords and poodles the second half. Not just Nick, either—all the kids at the party found great amusement in stepping on the dinosaur’s tail and messing with his costume. At one point, the dinosaur actually complained to a group of little girls, “Come on, I can’t paint anyone’s face if you hit me.”
When Jeff asked Ben what kind of face painting he was going to get, nine-year-old Ben gave the camera a serious look and said, “I’m not going to get painted.”
“You’re too cool?” Jeff asked. Ben nodded and took a swig from his Dixie cup.
Then it was time for the happy birthday song, and Nick stood there in his dinosaur shirt and blew out the candles on his dinosaur cake, and when Jeff asked, “How old are you?” Nick called out, “T
HWEE!”
There were all manner of cousins and neighbors and some children whose names we didn’t even know (Where had they come from? Do preschoolers normally crash parties?). Their moms were there, too, with decade-appropriate frosted and permed hair.
It was exactly the life I’d always pictured. We made fun out of thin air. It never really mattered what we were doing: if we were together, there would be love and laughter. Some of our best times were on the sailboat, sailing together on the high seas, where the kids would take turns steering the boat and wearing the captain’s hat.
Nick started preschool that year at a place called the Farm School, and he would come home with his pockets filled with acorns. Acorns can still make me feel sentimental today. It was an exciting time because he loved his little friends there. I kept every finger painting, every turkey made out of a hand tracing, his phone number written inside a picture of a telephone, the “A Is for Apple” and “C Is for Cat” work sheets . . .
For a time, life really felt perfect.
Interspersed with all this perfection, however, were the court battles. Jeff’s ex wanted more money. She had the kids in private school and couldn’t afford the tuition. Instead, we asked for—and got—more visitation with the kids. Each time she asked for more money, we asked for more time. Eventually, it was a fifty-fifty split. We had the kids every other week, plus half of all holidays and vacations. That seriously steamed her.
I don’t mean to insinuate that the only reason we wanted more time with the kids was out of spite. We really thought, at the time, that we were the more capable parents and the more stable household, so it would be better for the kids to spend as much time with us as possible.
By that point, Ben was nine and Leah was twelve. Beautiful kids, both of them. Ben had a “little-surfer-dude” look about him, with windswept dirty blond hair, and Leah had long, shiny brown locks and an electric smile. They were good to their little brother, and he liked following them around. On the rare occasions when they fought or made fun of each other, I’d make them write sentences in a notebook. (“Leah does not look like a nerd. Leah does not look like a nerd.”)
One of our first moves once we had equal custody, and it was a wrong one, was to take the kids out of private school and put them in public school. Why do we need to spend so much money on private school? we thought. How could it be so much better than the public school that everyone else’s kids went to without complaint?
Plus, we really wanted to keep the sailboat.
If I had to trace our family’s tragedy all the way back to its root, that’s what I’d point to right there. We couldn’t afford to keep the boat and send the kids to that private school. What we should have done right then was sell the boat and give the money to Jeff’s ex to keep the kids where they were comfortable. But we were stubborn and just plain wrong. We let our priorities get mixed up.
So we kept the boat, got the kids half the time, and switched them to a new school—uprooting them from their friends and teachers, putting them in a new atmosphere with bigger classes and less monitoring. They weren’t happy, and Ben’s behavior problems began soon thereafter. Attention deficit disorder (ADD) is what they called it. Who knows if that was the real problem? ADD was very “in vogue” at the time.
I thought part of the problem might be because Ben seemed to be physically uncomfortable all the time. He was always clearing his throat and making weird sounds that seemed to me like he must have allergies or sinus problems, so I took him to a doctor and sat with him while he got poked with way too many needles. Afterward, he kept thanking me. It was sad and cute.
His mom was furious. She was absolutely livid that I had taken him to a doctor without her consent. I hadn’t really considered it at that point, but I later understood that I wouldn’t have wanted someone to take my son to a doctor without my consent, either. At the time, though, my only concern was trying to figure out what was bothering Ben so much.
Then things really went wrong.
Depending on who was arguing with whom at the time, Ben and Leah bounced back and forth between our two houses. First, Leah came to live with us during the week, while Ben stayed at his mother’s house.
Some days, Jeff’s ex had to leave for work before Ben had to go to school, so she started dropping him off at our house on those mornings so that I’d take him to school. Luckily, his middle school was just down the block, but she never gave us any warning or asked for permission. She never called to check if I was home or to make sure it was OK for me to take Ben, and there was no consistent schedule—some days he’d just show up on our doorstep and ring the bell, and some days he wouldn’t. I told her to stop it and to call ahead if she wanted me to take Ben to school.
That didn’t happen. So the next time she showed up with him in tow, I just didn’t answer the door. I pretended not to be home—which they both knew was a lie.
“Keep knocking. That bitch is home,” she called out to Ben.
It killed me to stand by that door and know Ben was standing on the other side, just a pawn in this game of ex-wife and new wife. Come what may, though, I was going to stand my ground this time. I was not backing down to this woman anymore. Just because she was bitter that I existed didn’t mean that I was going to take over any responsibility she felt like shoving my way.
Ben trudged back to his mother’s car, and they drove away. Maybe she took him to school early; maybe she went to work late. But he got to school somehow. It was wrong of me; I had made Ben a pawn just as much as his mother had. I shouldn’t have made him feel like I was avoiding him.
The next weekend when she came to pick Ben up, I was outside watering the lawn. I turned to her in the driveway and told her, “Stop putting the kids in the middle of this. If you want special favors from me, you call me first. You don’t just drop Ben off unannounced and expect that I’ll handle everything.”
A tidal wave of profanities flew out of her mouth. And just in case I didn’t get the point verbally, she decided to take it a step further.
She tried to run me over with her car.
No, I mean it. She tried to run me over with her car.
Jerking the car forward at me in the driveway, she grazed my pant leg with the car bumper, and I did the first thing that came to mind: I turned the hose at her and sprayed it full blast. Her car had the sunroof open, so the water showered down on her and the car seats. In shock, I’m sure, she drove up across the lawn, then backed up into the street, while I got out of striking range.
“Ben! Get over here,” she screamed, and she backed up across the front lawn.
Oh, Ben. I turned to see that he had been standing at the door the whole time, seeing and probably hearing everything. He hesitated; what was he supposed to do? His mother was cursing and drenched and practically foaming at the mouth, but she was his mother, and I was the one holding the hose. I was always going to be the Other Woman, even though I had nothing to do with the breakup of their home. Poor Ben, with his eyes open wide, looking at me, then at her. She flung the car door open and screamed again for him to get in. He walked over and got into her car wordlessly. As she peeled out, she tried to rip up the front lawn, squealing her tires all the way down the street.
I filed a police report, but I dropped it before it got to court because it seemed like the wrong thing to do to the kids. As much as I wanted her to be held accountable for her actions, I didn’t want Ben and Leah to see us tearing each other’s throats out in another legal battle. They had enough ugliness between our two households as it was. In those early years, we were all immature and wrong about the way we spoke about each other. We name-called. We let the kids hear things they shouldn’t have. And it hurt them—they had no idea who to believe or who really wanted them, and they took sides depending on whose house they were in at the moment.
You could see trouble coming with Ben even from very early on. He didn’t seem to be able to control his impulses. For one thing, he was extremely fidgety, always moving and
poking people and trying to get attention. There were also aggressive tendencies that came and went. He was a loving son and brother but very easily got off-track and would knock things down or throw things across the room. It seemed like there was no censor inside of him telling him to relax and get a grip until it was too late. Then, when he was calm again, he could be a sweet kid and a lot of fun.
When Nick was in the second grade, he completed a fill-in-the-blank book. It had entries like “My favorite book is The Big Book of Why” and “My favorite food is cheese omelets.” One of the sentences to fill out was “I worry about _____,” and he wrote “my brother.”
Even then, we all saw danger signs, and it didn’t take a genius to figure out where they were coming from. We just didn’t know how bad it would get.
At age eleven, Ben and a friend got caught using a screwdriver to puncture tires. There was no animosity behind it; the other boy just told him to do it, so Ben did. He wanted acceptance from this boy. Unluckily for them, however, an off-duty police officer happened to be jogging in the neighborhood just as Ben was doing the deed. He got caught, and my instinct was to pull Nick closer to me. It worried me that Ben had gotten involved in something illegal, and my intuition was that this was just the beginning.
Ben’s teachers frequently complained about his misbehavior. His friends were a rough, older crowd who liked to live dangerously, and he didn’t trust either one of his parents. At one point, Ben was being uncooperative with his mother and tried to walk out the door. A friend of Leah’s boyfriend was standing in his way, so Ben pushed him away—and the sixteen-year-old boy beat Ben up. He did it in front of Ben’s mother, and she didn’t intervene.
Then Ben and a friend went to visit another friend of theirs. No one answered the door, but they decided to walk in anyway—the door was unlocked, but no one was home. The boys spotted car keys on their friend’s table, and they thought it sounded like a cool idea to go for a ride. Ben took his friend out for a joyride in that family’s car, crashed it, and damaged three other cars in the process. How he learned to drive at all at eleven years old was beyond me. We were lucky that no one was hurt, and at the time, we were glad that the police didn’t get involved. Jeff paid for the damages to the cars, and we decided it was time to do something about Ben.
My Stolen Son Page 2