A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  He ignored me. “That so-called ‘fraud’ will ruin my practice.”

  “Peter, that’s not my fault. The judge decided what he decided. It’s over. I need to talk about acc—”

  “Not for me it’s not. It’ll never be over for me. I’ll never sign that order. I’ll never say that was fraud.” Peppered throughout his barrage were ancient themes: I was an “actress” (I had been a model in my 20s, and was a Vancouver television personality when I had met Peter). I had “fooled the courts.” I was a “fucking bitch.” Twenty-five times he said it in the Cactus Club Café: “You’re a fucking bitch.” People turned and glared at the three of us. Oblivious to all, Peter just raised his voice higher. “Why all the rush on this, anyway? Yeah, I need a break, too, you know.”

  “Well, I thought we could talk about your plans, so Dash and you can do what you want and I can work out my holiday time, too.”

  “Plans, plans, plans. That’s all I ever hear from you is plans. What do you want anyway, all of July?” Peter asked, then exploded into laughter. “What is Richardson doing here anyway? What has he got to do with anything?”

  “He’s just here to listen, Peter, so you don’t have to worry about him.” I felt myself buckling under the weight of this man’s hatred and irrationality. “You won, Peter!” I eventually exclaimed. “You got custody. You got what you wanted! We need to put this behind us. I came here to work out summer access with you.”

  “That trial was all your doing. I can barely stand to look at you.”

  “Okay, Peter,” I said miserably, “we’re leaving.” I smoothed my shirt over my tummy and manoeuvred out from behind the little table. Dave still hadn’t said a word, just as he had promised. We were out onto the street before he finally spoke. “I’m glad that went so well, aren’t you?” he said, lightly.

  I smiled crookedly. “I’m so sorry, Dave.”

  But he forced a laugh. “Hey!” he said. “It goes with the territory! I don’t know how you kept your cool.” Dave may not have liked my strategy of non-confrontation, of trying to neutralize Peter’s aggression by not responding to it, but he respected it, he respected me. And this is where the foundation of our love lay. Despite the abuse, my misery and frustration, and the knowledge deep in my gut that Dash was going to suffer for his father’s blistering anger, I felt safer than at any other time in the past ten years. I may not have come away from the meeting with a summer access schedule, but knowing that Dave would be there for me, in whatever way I needed him to be, was the rare and precious cargo I took home that day. And I did get my four weeks of summer with Dash. It took another half-dozen phone calls to Peter, but I got them. We went to Lake of the Woods and had a great time.

  That September, Dash was our best man at an intimate garden wedding. My best friend, Sandy Cameron, and her husband, Terry, my dad, Jim, my brother, Dave, and his wife, Bev, celebrated with us. My mom was visiting relatives in England, a trip long planned. Dave’s parents were on the phone listening to the service from Winnipeg, with champagne glasses in hand for the toast. Dash wore a soft sea-blue shirt and neat black pants. He shone as he posed for photographs, grinning widely and proudly, signing his name on the marriage certificate with a face heavy with concentration. He told me how he wanted to make sure he wrote his name perfectly on the lines. “You’ve done it beautifully,” I told him. At forty-one, I had my son with me, I was marrying a man whose beauty and generosity endure in the same abundance today, fourteen years later, and I was eight days from meeting Colby, the first of two beautiful baby boys Dave and I would have together. Though I still reeled from the court’s decision, I had a family, I had love — I had a whole world. “Custody” was just a word for the paperwork, I decided. What happened in our lives was what counted.

  But losses began to accumulate. I discovered that, along with my ban from the school, I wasn’t called when Dash was sick. Peter was called, and if he wasn’t home or the nanny didn’t answer the phone, Dash stayed at school in the sickroom. Because I had to go through Peter for school notices, I never got any. I didn’t know when sports days were, or Dash’s school plays. While missing the events of Dash’s school life was bizarre and upsetting, what was far worse was losing my ability to continue the natural bonding that takes place when your child knows you are actively involved with his school. The child feels loved and cared for and generally does better at school when the parents participate. I knew what it was to be an active member of Dash’s school community. I had been involved for his two years of preschool and then kindergarten, and when I lost all that, I was keenly aware that there was no way to make up or substitute for it. On what planet would a school want a loving, committed parent excluded from school? I knew no other parent who was so cut off from their child’s school life, and I felt dirty and stained, a marginal person, a lurking pariah. A bad parent.

  But I never drove by the school to try and catch a glimpse of Dash, or grab an illicit cuddle with him, or try secretly to meet with his teachers for news. I never pushed anything. I was the picture of propriety. I didn’t skulk. I couldn’t do anything that accorded with the view of me that Peter had put out at the trial. I couldn’t be seen in tears — the over-emotional madwoman. I couldn’t screen out Peter’s drunken calls — the judgmental socialite. I couldn’t accuse him of telling Dash terrible things about me, which I knew he was doing — the paranoid loose screw. I had been tainted. As in politics, Peter had framed the issue — me — and I couldn’t get in front of the debate again. I had no standing to argue. In my private life I lived in a beautiful house in Kerrisdale, I was married to a wealthy businessman, but in legal terms I was the woman who had lost all custodial rights to my child, a punishment I thought was only meted out to crack whores and deadbeat dads. So I had to act the very opposite of that reputation and incrementally restore myself by being who I was, not who Peter said I was.

  I wouldn’t have cared what Peter did if he had just trained his sights on me. But I was never so naïve as to think Peter could — or wanted to — leave Dash out of it. That little boy represented the best means of getting me to do whatever Peter wanted. In Peter’s growing preoccupation with diminishing my role in our son’s life, Dash became the ultimate lever. Six years old as of August, Dash had to see it all, hear it all, witness everything. If Peter was to be the one parent Dash had, Dash himself had to believe that life would be better that way. Knocking me down, morning, noon, and night, was Peter’s chosen method of achieving that end.

  One Friday afternoon, when I was at their door to pick up Dash for the weekend, with Dash standing right next to him, Peter snarled, “Get off my steps and go and wait in your car.” My face flushing with rage and frustration, I walked back to the car and got in. I would not bite. For Dash I acted as if it were okay. I smiled brightly when he jumped in the car, and we both pretended that I wasn’t the only person in the world who wasn’t allowed on their doorstep. I had become a fool, too: rather than “Mommy” or “your mom,” in their house I was “Yo-Yo Head” and worse, “Pam.” I had become a casual acquaintance. The first time Dash called me “Pam,” he did it with such naturalness and nonchalance that I nearly choked on my coffee. “Pam, Daddy wants to talk to you,” he said, handing me the phone. When Dash and I were settling in later to read a bedtime story, I asked, “Does Daddy still call me ‘Pam’ when he’s talking with you?” and he became so serious that I regretted bringing it up.

  “Sometimes ‘Pam,’” he said very quietly. “Sometimes other things.”

  “Like what, Dash?” I asked.

  “I don’t think you’ll like it, Mommy,” he said in an unhappy little voice. “He calls you the F.A.”

  I crinkled my forehead in confusion and said nothing, so Dash went on. “He calls you the Fucking Asshole, Mommy.”

  Shock crept over me, thinking of what it must feel like to hear that kind of talk about your mother. With my heart hammering, I pulled Dash closer and asked, “How does that make you feel?”

  “Very sad
, Mommy.”

  Very sad. Another mom with a child in Dash’s class called me one afternoon to tell me she had just seen Dash sitting alone on the school steps, crying. When she had asked him what was wrong, Dash had replied with an astonishingly grown-up, “It’s personal.” When he burst into tears in my arms a little while later, saying, “Mommy, I have a bad life,” his distress was so overwhelming that my first thought was to steal Dash away.

  Another Friday afternoon, Dash jumped into my car grinning and wiggling two loose baby teeth at me. All weekend he toyed with them, making a crunching sound as he used his tongue to push them out before sucking them back in. They were Dash’s first teeth, and losing them was a special occasion. By Sunday night they were hanging halfway out of his mouth on a thread of pink gum, and Dash finally asked Dave if he would help him get them out. They found a soft facecloth and, with a couple of gentle twists, the little teeth came free. “I can’t wait to go to bed!” Dash shouted. “The tooth fairy is going to visit!” He put the teeth into a little cotton-wool bed I had made.

  “Why don’t you call your dad and tell him you’ve just lost your teeth?” I said blithely.

  “Yeah!” he cried and ran to the phone.

  As I dialled the number for him, I told Dash he should take one of his teeth back to his dad’s house so the tooth fairy could visit him there, too. Dash had already thought of that. He wanted two loonies for his teeth, not just one! He pressed the receiver to his ear and waited for his father to pick up the phone, his mouth set in a gap-toothed grin. He wore his joy so openly.

  “Dad, I lost those two teeth!” he shouted into the phone, but he got no further than that. I watched, horrified, as Dash listened without speaking for a full minute, his face collapsing. Peter demanded to talk to me, and Dash stepped aside, shaken. “You have Dash’s teeth!” he shouted. “I’m his custodial parent! You had no right to take them out! Dash is to deliver both teeth back home on Monday afternoon!”

  Greater and greater interference flowed into our lives. After the trial, Peter told me he had a new phone number for the house, so I took it down and began using it, but found it curious, and then maddening, that the phone was rarely answered. Weeks passed. Night after night I would dial the number to talk with Dash, but increasingly simply couldn’t. Instead of hearing Dash’s happy voice, my ears would fill with endless ringing, an answering machine clicking on, or, later, a fax machine. I often sent a note saying, “Please turn off the fax machine, I am trying to get through to Dash,” but the machine’s shrill scream continued to mirror my inner one. I was ashamed to realize that I felt intimidated by the barriers Peter put up and, mindful of aggravating the situation by calling too often, I limited myself to three attempts a night. I don’t know if Dash ever knew that I had called; certainly he never called me back. When once or twice a week someone did answer the phone, I was unprepared and unnerved. Once, when I hadn’t spoken to Dash all week and actually got Peter, I begged him to get Dash to call me, but Peter said calmly, “It’s not my fault Dash never calls you back. Dash doesn’t want to call you, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to drag him to the phone and force him to speak to his mother.” Stung, I hung up and stared at the phone. Dash didn’t want to call me? Why? He was six years old.

  On the nights I couldn’t get through, Dave would come into my den and instantly know. “Oh, well, no one’s home,” I would say, trying to sound casual, but my smile would be wobbly and my eyes would threaten tears. A whole year of this passed; then one day I was looking over Dash’s new soccer schedule — which another child’s mom had faxed me because Peter had not — and by chance I saw that the number listed as Dash’s home number was not the “new” one Peter had given me after the trial. A plummeting, sick feeling hit my stomach. I scrambled to the phone and dialled the number listed on the schedule, and Peter answered immediately. He was shocked to hear my voice. “Get off this line and use your own!” he bellowed, and I knew then that my number was a dud. This man truly wants me to fall out of Dash’s life, I thought, for the first time articulating the fear that had lingered near my heart for a year now. My hope that the future would one day be normal lay shattered, in that moment. I was paralyzed. Where does this end? When a child is in the hands of someone who calculates this way, how does it end?

  Using the main telephone number I now spoke to Dash more often than before, but the evasions continued. Once Peter picked up the phone and said, “Dash isn’t home,” but Dash, having picked up the other extension, quietly said, “I’m right here, Dad.” What is this doing to him? Calls from Mom are bad? The hang-ups went on. The shouts to get off the line. Peter had his own version of events prepared in an affidavit: “Anytime the Respondent has called our home and asked to speak to Dashiell, she has been accommodated.… Dashiell has been advised of his Mother’s call, and encouraged, very much encouraged, to return the call.” Some months were worse than others — that August I was able to speak to Dash only once — but on average it was about once a week. Dash had become increasingly uncomfortable on the phone. Sometimes, in the middle of a sentence, he would suddenly lower his voice and whisper, “I love you,” then hang up, leaving me clutching the phone. “Dash? Dash are you there?” Other times he was buoyant and cheerful and I wondered, Is Dash alone in the house? I wanted our lives to be normal. Why weren’t they? I wanted to call up and say, “Hi, Dash! There’s a great show on TV tonight I think you would love!” or “Don’t forget your rollerblades this weekend. Big D is going to take you around the seawall.” Having to orchestrate everything ten times over crushed my spontaneity. It crushed me.

  Peter’s new wife, Suzanne MacGregor, had been my great hope. When she moved in and then married Peter in April 1991, I saw her as a sober person, a professional woman, a tough woman, who wouldn’t let Peter get away with bad behaviour. That hope had been crushed quickly, too. When Peter was too drunk to drive over and pick up Dash, Suzanne came instead, but wouldn’t say a word about Peter’s drinking that would help me. She later told the court Peter never drank. The reason she drove over to get Dash was because of the “problems” at exchange times. She was sparing Peter and Dash the upset. On the stand at the second custody trial in 1996, she would say he drank so little, in fact, that one of her pet domestic peeves was his “half-finished” beer bottles left in the fridge. She wrote her own florid affidavits about how happy Dash was and how great a parent Peter was. I often wondered if it was through Suzanne’s intimate knowledge of the family-law personnel in Vancouver that Peter learned exactly what to tell Dr. Elterman that would gain him the recommendation he needed. Who knows? Suzanne and Peter’s son, Greg, who still lived with them, certainly gave powerhouse performances belittling my role as Dash’s mom and turning blind eyes to Peter’s growing parental flaws: the drinking, the telephonus interruptus, and his unhealthy preoccupation with Dash — and me. I could understand a son’s loyalty from Greg, but I couldn’t understand how Suzanne tolerated having to share Peter’s attention with me. How much time did sending faxes and leaving abusive messages for me take up in their lives? How much time at the dinner table was absorbed by their strategies against me? Why did Suzanne tolerate Dash being the centre of attention that they all huddled around? Was it because I was believed to be every bit as dangerous as I was made out to be? Greg, who had lived happily with me for seven years while his father and I were married, testified at the trial that I was enraged, demanding, and impossible to live with. With an icy hostility, Suzanne refused all my attempts at reconciliation and pleas from Dave — as the other step-parent — to work together. She refused countless offers to come in out of the cold and have a cup of tea when she came to pick up Dash — staying in the car or outside the front door instead. Christmas drinks were turned down. I was never invited to share Dash’s birthday or go trick-or-treating with him. There was no “in” for me with which I could turn their heads back to rationality. “Just let me be Dash’s mom!” I wanted to tell them. “I’m no threat. I don’t want anything from yo
u — just my son on my appointed days and the ability to speak to him on the phone.” But I guess I gave them a common enemy, and living their lives preoccupied with their version of Dash’s welfare became a glue that bound them together.

  With Peter’s household so ordered, he set his sights on ours. Peter sent letters telling me I was manhandling Dash. He sent letters accusing Dave of intruding into his relationship with his son. We received faxes on Mondays telling us we had “interrogated” Dash all weekend. At our house Dash had always been encouraged to talk about and ask about whatever he wanted, but within weeks of the first of these accusations, Dash clammed up. He stopped telling me things — normal things, six-year-old things — about his life, about school, about his father and Suzanne. Conversations that included the phrase “your daddy,” no matter how innocent, provoked visible suspicion and discomfort in Dash. Something as probing as “Are you going away with your dad for the long weekend?” was an ordeal for him. Our exchanges were filtered through the prism of his newly complex relationship with his father, and it crystallized in an utterance that, once spoken, came thereafter with alarming frequency. Dash and I were in the kitchen. I was unpacking the groceries, we were chatting away happily.

  “My dad and Suzanne are going out for dinner tonight,” Dash said out of the blue.

  “Well now, that’s a really nice thing to do on a Friday night,” I said, reaching up high to put away the tea. “There are some great restaurants near you. Where are they going?”

  Dash lashed out immediately. “It’s none of your business,” he said.

  I was stunned. In “none of your business,” the child molester’s “Let’s keep this a secret” rang in my ears. In Dash’s words — so alien to a six-year-old — I finally realized that whatever went on in that house was completely private, with Dash, too, now complicit. Most things became none of my business: whether he liked his new teacher, what he had done on the weekend, trivial and harmless details, guarded like state secrets. Dash came to believe that innocent inquiries from his mom and stepdad about his day and his life were “interrogations” to get “dirt” to take to court. Dash went home and told his dad, “Yeah, they did. They questioned me all weekend.”