A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  We “abused” Dash, too. Peter wrote a vitriolic letter telling us that I had yelled at Dash and grabbed him by the testicles in anger. It brought ice to my veins. How far will this man go? Peter knew better than anyone that I never, ever, used physical discipline with Dash (nor have I ever with my other children; it’s a parenting style I am dead against), and no court in all the subsequent years of accusations believed for a minute that I ever laid a finger on him. So Peter turned his gaze on Dave. As a man and a stepfather he was a far easier target. Peter sent letters declaring that Dave “had better stop abusing Dash,” but he never informed family services or the police or Dr. Elterman that Dash was being abused at our home. Dash began to say Dave was “mean” to him “all the time,” although when we asked him, in desperation, what he meant by “mean,” it came to such crimes as “He takes the big piece of pie for himself and gives me the small piece.”

  Tension flowed daily through our lives, as I’m sure they were meant to. Dave’s increasingly visible frustration with the abuse charges was reasonable, his outrage appropriate. He wanted to do something, anything! But I told him, “You have to suck it in, Dave. We’re dealing with a sick man. We’ve got to stay non-confrontational. Just as we can’t deviate from the court order, we have to do everything right. We can’t give Peter anything to use against us. He has Dash. He has the court’s nod. We have nothing here.”

  Dave knew my approach was the only choice we really had, but he couldn’t always accept his inability to act. The accusations were deeply personal and highly offensive. We often rehashed our positions over dinner or in front of the fireplace. “This is bullshit!” he would half-shout, holding the latest “abuse” affidavit. “Dash doesn’t think this! Why is he telling Peter these things?” I hated these flare-ups, because I was often exhausted from having fended Peter off myself, or from trying three or four times to get through to Dash, or from just being a new mom on the go all day. I didn’t need to fight Dave as well, but his feelings were real and I never, ever, shut him down. Ironically enough, instead of avoiding the issue, engaging it allowed us yet another forum within which we worked on and tended our marriage.

  “We’ve been here so many times,” I said, trying to calm him. “Peter wants us to fight about this. You know that, I know you do. So we need to stay focused on the real issue here. You know this is Peter. Dash is telling him what he wants to hear, not only because Peter rewards him for doing it but because Dash is insecure otherwise. Remember ‘Mommy, I have a bad life?’ He’s not talking about the price of yen, he’s talking about a life that’s scary sometimes.”

  “I know. But, Pam, I mean … God!” he said, running his hands through his hair. “How can I not defend myself? Isn’t this slander or something? I love Dash!”

  “Dave, listen to me. Dash has to do this. You threaten Peter because Dash loves you so much, that’s it. It’s not you. It’s not about you. We have to keep seeing Dash and trying to give him a normal life that way.”

  “Peter’s telling Dash what to think.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s telling him what to feel.”

  “Yes. So we have to be his safe harbour. We have to stay out of Peter’s battle.”

  “Okay. I know. I do know this. It’s just so frustrating to be behind the ball all the time. Waiting instead of acting. Reactive instead of proactive.”

  “None of this is how I want to play this, Dave. It’s how I have to play this.”

  “Ah,” Dave said softly. “The art of war.”

  “The art of war.”

  Dave was quiet for a moment. “Pam, I don’t think he’s ever going to change,” he said carefully.

  Tears came immediately to my eyes, and I sat up straight. “I can’t go there, Dave,” I said firmly. “I can’t. Because if I believe that, then I lose Dash.”

  At my reality, Dave slumped. His anger evaporated and he composed himself before my grief and reached out and touched my arm. “So I should step back?” he asked.

  “No, don’t step back. Above all Dash needs to know that we love him, no matter what. Just let go of your expectations of him. Let go of the history you had with him. Don’t demand anything of the relationship and don’t take any of this personally.”

  “It’s impossible not to.”

  “It’s not impossible, but it’s really hard. I’ve had to do it, too. We have to give them nothing to write affidavits about and nothing they can pressure Dash with. Your disappointment overflows sometimes; it’s not helping. Your need is visible, and it makes Dash worry about loyalty to his dad.”

  “I know. It’s just so—”

  I touched his face with my open hand and he stopped and closed his eyes into it. “Dave, this isn’t about us. Dash loves you. He just can’t show it. I need you to put aside your relationship with him. The most important thing is that Dash has time with me. I’m his mother and I have to try and parent him from here. I need you to just kind of filter in and out. Apply no pressure to do things. Can you do that?”

  Of course he could. Dave made a graceful exit from the tattered remains of what had once been a delightful, easy friendship, because he had no choice. He had been made a wedge eroding my already fragile relationship with my son, so to help save Dash and me as a unit, Dave stopped inviting him to putter about with him in the garden for hours on end, talking about plants and trees and nature. He stopped taking Dash skiing. He waited for Dash to come to him, and he waited patiently, but it was a devastating, utterly unnatural adjustment.

  It broke my heart, too. Their relationship had been so beautiful to watch. Dave’s embrace of Dash had solidified my feelings for him as a partner and the future father of our children. I knew I would never again see Dash rip open the curtains at our Whistler cabin and hear him call to Dave, “Come on, Big D! Let’s get our skis on!” By the time the accusations began, when Dash was six, they had become soulmates, and when Dave moved into the background, a big piece of him died along with the relationship. He looked physically crumpled by his loss.

  Other people had to drop out of Dash’s life, too. My best friend, Sandy Cameron, had been a fixture in Dash’s life from the day he was born. She had been there his whole life. He understood my relationship with Sandy and loved her because I did. Sandy had been my best friend for most of my life. I don’t remember a time she wasn’t on the other end of the phone for me, or sharing my lunch-hour or, with her husband, Terry, enjoying one of the many dinner we had together. Inevitably we would be pregnant together, and we gave birth to beautiful baby boys three months apart, Dash in August and Warren in October. Warren had his mother’s amazing blue eyes and his father’s blond hair, and Dash had my big brown eyes and tawny blond mop. As young mothers, Sandy and I met for walks in the park or at the beach, pushing our strollers, drinking coffee from Thermoses. We talked and talked. We wanted our sons to be best friends and, with no effort at all, they were, together for every birthday, Christmas party, Halloween, Thanksgiving, and as many play-dates as we could arrange. Sandy and I looked on with wonder and pride as we watched our boys grow and learn together.

  Sandy was there when I despaired over my marriage to Peter. She was at one of our dinner parties when he went to the bathroom four times in an evening, coming back to the table with white powder under his nose. “Vitamin C,” Peter explained. She was there for me in June 1988, the morning after Peter finally exploded into violence and threw me against the kitchen wall. When I got away, he grabbed the back of my dress and threw me into the den, slapping, punching, and kicking me. He banged my head over and over against the den wall, and with shock and mortification, I felt a warm burn down my legs and knew I had wet myself. I went to see Sandy the next day, after my doctor documented my injuries and wrote a report I filed away and tried to forget. My head, buttocks, arms, and legs were covered in bruises. Sandy was less horrified than deeply, deeply wounded for me. She knew how much I had loved Peter. She hugged me hard. She just said, “I’m so sorry.” I pressed no charges and I
stayed with Peter for another six months before I had the courage to leave him. Sandy was there, with my mother and my brother, Dave, at the West Vancouver house I rented. Again, she hugged me hard and helped me unload Dash’s teddies, books, and his little pine stool. Warren came for our weekends in Whistler, and the boys skied all day and collapsed in their beds at night. When Dash started to hesitate in his relationship with Dave, and later with me, we held up Warren as an enticement for Dash to come and enjoy himself. Whistler weekends became fraught for Dash, but, with Warren there, Dash could say to his father, “I have to go, Warren is coming.” Dash hid behind Warren, at least for those first couple of years. By the time Dash was seven or eight, all four of us — Sandy, Terry, Dave, and I — would use whatever we could to get Dash to spend time with me. Warren was Sandy’s gift, but soon even he was cast aside.

  After isolating Dash from many of the people he loved, Peter began pressing the most valuable part of my relationship with Dash: our time together. By the end of Peter’s first year of sole custody, he was cutting my access indiscriminately, using dozens of semi-plausible reasons. Peter would take Dash on trips and bring him back half a week late, erasing my Wednesdays or weekend access days. He would cancel or shorten Dash’s time with me in order to get him to doctor and dentist appointments that didn’t exist. Dash was, for the most part, still the happy, cheery child he always had been, and he never questioned these cancellations or expressed disappointment. They came so often, maybe he was simply used to them. I never even mentioned the irritating, curious cancellations to Dash, but it was hard to keep up appearances. Once Peter wanted Dash home early in order to take him to a birthday party, but when I dropped a gift around to the birthday boy’s house (instead of dropping off my child, whose father insisted on driving him to each and every party or sleepover), his surprised mother told me that I was five days early for the party. I could only get out an idiotic, “Oh! I must have got my dates wrong!” before lurching for the sanctuary of my car, my blood boiling. And although I never tried to keep Dash with me, and I never lobbied Peter for makeup time when he picked up Dash, my antennae was wired. Is this deliberate? Anger is one thing, but these sabotages of our time? I saw what was happening but tried desperately to see the other side. I second-guessed myself even in the face of overwhelming evidence. It was hard not to start obsessing about the numbers. Four hours here. An afternoon there. Two evenings here. A whole weekend. Lost. As Dash spent time doing anything with anyone but his mother. Are my lost hours and days just coincidences, part of the life of an access parent? I asked myself. Dave’s frustration would rise. “You are the only parent giving up access time, Pam. Peter never loses time. He doesn’t even give you makeup days. He offers you time you are supposed to have with Dash anyway.”

  I discovered through another mom that Dash finished school at noon every second Friday, so I called Peter and asked if I could pick him up at one or two instead of the usual four o’clock on those Fridays. I got a flat out “No.” Instead Dash stayed with his nanny until I arrived at four. Sometimes on Friday afternoons Peter would call and tell me that Dash didn’t want to see me until Saturday, unaware that I had just spoken to Dash, who was planning on me coming to get him that afternoon.

  Sometimes Dash was whisked off for hamburgers just as I was due to arrive; other times he waited eagerly for me at his door and sprang out and hugged me excitedly, leaping into my car and holding my hand tight the whole drive back to our house. At the same time that Peter wrote in one of his countless affidavits, “Dashy is happy, content and exuberant in every aspect of his life, except when it comes to these access visits. Dash wants to visit every second weekend and he doesn’t really like mid-week visits, at the end of a school day,” Dash would be in my car, chattering away merrily and blasting questions at me about what was planned for the evening or weekend.

  Still, when I drove over to pick up Dash for our access time, I often found no one home. I’d wait for a half hour or so, fighting back tears and rising frustration, then drive home alone, rehearsing my ever-unspoken questions: Why doesn’t he think about what this does to Dash? Why, when Dash lives with three professional adults and a nanny, can no one respect the access order and have Dash packed and ready to go when I arrive? Where are they? How will this end? When will I see him next? The first of many times Suzanne took on the role of gatekeeper and refused me access to Dash, I turned on my heel, brushed away hot tears, and called my lawyer from the car. He told me to go home and then sent a fax to the Hart house, saying I would be arriving again at seven that evening to pick up Dash. Breaking out of his background role, Dave volunteered to go. He needed to do something. I had come home in tears yet again. When Dave arrived at seven o’clock, Peter and Greg were standing guard at the door.

  “Go away, little boy. You’re not getting Dash,” Peter sneered.

  “Get off our property,” Greg said. “You’re trespassing and we will call the police if you don’t leave.” Peter wrote an affidavit. “Pamela complains of a denial of access. Her accusation is false. At no time have I denied access. I have conducted myself, regarding access, in a manner that is quite the opposite. I have been flexible and generous.” Dave had worn a little recording device that night, and the whole exchange was on tape. But what could we do? We might have a tape, but they had Dash.

  Once, on a hunch, when Dash wasn’t at home when I arrived to get him, I drove to a local park and found him playing there with his nanny. My heart leapt to see him, as it always did, and I parked and walked over to them. Dash called out, “Mommy!” and grinned from ear to ear when he saw me. When I got to him, he reached up for a hug, then hung his arms around my neck and snuggled in.

  “Oh, it’s so good to see you!” I said, as Dash twirled my hair in his fingers. He smelled of dirt and soap. He was divine. “Brown eyes to brown eyes, Dash.” That was the way I always got his attention. Dash looked at me, smiling, expectant. “Guess what? It’s our weekend together. Do you want to come over?”

  Rose, the nanny, flashed a glance at Dash and shifted uncomfortably on the park bench. The seven-year-old boy whose father wouldn’t “push him out the door” to see me shrieked “Yes!” waved goodbye to his nanny, took my hand, and ran all the way across the field with me to the car.

  Chapter 2

  The Disappearing Boy

  Dash loved his dad, he loved me, he loved Dave, and he loved Suzanne. What Dash wanted most in the whole world, as he told Dave when they saw a shooting star a year earlier, was to have all four of us living together in the same house. All the people he loved, together. Dash wanted what every child from a broken family wants: to not have to choose between his parents.

  But a year after the first custody trial, Peter enrolled Dash on a soccer team that played their games on my Saturdays and trained on my Wednesdays. Peter made himself the team’s coach, a position of authority and a new way to pull on eight-year-old Dash’s loyalty. Now, when Dash wanted to ski with me on weekends, he had to answer to not only his father, but his coach. What do you mean you’re skiing with your mother this weekend? Well, what about your team? What about your coach? Gee, Dash, you’re letting us down, kiddo. I wasn’t asked if Dash could play soccer on my weekends and practise on my Wednesday access nights, and I found out about it only because Peter refused me access after I arrived at the house to pick up Dash one Friday night, citing “Dash’s first soccer game” the next morning.

  “Couldn’t you at least have asked me, Peter?”

  “Jesus Christ, here we go. What are you complaining about? You should be happy Dash is playing soccer. Don’t be so selfish. This is for Dash, not you or me.”

  “It’s great that he’s going to be playing, but—”

  “You want him to be happy don’t you, Pamela?”

  “Peter, you know I do. That’s all I want.”

  “Good. Oh, and by the way, because I’m the coach, Dash wants to stay with me tonight, to get to the game together in the morning. You know, to carry the balls
and whatnot.”

  So this is it. He told me that my weekends with Dash would now begin not on Friday after school, but on Saturdays, after their game. It was all I could do to get back to the car. I’m losing a night a week for the whole soccer season. As always, I needed to check my paranoia with Dave. “If Dash really wants this, maybe I am being selfish by wanting to be with Dash on those Fridays?”

  “Pam—”

  “Dash is a boy growing into a man. Maybe he really does want to spend Fridays with his dad to get ready for the game? Colby may want the same thing one day. I don’t know.”

  “Maybe. But we’ve seen a lot the last few years, Pam,” Dave said.

  “You think he’s making Dash choose between time with me — ‘Geez, what a drag that you have to be with your mom this weekend, Dash’ — and the enticing package of dad and the soccer team?”

  “That’s how it looks to me.”

  “But what if it’s not? What if it’s just what happens when boys from split families want to play soccer?”

  “Well, what would Sandy say? Would Terry pull this if they split up and he put Warren on a soccer team?”

  “Nope. And Warren wouldn’t care who got him to soccer as long as one of them did.”

  “Right.”

  “What do I do then? Go to court and say, ‘Don’t let this man coach soccer’? That’s madness. So what? What do I do?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. Peter’s always a step ahead of us.”

  “Dash will suffer if I do something involving the courts, and if I do nothing I lose a night I may never get back. Which is worse for Dash?”