A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  I made lists and mulled them over in the middle of the night. How much of Dash’s behaviour was normal for a boy his age? How much of it was because he hadn’t seen me that week or that month? How much of it was because anger flowed through the Hart household like lava? How much of it was me, my “overprotectiveness”? I would get down on myself as the clock ticked toward midnight. I tend to obsess about things. I’m probably just obsessing now. Maybe the experts were right to choose Peter over me. Have I so misjudged Dash’s needs that he clings to his father? Dash is my first child. Have I done a bad job? Then I’d swing back the other way. Surely the five years Dash and I spent together meant something. You can’t pour your heart and soul into a child, spend every day with him, introduce him to music and food and have him nurtured at your breast, and have it go this badly. I had given him everything I had to give, all my security, all my confidence, all my love, and he had responded to it as children do. He had been happy. Most of the time he was still happy with me. When I saw him. I mulled it over and over and over. I read books on parenting. I talked to other moms about what I should expect from an eight-year-old boy. Each weekend when Dash didn’t visit, or did but was withdrawn or angry, I would go to sleep with only one thought in my mind: If Dash was living with the parent he most needed to be with — Dr. Elterman’s “excellent parent,” Dash’s “psychological parent” — why wasn’t he thriving? Why was he running from place to place and avoiding his father’s home? Why did I never hear from him except when I called? Why didn’t he need his mommy? Why was Dash’s tolerance for ordinary discipline so low that, at the first sign of a rule, he ran off and hid behind the couch? Why had Dash’s entire personality changed so radically in the space of three years?

  But I could mull all I wanted. I needed help. I had to talk to someone who knew more than me. I made an appointment with a prominent Vancouver child psychologist, Dr. Norman Goodwell, and told him everything. “I don’t see my child much. There was an ugly trial and the father hates me. The whole household seems to be hostile to the idea of my parenting this boy. The father has sole custody, and Dash is rebelling against me in queer, uncharacteristic ways. I don’t know how to maintain order in our house — I have two little babies now — without disciplining him. And I can’t discipline him because he goes home and says we’ve abused him, and I don’t want to punish him because I really do think he’s a boy in a lot of pain. What should I do?”

  “Why do you think he’s in a lot of pain?” Dr. Goodwell asked.

  “There is so much anger and poison in his father’s home. I’m this, I’m that. Dash isn’t free just to love me and he isn’t allowed to forget that there was a trial between his mother and his father and that his father won and is all-powerful. I think it’s changing Dash’s opinion of me. I think he’s suffering under it.”

  I saw Norman Goodwell half a dozen times in that initial period. I talked freely about the new and old Dash, and at great length about my marriage to and divorce from Peter and about his anger, which seemed to consume everything in its path. It had consumed our marriage, it had consumed Dash’s relationship with Dave, and it was consuming Dash. I was his mother. I saw it. I wasn’t getting my access and couldn’t dilute Peter’s poison on the days each month I saw him.

  From our handful of sessions Dr. Goodwell came to believe that Dash was suffering from “loss of attachment,” a reaction to being separated for long periods from a parent he loved, was bonded to, and wanted to be near. This “defensive detachment” was Dash’s psychological response to his periods of separation from me. Dr. Goodwell said his most stringent resistance would probably be immediately following and immediately preceding a period of separation from me, and I almost leapt out of my chair to say, “Yes, yes, that’s exactly what happens! He shuts down. It takes hours to settle in with us when we first get him, and his acting out usually comes when the time is approaching for him to go back to his father.” Dash wasn’t rebelling, Norman Goodwell told me — at least not in any traditional sense. He was getting sick. Defensive detachment was a disorder, a form of psychological distress.

  “Get your access,” he told me. “This can’t be turned around until he regains regular time with you. In the meantime, I agree that he should not be disciplined — this boy is in pain and he needs your love, not punishment. With one hand on each of his shoulders, ask him to look into your eyes when you want to speak with him, but don’t do anything that will give him an excuse to step even further away from his pain. That’s what he’s doing. Each separation from you threatens and frightens him, so he withdraws from it. We all do that. So keep doing what you’re doing. Provide boundaries. All kids need boundaries, so keep providing them. Above all, get your access.”

  Dr. Goodwell relieved me from my humiliation as a rejected mother and relieved me from the depressing feeling of not knowing what was happening to my son. Still, I was jolted when Dr. Goodwell told me, kindly, but bluntly, “Pam, you must do whatever you can to reverse the condition here. Otherwise the inevitable result will be the functional loss of you as a parent to that boy.” Dash will have no mom.

  The love between parents and their children runs deep, and each time Dash visited I saw that the easy love Dash and I had shared for years was never far away. We’d built a bond in Dash’s first five years that I didn’t believe could simply be set aside. Every book I had read on parenting — and, since Dr. Goodwell, on “detachment” — told me that those years are the glue. They mould a child, the experts say. As well as I knew Dash, he knew me equally well, regardless of what his father had taught him to think. When I was with him, it still felt as if we were old friends, friends who don’t speak often but who slip into each other’s special groove when they are together. So as much as I cried, and I did, all the time, I also smiled, filled up with love at my memories of him. I believed that my connection was always going to be deeper than the lack of interest Dash often projected. In those moments I believed I could protect him. I could be his light.

  I kept calling. “Dash, I’d love to see you this weekend. Do you think you’ll want to come over?” “Dash, I haven’t seen you for three weeks. How about a movie on Sunday?” I coaxed Dash over by promising him that we wouldn’t do anything he didn’t want to do, we wouldn’t go anywhere he didn’t want to go, we would do whatever it was he wanted to do. It wasn’t the way we would have chosen to raise Dash and it was nothing like the way Dave and I were raising Colby and Quinten, but we had to do what we could to get him to stay. If Dash had begun to believe that my family was noxious in some way, then, because he was a little boy, I had to ease the pressure on him. He was eight. I needed him to feel that he could stay, for a day, perhaps for a night, every couple of months, or for meals and other close family times. I kept saying to Dave, “This isn’t parenting,” but in fact I think it was. I was managing a child who lived in an emotional war zone, and I had to do it to stop it from sinking him. It had taken a bewilderingly long time to get it: much as I wanted everything to be “normal” — it wasn’t. Much as I wanted to simply be Dash’s happy soccer mom, the first thing I had to do was bind up my damaged son’s wounds. I might be the original Pollyanna, but Dave and I had eyes. The anger and paranoia that existed in that house was corroding the most beautiful parts of that young boy: his natural trust, his capacity for joy, and his ease.

  So Dave and I decided to lead by example and show Dash how healthy, loving families lived and operated. It let me keep my pride as a parent and stopped me from ever sniping at Peter or his parenting methods. He was sick, and that was the end of it. We shifted the focus from Peter to us and from Peter to Dash and just tried to live our lives without anger, criticism, and conditions. I believed that Dash would one day see the difference and, before he did, he would feel the difference and want to see me more because our home was gentler and safe. Through Norman Goodwell I gained the knowledge and confidence to parent Dash in unconventional ways. Life, when Dash was with us, centred on him. Dave and I refused dinner invi
tations if Dash was supposed to be coming over; our friends quickly understood. I called Sandy and borrowed Warren; if he couldn’t come I’d call my friend Myrna Halpenny, whom I met when Dash and her son Myles both attended Queen Mary Elementary. I still had some parental pull, and I used that as well as other things. I rounded up local playmates in the neighbourhood. I told him we would make his favourite chocolate cake together. Or I’d tell him “Colby was asking about you and says he really wants to see you” — anything special or exciting we could think up, we did. It couldn’t be anything extravagant — there were no circuses staged in the back garden — because it had to look normal, be normal. We watched hockey games, made cookies, played video games, and went to movies. Although we were naturally inclined that way anyway, now whatever we did, we did as a family unit. We ate all our meals together, laughing and joking. Those times I sensed that Dash needed time alone with me, Dave would take the boys off somewhere. At other times we all stayed home together and tried hard to make sure Dash not only enjoyed himself but felt our love and care for him. I never let him leave without making plans for our next visit or arranging a time I would call him. I sent him home with Ziploc bags of fresh cookies or a new glitter pen, a set of puffy stickers or a photograph of us all together. If I asked him to stay over and he squirmed and said, “No, I don’t think so,” then I would say, “That’s okay.” If I asked him when he wanted to go home and he said, “In an hour, Mom?” then I would say “No problem, Dash.” I’d drop him off with a big hug and kiss, and as he walked up the path to his door, I would make our little heart shape with my fingers and thumbs.

  When I wasn’t with Dash or engaged with trying to be with him, I put my head down and tried to raise my two baby boys and be a good wife to Dave. Staying healthy became a priority and, while I have always been an athletic person, I worked out with renewed vigour. I had to be strong. I was the captain of our ship, and I couldn’t neglect my marriage. It was in my car that I tried to work through my distress so as not to involve Dave too much or let it have any more of an impact on our family life than it already did. I would neither give Peter the satisfaction of driving wedges into my family nor put aside my two little boys because my relationship with my eldest was dizzying and preoccupying. Through my family I was able to focus on what was important. Anger was not important; I had seen first-hand how destructive it was. Grief had to be temporary, because we were all still alive and had needs. I was forced out of myself by the demands of my family, forced to be on when I sometimes wanted to be off, forced to stop crying when I thought I would drown in my tears. I immersed myself in my life instead of stepping out of it, and I kept going forward, always forward.

  I sat at my desk a lot and stared at the wall or got in the car and drove around, ostensibly running errands, focusing on the little changes I could make in Dash’s life. I dreamed up things to send him and organized great family vacations I thought might entice him. I called him as often as I dared, and sent little cards and notes in the mail, baked cookies and left them on his doorstep. I kept trying to arrange access days with him and, when I had done all I could do for him that day, I lived the other half of my life. I sent Dave off to work with a kiss, played with the boys, worked in the house with Mimi, our nanny, went to the gym, picked up the groceries, took the boys to the park, and had a bottle of wine chilling in the fridge and dinner in the oven when Dave came home in the evening. I had structure and I was surrounded by love, places to pour it and places to get it. I found strength in Dave’s gentle arms and in the healthy, happy giggles of my little boys.

  But Dash’s absence was sometimes unbearable, because the reality was that he lived so far out of my life he could have been on Mars. By the third anniversary of Peter’s sole custody win, it felt like nothing I did in the tiny pockets of time I saw Dash and in the marginal ways I could reach out and touch his heart could solve our problem. It could apply triage, it could help, but it fixed nothing, because the problem came from Peter’s home, and the two of them lived side by side. But as one of Dash’s old school friends told me recently, “There are two parts to a kid’s life: his home life and his school life. So even if his home life was a disaster — and it was for Dash — the structure at school kept him up and moving in the right direction. We kept showing him the way.” His peers helped moor him. Most had known him since preschool and cared a great deal for him, and they knew his home life wasn’t like their own. So when he said or did something inappropriate, or acted out, the group guided him back into line. “Gee, Dash, don’t do that, that’s dumb,” or “Come on, Dash, quiet down.” A school friend told me they kept trying to make Dash “stay normal.” Did Dash know he was starting to seem abnormal? Or that his life was one other kids pitied? That taint would have been profound.

  I kept seeing Dr. Goodwell. Our conversations had progressed from specific techniques for dealing with Dash’s behaviour and state of mind to talking more and more about Peter’s influence. We talked about his anger and his interferences. I told him about how Peter whistled loudly or played the guitar next to Dash when he was on the phone with me. We talked about the glares and hostile stares he gave me from the soccer field and how Dash, after only a few games, stopped coming up to me at halftime like all the other kids did with their moms. We talked about how Peter said Dash never acted up at their house but did at mine, and how curious that was, and we talked about the constant presence of alcohol. I showed Norman Goodwell the illegible faxes Peter sent me, filled with drunken ravings: I was being “irresponsible,” I didn’t respect “Dash’s wishes,” “Dash wants” this and “Dash wants” that. Dr. Goodwell came to believe, as I already did, that Peter fully supported Dash’s distorted relationship with me.

  “Pamela, defensive detachment often has a second element to it beyond the distress of a sudden or traumatic separation. The actions of the other parent play a huge role,” Norman Goodwell said. My antennae shot up. “When a parent pulls on a child’s loyalty,” he continued, “when he treats the relationship with the child as exclusive and doesn’t acknowledge the other parent’s existence or the existence of a relationship between the child and the other parent, when he forbids or discourages contact with the other parent, the child’s sense of separation is wildly exacerbated. This is what I think is going on here.”

  Peter was showing Dash what to think. I tried to focus on what Dr. Goodwell was saying, but blood was pounding in my ears. This person is telling me what I have felt for three years. I was not nuts. I was not overprotective. I was not over-emotional or obsessed with my custody loss. My child was in distress and that’s what I was responding to. It didn’t make any difference any more whether the destruction of Dash’s good feelings for me was Peter’s deliberate plan or just the accumulated actions of his sickness — what mattered was that it was happening. This was child abuse, and of the three of us I was the only one capable of turning it in another direction: Dash was a child, Peter was sick. I was the only healthy one, and I had to get the situation under control, because it had already gathered its own head of steam.

  “You have to get your access in order to help your son,” Norman Goodwell repeated. “Whatever you have to do, keep going.”

  I cried in the car driving home (always in the car, so often crying) but these tears were sharp and jagged, filled for the first time with not just pain and grief, but relief. My love for him could fix my son.

  Chapter 3

  Crushed

  I had had Dash with me for three hours, but in that precious time Peter had called three times to harry the boy. “Are you ready to come home, Dash?” Then, “Be ready at seven o’clock, okay?” Then “I’ll be right outside at seven on the dot, Dash.” I collected three further messages on my answering machine, and in each Peter was increasingly sarcastic, his voice more and more slurred and incomprehensible. By the time he had left his last message, Peter was so drunk that I dreaded Dash going home. I called Peter back as soon as I got that third and most aggressive message, but got o
nly his answering machine. Had he already left? I hung up and tried again, but got no answer. I looked out the window to see a taxi at the curb and walked quickly to the front door. Peter waved dismissively at the taxi as he wove down our pathway. “I was just having dinner with a judge. And before you accuse me of anything, my car’s at the mechanic’s.”

  I didn’t speak. I kept our exchanges short when he was like this. Peter reeked of alcohol, and I turned away from the smell. He handed me one of his scrawled notes, which I glanced at quickly but didn’t read.

  “Where’s Dash?” he demanded.

  “He’s inside. Wait here, please, Peter.”

  I flew downstairs to the playroom where Dash was watching television. I sat down with him and began a conversation I had been meaning to have for years. I couldn’t keep putting him in cabs and cars and sending him off like this.

  “I was just thinking, do you want to stay the night?”

  But Dash never stayed overnight anymore, and he knew it. “Why, Mom?” he asked, suddenly wary.

  “To tell you the truth, Dash, I think Daddy’s been drinking tonight, and sometimes when people have too much to drink they can get, well, a little out of character.”

  He stared at the television again but said nothing, his face a mask.

  “I’d really like you to stay.”

  “I’m going with my dad,” he said quickly, automatically. I knew he would and I kept my voice calm. “Dash, can’t you stay just one night? I’ll drive you home first thing in the morning, I promise.” Please, Dash.

  I turned the television’s volume down low and stayed close to him, speaking very quietly, conscious as always about snaking carefully around his loyalty to his father. Dash didn’t look at me. “Dash, your father has a problem with alcohol.” At this hefty charge, Dash betrayed no response at all. He didn’t bristle. He didn’t even seem surprised. “It’s no different than diabetes or cancer,” I continued. “It’s a disease, so don’t feel badly about what I’m saying.”