A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  The taped conversations, the various faxes, the consistency of the other parts of the story related to me by Mrs. Richardson and her general credibility are sufficient to raise doubts about the advisability of the present custody arrangement.… The adverse consequences for a child in that milieu are such that when allegations of this sort are raised they should be thoroughly investigated. I would urge the court to take Mrs. Richardson’s allegations seriously and to investigate them thoroughly for the good of young Dashiell.

  The scrutiny, probing, and harsh judgement of me that had come with the custody trial and from Dr. Elterman had awoken me from my naïveté. I had never before concerned myself with whether or not I was “believed” about anything. I’m a pleaser by nature, so I often cared if I was liked or not, but believed? Who has to worry about that? But this feeling comes to life when you’re under the microscope, and when the court-appointed psychologist has taken a dislike to you, believing that your passion and concern for your son are signs of pushiness, impression management, and elitism. I would have forgotten all about Dr. Elterman’s judgement and his damaging reports and the court decisions that were based on them if I had got the access the court had ordered. I didn’t care that I was seen in a particular light by a system I neither understood nor particularly trusted. But I cared very much that their judgements had left my son in the care of a man whose anger and dysfunction had led to a whole host of problems, beginning with my lack of access and extending to Dash’s psychological health. Beyerstein’s report wasn’t much, because Peter would no doubt argue hard against it, saying I had bought myself an expert witness, but Beyerstein’s wholly positive reaction to me as a human being and a mother, and his confirmation of things I had long suspected to be true, gave me much-needed validation.

  Allowing the questions about Peter’s alcohol and drug use to be swept aside at the permanent custody trial three years earlier had created two big problems: When I brought the issue up in court this time, Peter and his lawyers would almost certainly consider it an attack and attack me back with the same kind of character assassinations they used before (I was a high-rolling party girl, never at home — and Dave, a man who’s never tried anything more than the odd joint in university, was a coke-head). Worse, the judge might ask suspiciously “Why now?” and toss it out. Would Peter say, “Did I suddenly become an alcoholic?” Would the judge think I was grasping at straws? Looking for a winning angle? If so, how would I answer that? If I said I relied on passive legal strategy, then I was blaming someone else for a strategy I had thought hard about and agreed to. Saying “It’s worse now” seemed feeble, even though it was true. Peter’s drinking had escalated, as all the literature says it so often can. When we were married, Peter was not weaving around drunk during the day. He drank at night, while I slept upstairs. I only saw signs — the empty bottles, his absences from my bed, and the flimsy excuses that went with them. I figured I would cross that bridge when I came to it. For now, I had to get my evidence together, because if I was going back, I had to go in with both guns blazing. I had real concerns about Dash’s care, and I wasn’t going to be passive any more. I hadn’t aired my marriage’s dirty laundry in court yet, but I had come to the crossroads. Continuing to wait to bring forward relevant evidence would soon make me negligent toward my own child.

  My lawyer, Gerald, had suggested, months earlier, that I think about hiring a private investigator to watch Peter, but I had been hesitant and then had shelved the idea. If I was found out, then things could get even worse. Peter might even be on the lookout for such a thing. While we were married he had secretly taped us eating dinner together. He left tape recorders running when I had girlfriends over. He planted bamboo in front of his den window in our early years together, so “no one can see in.” He kept the blinds closed and locked the door of his den when he was inside. The idea of hiring a private investigator might blow up in my face, but now I wanted to try. If she saw Peter ferrying Dash around in the car while he was drunk, we could use it. Although Peter had been picked up twice for driving under the influence, he had not been convicted either time.

  Hiring a private investigator turned our life even further away from “normal.” I called her only when I knew Peter had been drinking (because we had spoken or he had left messages), and either I had Dash and he was coming to get him or he was dropping Dash at my house. Neither of these things was regular, so there wasn’t all that much investigative work to do, and I didn’t hold out inordinate hope that we would get anything we could use. Sometimes Suzanne drove Peter over to get Dash. They would both wait in the car until Dash came running down the path to them. Sometimes Greg came with Peter instead of Suzanne. Sometimes Peter came in cabs. Sometimes he came alone but didn’t act as if he were drunk. The investigator would park on his street and watch the house, and when they drove away she followed him to mine. She saw little things. Peter banged his Mercedes into the gutter outside my house as he was parking, left his window rolled down during a downpour. He berated me on my doorstep for seven documented minutes. Turned up again to my house in a taxi. The investigator discovered that Peter’s 1969 Mustang was licensed to an address that didn’t exist. These were trivial things, though, nothing we could use. I wasn’t really surprised, and at least I’d tried.

  Meanwhile Peter’s increasing paranoia paid off. He discovered the surveillance and quickly informed Dash that they were being followed. Peter swore an affidavit saying that he had found in his car a “recently drilled hole in my console where a bug had been placed but since removed.” Its purpose was to intercept his phone conversations, he said. Dash insisted that I had put a bug in his dad’s car, even though the investigator hadn’t gone near the car and would never in a million years have bugged it. “My dad proved it to me,” he told me on the phone. There was a drilled hole in his dad’s Mercedes, Dash told me emphatically, the purpose of which was to house a “surveillance camera.”

  “But Dash, there isn’t a bug, and there isn’t a camera.”

  “There is. There’s a hole. And there’s a microphone in the car, my dad said so.”

  “Why would I bug your dad’s car?”

  “To dig up some dirt on him.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me, and I really hope you can think about that and believe what I’m saying. I do not know why there is a hole in your dad’s car. It seems like an unusual thing to have happened, to have found a hole in the metal of a car. I guess it would have had to have been drilled, but I don’t know how that could have happened with the car sitting right in front of your house. Surely you would have noticed.”

  “I’ll have to ask my dad. But there is a hole and it’s there to bug him, I’m sure.”

  Getting caught “spying” gave Dash yet another reason to distrust me. After three months with nothing but a big bill, I let the private investigator go. Looking at our paltry evidence, I began to slide away from the idea of going back to court. I began to comfort myself in strange ways that later smacked of rationalization: He’s not dead. He’s eating. He’s going to school, where he’s surrounded by healthy adults and his peers. He’s seeing me once a month or so. When he does, he seems all right.

  Still, I had been all but wiped out of Dash’s life. Peter had air time in my marriage, much as I tried to shut him out of it, and sometimes he hurt my marriage, as Dave and I disagreed or I picked on him in my frustration or when I cried and he couldn’t comfort me. I wasn’t super-woman, and my loss and frustration did sometimes distract me from my other children. We were hardly bouncing through life without a care in the world, and my household had become distorted. Waiting for Dash. Trying to pick him up. Avoiding conflict with Peter. There were my tears, Dave’s anger, and Colby’s confusion when Dash missed long-awaited visits. “I made his favourite dinner,” Mimi would say sadly, and there at the table would be Dash’s special table setting — folded napkin and childhood bunny cup — sitting out waiting for a boy who so rarely arrived to use it. Mimi bounced back every time, as Colby di
d, as I did, but it wasn’t easy. I kept Dash with us, though, even when he wasn’t and hadn’t been for weeks. It was important for my family to know that he still existed as a brother, a stepson, and a son. “Remember the night Dash got into Breeza’s doggie bed?” I would say brightly, referring to our black Lab, and Colby would recall it with a smile and a snort. When we got a new roll of film developed, we would pore over the prints, and Dash would be in our house again, even just on paper. Colby would shout happily, “There’s Dash!” We all loved him and waited impatiently to see him and welcome him when he crashed back into our lives.

  Through our love and our efforts and my vigilance, my family and I stayed healthy. Where Peter was obsessed, angry, and fixated on our marriage and divorce, both of which were long, long over, we had all moved on to greater joys, hoping, as we always did, that Dash would join us somewhere down the track. Peter wouldn’t win. He couldn’t even diminish me, because in a perverse way his plan had already backfired: he had given me the forum — excruciating pain, long-term heartbreak — within which I was forced, like a character in a book, to sink or swim, live or die. Through the experience of being that hated, that toyed with, that debased and humiliated, I had stepped up and become a better person. I was more patient, more tolerant, more confident, a more grounded wife, a better mother. I hadn’t always been patient in my life. I hadn’t always chosen well. But now I lived each day and embraced every moment I was given, with my three boys, with Dave and my family and friends. I wasn’t going to lie down on a couch and pass my years in a fog of depression. I wasn’t going to forget about Dash. I wasn’t going to toss my marriage. I had a life. I wasn’t going anywhere.

  Much as my family buoyed me, though, it was still me who had to drag myself out of bed every morning; it was still me who sat outside Dash’s house every Friday night and wrote letters and sent care packages filled with Easter eggs or socks and boxers. In many ways, I was in it alone. I tried to find ways to quarantine my despair and horror to keep it from infecting the other half of my life. Compartmentalization is what the psychologists call it, but I just called it survival. My gratitude for life, and for what I had, almost always outweighed the trauma I felt about what I didn’t have.

  Almost always. I didn’t have many places where I was willing to peel back my skin, but in the office of my therapist, Bob Armstrong, I did. I had started to see Bob to help deal with the stress I faced. I’d make an appointment when my reserves were running low, or when I needed to run through my plans or ideas, or just grieve in a safe place, somewhere that wasn’t home. Dave, my brother, my father, my best friend, Sandy, and wonderful Mimi were the ropes I leaned against between bouts, but it was to Bob that I laid it all out — the moments of hopelessness and heartbreak I never wanted anyone else to see. He saw my tears, my rage, helplessness, and fear.

  “I never, ever forget that I am missing huge parts of Dash’s life. I worry about him needing me and me not being there to comfort him when he feels afraid or is hurt. I think about what it must have been like to be a prisoner in a POW camp, to have your children taken away from you. I think I know how they must have felt.

  “I try to keep it from Dave unless we need to talk about something specific. I have brought grief into our marriage, and pain. And I don’t feel good about that. Dash is my son, and I have to be the one who deals with Peter and the lawyers.

  “I’ve learned to compartmentalize, because I literally cannot take the reality of what is happening any more. As a parent, to not be able to protect and comfort your child from any harm, let alone harm done by the other parent, is a form of exquisite torture.

  “Bob, sometimes I feel so trapped. Who can understand what I live? How many parents can relate to this? It’s like some secret, underground club to which no one would ever want to belong, and yet if you’re there you can’t leave it. That’s my real world, and no matter how successful I am in all the other areas of my life — it’s always there.

  “Then I remember how lucky I am. I don’t have to worry about paying the rent, I’m not alone, I’m healthy, I have a beautiful family. I close my notebooks and fold up my papers and notes and walk back to the other area of my life. Without my family I couldn’t do all that I have to do to be with Dash and it makes me alive and gives me the strength to go on.”

  While Bob Armstrong was there for me, Norman Goodwell was still my point man on Dash. He completely understood my deep, almost-phobic reluctance to go back to court unless I was guaranteed a win. The adversarial system was, in his mind and mine, the last place to resolve custody and access disputes. “It’s a crapshoot every time,” he said. He had seen cases go horribly wrong and children suffer as cases dragged on for months, with parents taking the black-and-white positions that the adversarial system forces upon them, with hired-gun lawyers taking fight-to-the-death oaths for their clients and refusing to negotiate or compromise or consider the welfare of the child as paramount. When that happens, war comes to children’s homes. It had come to mine.

  The legal system was a crapshoot, but at some point all that had happened to Dash was going to cause him irreparable damage. Like me, Norman Goodwell wanted to avoid court, but we both knew that the situation wasn’t getting better. He had believed right from our first session, two years earlier, in 1991, that Dr. Elterman had done a poor job of assessing Dash’s ideal custodial situation. Dr. Goodwell viewed Dr. Elterman’s two reports as superficial and illogical, and we had long argued that there was no reason for Dr. Elterman to have wanted a sole-custody situation for five-year-old Dash and that there had been no logic behind his nomination of Peter for the job — beyond the house, the nanny, the school, and the spurious definition of “psychological parent.”

  “Either Dr. Elterman declined to report things that were unfavourable to Peter or he allowed his conclusions to be coloured by his own prejudices,” Norman told me. “I can’t see how he came to his conclusions based on the things he reported.

  “Whatever route you’re going to choose, do it now. Your window is closing. If you don’t re-establish your relationship with Dash within the next couple of years, he will attach to his peer group instead, and you will have no control and no ability to guide or influence him.”

  When a batch of legal documents was placed in my hands by a process server a little while later, I reeled. Peter had applied to change the access order to formally remove my Friday nights. “It’s a ploy,” I told Gerald later that afternoon. “‘Dash wants to know where he’ll go to soccer from.’ But I’ve already lost those nights. Dash goes with Peter — always. Peter wants it on paper, so I’ll never get them back.” Although I didn’t see Dash overnight anymore, symbolically — emotionally — I still had my Friday nights, because they were written into the access order. Dishonoured and useless though the order was, the days were there. If Peter won his application and set the loss in stone, I would never see Dash again on any Friday nights. Soccer season would come and go and it wouldn’t change a thing, because it was never the real reason. The visit was. Soccer was simply the wrapper in which the interference had been packaged. Peter’s application panicked and galvanized me. Peter would push and push until I had nothing, even on paper.

  I called Gerald. “I don’t want Dash to live like this,” I told him. “Let’s go to court. I need custody.”

  He drew up and filed our application. Later I got a message on my answering machine: “Pamela, it’s Gerald Reid. I am hoping you might come down to our offices this afternoon. We need to talk to you about something that happened here over the Christmas holidays. Our office has been firebombed again.”

  The first time my lawyers’ offices had been firebombed was a year or so earlier, twenty-four hours after Peter had applied to the court to expunge my Wednesday access evenings, because Dash had asked for the change and Peter had “agreed to support him.” Peter hadn’t told me or my lawyer about the application, but by coincidence, Gerald’s partner, William Morton, happened to be in the courtroom on another client
’s case when Peter’s motion was called. He rose to object and ask that the motion be adjourned because I wasn’t there, but in the end it wasn’t necessary, because Peter never showed up and his application was dismissed. Peter had called me the morning the motion was to be heard in court, so slurred and incoherent I had hung up in frustration. That night, a Molotov cocktail was found underneath a window outside the heritage house that contained the law offices. No investigation had ever linked Peter to the bombing, but at the time the possible connection had worried us all. The timing of this one was just as alarming.

  I drove downtown to the law offices of Morton and Reid and met with both of them, because they had done significant double-duty on my case. Peter had been representing himself for many months, and because of this had much closer contact with my lawyers than he would normally have, and he spent much of his time personally attacking Gerald. He constantly relived the old trial themes and the judge’s finding of fraud against him, which he blamed, when he wasn’t blaming me, on my lawyer. (It was Gerald who had found Peter’s illegal conveyance of our marital house while preparing for the permanent custody trial.) Peter’s animosity toward Gerald became so personal that we had decided that switching from Gerald Reid to his partner, William, a QC, might neutralize Peter and allow us to move forward. The two of them sat me down.

  “The Vancouver Police arson investigators say that the bombing was not a random attack,” Gerald said. “You think this is Peter? Or someone for him?” My skin crawled. I remembered when Dave and I moved to our Kerrisdale home. Peter had been so threatening and unpredictable that, on the weekends we skied in Whistler, we had hired a security company to watch our house.

  “We are concerned about your file.” William leaned over and relit his cigar, by now a familiar and almost comforting movement to me. He took a moment before he spoke again. “My secretary has been here thirty years, and now she is frightened to come to work. She is considering leaving, and I just can’t lose her.” Oh, no, I thought, they’re letting me go. Sudden panic rose in me. We were in the middle of renewed court proceedings. How could I just change lawyers? How would I do this? “We’ve been in touch with another family lawyer. His name is John Fiddes.”