“Why? What’s happened?” Dash asked curiously.
“Dash, Grandpa’s been taken to hospital.”
“Oh —”
“Now, don’t worry. But he is very sick, and I don’t think he’s going to get better.”
“What do you mean, Mom?”
“Well, Grandpa has cancer, and because of his age they can’t operate and get rid of it, so he probably won’t get better.”
“Mom, are you saying Grandpa is really, really sick?”
“Yes, Sweetheart, I am. So I was thinking that you should come soon and visit him.”
“Okay.”
“It may be a bit hard for you, but I think you should see him. And of course it would mean the world to him.”
“Okay, Mom. When shall I come?” This was easier than I had reckoned.
“Well, how about this afternoon?”
“Okay.”
“We’ll only stay a few minutes, because Grandpa gets tired quickly, but seeing you will make him feel a lot better.”
I bundled Dash into the car a few hours later. We talked about skateboarding. He needed a new board, and we planned to go and get him one after we saw Grandpa. He was open and chatty on the drive, and then listened carefully when our conversation turned serious. I told him what to expect when we saw Grandpa, and explained that his illness had progressed, and that he didn’t look all that good. When we got there, Dad held Dash’s hands gently and they talked.
“Come a little closer, Dash. I won’t bite. Let me take a good look at you. My, you’re getting more and more handsome every day. Come here, let me tell you something secret.” He smiled. Dash smiled too, and leaned into him. “You get all your looks from me,” he whispered.
Dash grinned and stood up straight again. “Oh, Grandpa, you haven’t changed!”
“I wouldn’t dare! Who’d recognize me?”
“Hey, what’s that tube for anyway?” Dash pointed to Dad’s intravenous tube.
“That? Oh, that’s just for looks. No, it’s because — so they say — I’m not eating enough. But you should try the food here! No wonder!”
“You’ll be home soon, and you can have burgers maybe.”
The two of them chatted lightly and easily until I stood up and went over to fluff Dad’s pillows. “We should probably go now,” I said quietly to Dash. “I think your grandpa might be a bit tired.”
“I am, Pam. But boy it was good to see you, Dash.” Dad looked over at me, and his eyes were flooded with gratitude that Dash had come. Thank you, he mouthed to me as Dash walked away and stood by the door.
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Dad.”
“I hope you feel better soon, Grandpa.” And we quietly left the room. I thanked Dash for coming with me and for being so thoughtful and kind with Grandpa, and from the look on his face I thought that Dash was glad he had come, too.
Dash had dealt so well with the hospital visit a month earlier that I felt confident he was prepared to attend Dad’s funeral. I felt it was important, in part to provide Dash with another forum for goodbye and closure, but also because I was relying on him backing away, at some point, from the pressures that had governed his childhood. I had to make sure that when he did he would not feel that he had been excluded from important events in my family’s lives. I didn’t want Dash to call me from his college dorm at nineteen and say, “Mom, why did you leave me out of family things, if you cared about me so much? Wasn’t I family, too?” I had taken that approach for years, and Dad’s funeral was another place to include Dash and show him that he had family.
Peter at first refused to let Dash attend the service, saying again how inappropriate it was for a child Dash’s age to go to a funeral. I assured Peter that it wouldn’t be a depressing funeral but a beautiful and loving memorial. “Peter, it won’t be heavy-handed. The service will be lovely, and celebratory.” Still Peter refused, and as with my mother’s funeral, it was only after my lawyer intervened and talked to Peter’s lawyer that, for whatever reason, he finally decided Dash could come.
St. Francis-in-the-Wood in West Vancouver is a cedar-shake-roofed stone church so quaint and pretty it could have been plucked straight from a village in Devon, England. My brother and I had attended Sunday school and were confirmed there. My mother and father had been lifelong members. My mother was in the altar guild, and my father, with his strong tenor, had raised the roof on Sundays. This was where my mother’s ashes had been scattered. My dad’s would be, too. With a catch in his throat, my brother joked that scattering dad’s ashes on top of mom’s would drive her crazy all over again, this time from the grave.
On the day of Dad’s funeral, Dave and I walked up the path to the church together, into a crowd of about fifty friends and family. Dash was at my side. Dave stood quietly talking with my brother’s wife, Bev, and I hugged my brother and greeted some arriving friends. I looked around for Dash and saw that he had run off and climbed a tree. I walked over and asked him to come down, but he ignored me and clambered onto the roof of a six-foot trellis archway. The guests had filtered into the church and would soon be waiting for us. I couldn’t get Dash to come down. The more I begged him, the more he ignored me. He didn’t appear to be angry; he was off in his own world, where he didn’t listen to me, and the more I asked of him the more he drew away. The minister had come out and was looking at me, waiting to start the service. I sized up this child of mine, scrambling around on the archway, and my heart started to pound. The minister did not know the details of our lives. He did not know all that had passed. All he saw was a child doing something beyond inappropriate at his grandfather’s funeral, and he saw that I couldn’t get him down. My face grew redder as I imagined him thinking, “What kind of parent would allow this to happen at a funeral and what sort of a parent must she be if her child behaves this way. What’s wrong with her?”
Of course the minister probably didn’t think any such thing, but I felt it, and I had felt it many times before — on the soccer field, or when I bumped into parents of children from Dash’s school in the supermarket, or at social events around town.
“Please, Dash,” I said softly, mindful of the people inside the church, wanting to keep my business private from them. “Please, we have to go in now, the minister is waiting for us. Everyone is inside already. Big D is inside, waiting for us.”
It took a few minutes, but Dash did come down; then he ambled along, idly kicking at grass tussocks and dirt mounds as he walked painfully slowly up the church steps, defying me to make him go any faster. Part of me wanted to scream at him like I never had before. I had just lost my father. I wanted to say, “Dash, stop it! This is Grandpa’s day. Just behave will you? Shape up! He loved you so much,” but the first word would not have even passed my lips because I saw what was happening. Dash was acting like a five-year-old not to be naughty or rebellious but because he couldn’t cope. Instead of internalizing his grief he was externalizing it the way a much younger child would. What he was doing was the equivalent of Dash stomping his feet and shouting, “No!” at the top of his voice.
I was furious at Peter for damaging our son so badly, furious that Dash was a broken child. I grieved for my father and the collapse of my family. I lashed at myself, too. Dash was not equipped to be there. Peter had crippled him, and now he was right: Dash shouldn’t have come. I didn’t scold or discipline Dash, I just took his hand and guided him to our seats next to Big D. I looked around at Sandy and her eyes were wide looking back at me. He’s worse than any of us thought. He’s so damaged. She nodded, mouthed I love you, and turned her gaze back to the minister. While he spoke of the contributions my father had made to his community and family, Dash squirmed in his seat, whistling, humming, and burping, lolling his head from side to side, staring out the window with great animation. He didn’t once look at the minister. The weight of the day was already so heavy, and here was my lost son, who had removed himself so far from his world that he couldn’t even act as if he cared about what had happened to
his grandpa. He had locked his feelings away for so long that he couldn’t even respond to the quiet, reflective mood of the family that surrounded him. I held his hand tight as he burped and grumbled and tried to keep him as quiet as I could, keep him in his seat, at least, and focused on me, if not the ceremony. I had no time to think about my wonderful father.
Dash had shown me, for the first time, the full effects of his childhood, the trauma of his separation from me, and the dysfunction in his home. I hadn’t seen it clearly before, in our two-hour visits every month or so. I hadn’t heard it during the sporadic phone calls. I hadn’t seen it at Lake of the Woods. It had taken a death for Dash to show us his damage, his inability to sit quietly and monitor his own behaviour. The funeral marked a watershed in our lives: Dave, Sandy, Terry, my brother, and his wife — we all knew that sitting in church that day was an abused child. Like a slap to the face, I realized that I had been kidding myself for a long time that I was still a parent to Dash. I hadn’t protected him, and look what he had become.
We struggled through the service and then repaired with my brother and his wife to a seaside restaurant to celebrate my father with a farewell dinner. There, Dash clattered the cutlery, balanced a knife on his forehead, sprinkled the salt and pepper all over the tablecloth. He played with the flame of the candles and flicked wax, squirmed in his seat, and shouted at the waiters to bring his food. My brother Dave’s patience was wearing thin. It had been a stressful time, and a long afternoon, and I couldn’t ask him to take any more. Even though my brother had been there with me through everything that had happened with Peter during our marriage and then the six years of our separation, he was burying his father. He may have loved Dash dearly, but he had his limits. Don’t, I pleaded to him silently across the table. Don’t. You know what he’s been through. This is an eleven-year-old boy who’s stuck at age five. This is pain. This is not him. My brother checked himself. I’m sorry, his face read. Dash had been horrible on the day of our father’s funeral. He had been disruptive and rude. But it was how dysfunctional he was, how ill, that finally made me burst into tears, apologize for leaving early, gather Dash’s hand in mine, and ask Dave to take us home.
I called Dr. Norman Goodwell’s office and made an appointment. I went in the following Monday with a renewed sense of urgency. Dr. Goodwell and I talked about Dash in the way we always did, not in highbrow psychological terms, but instead focusing on practical things I could do to try and turn the situation around.
“In detachment, what is vital is that the parent who has been removed from the relationship breaks through as often as possible to try and regain the childhood bond that has been severed,” Norman said. “Your phone calls, your caring and loving conversations, trying to see him, and the all-important thing, contact, are all crucial here, particularly as the detachment appears to have progressed even further. You have to get more time, not these little bits. You need time with Dash to reconstruct your bond, to mend the break, if you like.”
“I feel like I’m living with a ticking time bomb, Norman, and there isn’t a day goes past when I don’t reach out to Dash in some way or think of some new way to try and reconnect. I just don’t get the time.”
“Time is crucial.”
“The system seems stacked against me, Norman. I don’t really know where to go from here in court. I don’t know what argument to make.”
Offhandedly Norman said, almost by the by, “You know, in family-law circles, what has happened to Dash is called something different. It’s not called detachment, it’s called Parental Alienation Syndrome.” This has a name? After our appointment ended, I rushed to Chapters bookstore, but couldn’t find any books on Parental Alienation Syndrome. I wheedled my way into a parking spot on harried West Fourth Avenue and tried Duthie Books. Nothing. Nothing even on file. I called Norman Goodwell for a reference and found out that the only book that existed on Parental Alienation Syndrome was a dense, cold text for clinicians and legal professionals, written by an American child psychiatrist named Dr. Richard Gardner. He had self-published the book, and I immediately called the phone number of the distributor listed on the copyright page. The book took weeks to arrive, but when it did I slogged through it from cover to cover. Peter fit the profile of an alienator to a T. Dash fit the profile of an alienated child to a T. Custody of the child was a precondition for inducing Parental Alienation Syndrome, and Peter had it. I was the stereotypical targeted parent: a passive, pleaser personality, a peacemaker — ripe for exploitation.
Now I could name what had happened and not sound like an obsessive paranoiac psychobabbler. I didn’t have to speak in euphemisms any more — “I don’t see Dash. It’s because of his father’s anger” — and I was no longer forced to make loose and clumsy comparisons (Peter to a cult leader, Dash to a programmed child). I could use real words: indoctrination; campaign of denigration; alienation. My son has been indoctrinated. Peter Hart has alienated his own child from his mother. I had always had bits and pieces, gleaned from instinct and desperate reading (Peter Hare’s Without Conscience, a foundational work on psychopathy, and various books on attachment theory, Dr. Goodwell’s specialty and an emergent field of child psychology), but suddenly the whole picture added up: Peter’s continuous need to control me, his inability to let go of his anger (ostensibly about the trial, but probably far more generalized than that. This man hated me — and everything I represented in Dash’s life), the unmistakable contribution made by his abuse of alcohol and drugs, the relentlessly negative messages (“indoctrinations”) about me and my family with which Dash had been bombarded since he was five years old, the critical role of Peter’s family and associates — those who encouraged and never questioned the exclusive way he parented Dash. All that coupled with Dash’s fierce loyalty to his father and his sharp psychological decline confirmed the thesis. My family was living with Parental Alienation Syndrome.
With the alienation left to run as rampant as it had been in Dash’s case, my disappearance from his life was utterly predictable, because my banishment was the point of all that Dash had gone through. It was the point of Peter’s custody petition and the subsequent trial. It was the point of getting and keeping Dr. Elterman onside and involved. It was the point of my being kept away from the school, the neighbourhood, the doctor, the dentist, and the point of all the missed access and screened and deleted phone messages. Peter was sick, but he wasn’t unique. Parents all over the world have done this to children. Some do it because of their personality disorders (psychopathy and clinical hysteria are often actors in these larger-than-life dramas), but others consciously, deliberately, seek to destroy their ex-spouse and know that alienation is as good a way as any to do it. Some are so mired in their anger and hurt from a breakup that they actually think they are doing the right thing — a delusional and irrational version of a parental kidnapping, which is supposed to protect the child from the other parent. The one constant in the case studies that Dr. Richard Gardner’s book presented was that the parent who has been made to disappear has not done anything to deserve it. It is often allowed to happen because of the personality types involved, but the parent has not done anything — been annoying, been cloying, been abusive, overprotective, or unnurturing. As I had protested all the way along: I’m a good mom, and Dash’s reasons aren’t reasons at all, they’re excuses, and they come from Peter. Dash’s excuses had always been trivial — like Dave always giving Dash the smaller piece of pie; that my house was “over-regimented” and “no fun.” So this was what it was about, I thought as I read. Peter hates me so much he will use our child to ensure my destruction. He wants my marriage to fail; he wants me ruined. I realized the full force that day of what it is to be hated by someone you once loved. My pain was a source of satisfaction to Peter, and my child had become a weapon of my destruction. I felt so preyed upon that I picked up the phone and called Dave to hear his reassuring words of love and acceptance.
Dr. Gardner’s book also told me something that
I hoped would change the course of Dash’s life: that the only solution to severe, entrenched alienation is court. Parents that alienate are, if not bona fide pathological, at least convinced in an absolute and paranoid way that they are right. In other words: they won’t stop. I finally had the information I had been sliding inexorably toward for six years. Court. I had thought that Dash would be able to see me if I dropped the custody proceedings a year and a half earlier, but he wasn’t. I had thought that if I stopped going to his soccer games, which I did for a whole season, it would help our relationship, but it didn’t. It couldn’t have, because Dash wasn’t in charge of whether he had me in his life or not. He wasn’t the one who decided whether he saw me or not. What I didn’t know, although somehow my poor, frustrated husband instinctively did, was that hardball was the only way to make a difference. I had to go and get the legal standing to say “No” to Peter’s power plays and to re-establish my relationship with Dash. Only then would the syndrome begin to turn around. My passive legal strategy had been wrong. I had made the wrong choice, believing that I had no choice, and I knew now that I had to go back. I felt panicked. The “system” might still be the biggest gamble around, but I needed it. I had to go to court and not stop till I got Dash out of his father’s care.
Finally I had something I could use.
I was overcome by a need to tell my story to someone who had gone through what I had gone through, who could help me see the path ahead and give me some feedback on what I had learned. I was desperate to talk and listen, and now my therapist Bob Armstrong wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to vent, or air my distress. I was gripped by a need to connect with someone who was in the same boat as I was. I wanted to see how other people coped, to see how they had fared in their own struggles. I looked in the Yellow Pages, asked Bob, phoned the Ministry of Child and Family Services for a referral, and finally located a custody-and-access parents’ group on the west side of Vancouver that met once a week. It was a group of six women, but all of them had custody of their children, all of them lived with their children, at least half-time, most had more. They had problems with deadbeat dads or had suffered through horribly abusive marriages — but they saw their children. I automatically felt my difference, the leper who didn’t even have joint custody, but the women were immediately accepting, inviting, and inclusive. They drew me in, as women have forever provided a haven and community for other women, looking after their own. None of the women could believe how rarely I saw Dash, given how close we lived and the specificity of the court order that had given me half his time. No one had experienced the withheld and manipulated access I did; no one’s child looked quite like mine did now. Everyone there was dealing with really difficult issues, but no one was in the same boat as I was. Yet they saw me, and they saw my pain, and they heard what had happened to Dash’s heart, and they saw that it was not right. As I told my story, I cried hard and long, years of trauma coming out, seas of tears. I said, “Thank you, ladies,” several times and tried to give the floor to another mother who needed the group’s support, but they wouldn’t let me stop.
A Kidnapped Mind Page 13