A Kidnapped Mind

by Pamela Richardson

  Jamie stood up. We had prepared for this. If, after all this time, Justice Brenner couldn’t see how damaged Dash was, how far in denial Peter was, how worried the teachers were, then we had to get away from him. We needed a judge who didn’t suddenly go inert every time he saw us. I wasn’t going to walk away from my son, and I wouldn’t let all these adults fail him yet again.

  “I’d like to ask Your Lordship to dismiss our entire application,” Jamie said in a strong voice, filled with hope.

  There were smirks all round from Ken Westlake and Peter, but I hardly noticed. I was too busy rushing up to talk with Jamie. My adrenalin had spiked. We had only this one last shot. We were going to appeal Brenner’s decision from the 1996 custody trial the year before. Though we were out of time by a month or two (appeals have to be lodged within twelve months), we were desperate, a child was involved, and late appeals were by no means unprecedented. I was still so overwrought from the hearing that I couldn’t handle being there on the day of our appeal. So for the first time in seven years of hearings, I sent my lawyer in alone.

  Jamie was alone, then, and so was I, when the appellate judge threw our case out.

  Neither the “interests of justice” nor Dash himself would be served by allowing it, Justice Ian Donald said. “Too much water has passed under the bridge.” The kick to the stomach came at the end of a short hearing. Justice Donald, who had the teachers’ entire transcript in front of him, told Jamie, almost casually, that I could go right ahead and apply for a new trial if at some point “a dramatic change of circumstances” occurred. Dash was a depressed insomniac who almost never saw his mother and was unsupervised at his drunken father’s home, failing elementary school, possibly abusing drugs and alcohol, and potentially suicidal. How much more “dramatic” did Justice Donald want it to get? Jamie had stood in court, broken, as the judge stood up, fluttered his robes, and left the room.

  By June, the end of Dash’s Grade Seven year, the teachers were exhausted from trying to manage him. I asked Jamie to get Justice Brenner to agree to host a mediation session with Carol Andison, Peter, Ken Westlake, and me. For now, Justice Brenner was all we had. We had to work with him. Maybe the mediation format would produce something positive. But my hopes were dashed as soon as we sat down. Peter and Ken Westlake were as loud and aggressive as they had been in court. They talked over everybody, and Justice Brenner just sat there in his sharp suit, looking down at his splendidly polished shoes, uncomfortable without his robes, high bench, and gavel. When I handed around Dash’s latest awful report card, all he managed to say was that the grades were a concern, and that Peter “should watch Dash’s academics.” Carol told them Dash was totally out of control. He wasn’t in class at all any more, because Donna, openly distraught about his rapid deterioration, could no longer handle him. It was Dash’s last month of elementary school and he was spending every day of it sitting at a little desk outside the principal’s office. The two lawyers pooh-poohed all that, but suddenly Ken Westlake volunteered to act as a go-between for Dash and me; he wanted to facilitate access visits, he said. Justice Brenner breathed a sign of relief. Why don’t you just get Jack the Ripper, I thought, but I had to make it into something. I choked down my rage, got out my little pocket calendar, smiled sweetly, and negotiated a visit with the lost son I now hadn’t seen for nearly four months.

  It was to take place at a picnic table in a park near my house, and turned out to be a chaperoned visit. Ken Westlake picked up Dash and brought him to the park. To my surprise, Ken didn’t leave. He didn’t even go off and pretend to make some calls on his cell phone or stretch his legs on a short walk. He sat shoulder to shoulder with Dash, and the three of us bumped through awkward conversation and stilted silences that I felt driving deeper wedges between Dash and me. Ken Westlake had a predictable chilling effect on Dash, who sat there pale and unkempt, unhappy and hardened. Ken hovered over him and said, “Tell her, Dash. Tell her how it makes you feel when she goes to court all the time. Tell her how you feel when she badmouths your father,” but Dash could hardly say anything, let alone his lines. My heart broke for him as we struggled to connect. Following Ken’s cues, knowing I had to address them, I said, “I understand that the court process was horrible for you. I do. But I only went because I love you. I believe with all my heart that you deserve to have your mother in your life.” Dash gave me nothing. I didn’t dare try to hold his hand. I was terrified of what would happen to each of us if he recoiled. I just continued, talking soft and low. I told him I was worried about him at school and at his home, and that I worried for him because he seemed so unhappy. He managed to get out, “You badmouthed my dad and you called him a drunk,” but his heart wasn’t in it.

  “No, Sweetheart, I didn’t. I don’t badmouth your dad, and I think you know this. And I will always be concerned for your welfare and I will always look out for you. I worry about you and I love you. You are my son.”

  Dash drew in a breath but couldn’t meet my eyes. “I won’t be visiting you this summer.”

  No! Not again. Not another summer missed. I had to think fast. I was losing him. I stood up. “Would you come with me a minute?” I didn’t wait for him to look up at Ken for permission; I just took his hand and led him away. A soft, yielding little boy again, for just a second, he came. I slowed then stopped, and we stood under a big maple tree. We were two brutalized human beings who had once shared an unbreakable bond, and suddenly Peter’s success seemed absolute. Dash couldn’t speak. He looked sick, scared, and tired … so unbelievably tired, but by ourselves, among the whispering trees, with the sun dappling his face through the leaves, I took his other hand lightly in mine. He wouldn’t look at me and stared hard at his beaten sneakers.

  “Dash,” I whispered, “brown eyes to brown eyes.” His hardness softened and slowly, agonizingly slowly, he looked up at me. It was the first time he had looked me in the eye in months, and the sliver of a connection we made in that moment, under such inhumane and humiliating circumstances, gave me more hope than any court ever had.

  Dash was about to start at Lord Byng Secondary. I knew that if I did not prepare the school in advance, Dash could be viewed as just another messed-up, neglected kid. I needed their engagement and understanding. I needed them to care for an nourish Dash. Visiting the school a month before Dash was to start there, I spoke with the school counsellor, Bob Lewis (and later the vice-principal and Dash’s eight new teachers). I said that I wanted Dash’s new school to be a haven, as Queen Mary Elementary had been. “Dash has had a really tough childhood,” I told Bob, “and he might be aggressive, unpleasant, uncooperative sometimes, but there are reasons for it, and they come from a deep and traumatized place.” I wanted to prepare him, when he met Dash the following month, to look beyond Dash’s misfit behaviour. His poor academics, inability to concentrate, and bad work habits were behavioural not academic; even the minor learning glitch that Queen Mary had identified was most likely tied directly to his trauma. I explained to Bob about PAS and got him to understand what it was to be a programmed child, what Dash’s loyalty forced him to do and think, what losing his mother so brutally had done to him, and what his home life was like. Dash and his father now lived worlds apart. It had been bad enough on West Fifth Avenue but now, in a new place on West Tenth, Dash had his own entrance and nearly complete separation from his father. Peter lived on the top level and Dash on the ground level. I told Bob that Peter drank, but that he seemed to be drinking less than usual right now, which was a positive thing. I told Bob about the other parts of Dash: his sense of humour, how naturally curious and intelligent he was, how popular he had always been with his peers.

  “He doesn’t think he is particularly good-looking, Bob, but he really is. And he loves animals and gardens and peaceful places and he lives to skateboard. His dream is to be a professional boarder, and I encourage that as much as I can. As long as he has goals he will make it through, I think. I supply anything that will help him, a big mat for his breakdanci
ng, new trucks for his skateboarding. But he’s been through a lot. He needs a basic education —” I paused for a second. “Look, Dash has to get through high school. I’m afraid he’ll end up on the streets if he doesn’t have support in his life, someone looking out for him, keeping him on the rails. Bob, he’s so angry. I worry about what it will do to him. It’s poison. His dad doesn’t know any different any more, but here at school Dash is surrounded by people who can care about what happens to him, try and turn him a different way, show him some peace.” I mentioned that Donna Andrews and Murray Stephenson of Queen Mary had talked about depression and possible suicidal feelings in Dash.

  “It sounds like he shouldn’t be here,” Bob said.

  “I know, but he is here,” I replied. “Queen Mary really wanted Dash to go into a bridge program, you know, one-on-one instruction in a small group setting away from school, a program that would work to improve Dash’s academic skills until he could meet the demands of high school? But Peter refused to sign the papers. Dash said he is nervous about going to a big high school, and I am worried he will get lost in the system if no one is watching. I would love it if you would be my eyes and ears, here, Bob. Dash will not come to me. He needs someone he can talk to and I need someone who sees him regularly and can keep me in touch with how he is and whether or not we can do anything more for him, or something different.”

  Once school started, Bob Lewis saw quickly that Dash’s formal education truly was going to be of secondary concern until Dash started to heal. Dash would not excel, but between Bob and his teachers he might be kept from falling off the rails completely. Over the course of time, Bob arranged for Peter to come in and talk about “Dash’s academics.” If the meetings had been about Dash’s “emotional health,” Peter would have walked out or defended Dash, blamed me, and stopped listening to what Bob was saying. Above all we needed Peter to stay open to Bob. So running beneath the casual chats with Peter about Dash’s marks and classroom behaviour was an agenda — that of getting Peter to trust him. The goal was keeping Dash in school and his self-esteem as high as possible, and Peter was instrumental to that. Bob checked in with Dash and his teachers often to see how he was doing and looked over his report cards, checking his attendance and tardiness and spending an inordinate amount of time on him. By the time I met with the teachers, most had already figured out that Dash didn’t have a home environment that encouraged his schoolwork or helped with his homework. Some of them gave him less to do than anyone else; other teachers let him complete his homework in class. He attended the “skills centre” instead of French, which allowed him to catch up on some of his work in a supervised environment. Dash was so well supported that first term that he did well. He passed. By the second term he was floundering, though, languishing behind his classmates and losing interest by the day. He led his peers astray in the classroom, which made him popular with the kids but not his teachers. He was time-consuming and disruptive. The teachers were amazingly tolerant, but they only had so much patience for a student who did not want to be there.

  Dash was angry at everybody and everything. Kids started to pity him. Some thought him a loser. All of them knew he was different. He was the only kid they knew whose house was open at all hours of the day and night for slacking and boozing. He was, as always, frequently absent and late, and the teachers, the vice-principal, Terry Howe, and Bob Lewis fought to deal with his confrontational behaviour. He was aggressive toward any adult who didn’t “respect” him or who slighted him or his father, and the cynicism and lack of trust or good guidance left Dash without any idea how to act in the adult world.

  Bob Lewis told me after Christmas that he believed Dash’s acting out, his class performances, were all poses. “Dash covers up his troubles. It’s a mask, and it hides a huge amount of pain and grief. He’s not sleeping. He’s not in good shape at all.” Some thought Dash was on drugs, but I think it was exhaustion. Bob Lewis agreed when I suggested that Dash’s insomnia was probably a manifestation of his inability to find peace. Dash, thirteen and a half, may have had so much noise in his head that he couldn’t sleep. Or maybe there was no noise at all. Like his expression now, maybe his head was just dead flat, silent.

  Bob went quiet for a moment then looked at me with solemnity. “Dash is hanging by a thread, Pam. I don’t want him to become another statistic.”

  I went cold. Don’t tell me things my heart already knows.

  In May, Bob Lewis met, as he did from time to time, with his in-house team of counsellors to brainstorm the school’s troubled children and work on strategies to help each one. They discussed Dash and agreed that nothing that had been attempted at the classroom level had stemmed Dash’s “failure or near failure in all subjects.” Bob Lewis had phoned Peter over and over, but Peter now refused to meet with him. He said, “My private life is to be respected.” Bob Lewis told me he thought Peter did care very much for Dash — and might even have loved him. “But his love for him is unhealthy. He cannot deal with what is happening with Dash.” Peter had idealized his son for years and dealt with Dash’s pain as he did his own — with denial and aggression. And I was still nowhere to be seen. By mid-1998, the end of Dash’s first year at high school, I had seen him only six or seven times since September 1996. We’d had dribs and drabs: a golf morning, a shopping trip a couple of months later, skiing at Whistler during spring break, the hour in the park, but basically nothing.

  By June, Bob decided that Dash’s case needed to be raised to a higher level. Dash was the only subject of discussion at the Jericho Area Central Screening Committee meeting, a program under the auspices of the Vancouver School Board that existed to provide support, resources, and interventions for children considered to be “at risk.” I went along and, as I had done many times, told the panel Dash’s background story. I was positive and hopeful. I knew they could only do so much for Dash while he remained in his home environment, but the intervention might help or lead to something else, which might lead to something that actually helped him. Step by step. That’s how I had to do this.

  The committee decided that Dash should enter Lord Byng’s Urgent Intervention Program immediately to get a short-term burst of extra help. Dash would not only be assigned a tutor who would work one-onone with Dash at school, he would get a social worker, the school psychologist, and more intense time with Bob Lewis, all of which was designed to support and help him. I only had joint guardianship; we still needed Dash’s father’s permission, so the case manager wrote to Peter, who had failed to attend. She practically begged him for his support for Dash to join the program. Although he had “declined any special support for Dash” in the past, she wrote, she hoped he would “reconsider.” Rage flooded through me. Peter couldn’t put his pen to a piece of paper authorizing an intervention for Dash that might keep him in school, but he had spent months in court hearings, in making phone calls to the principal and the school board, and in writing a sixteen-page affidavit to keep me out of Dash’s primary school all those years ago.

  Some fifteen months before the intervention meeting, I had started a process that had produced something I now decided to use. In April 1997, around the same time the Queen Mary educators had come to me with their concerns, I had decided to file a complaint with the B.C. College of Psychologists about Dr. Elterman’s conduct on my case. While it had been Peter who had induced the PAS with which we all lived, it was Dr. Elterman who had failed to provide a check against Peter’s abuse of his son. Dr. Elterman had recommended the sole custody that had provided the environment within which Dash’s alienation from me could flourish. Over the years Bob Armstrong’s mood had gone from simple disbelief to outrage that a five-year-old had even been the subject of a sole custody order in the first place, because the rule of thumb was that one is issued only when one parent is assessed as extremely unfit. From the first Dr. Elterman had said I was a good parent. None of the dozen judges we went before ever said I was anything but a good parent. Dr. Goodwell told me that he had s
een many custodial assessments he disagreed with but could still respect on a professional and scientific level. But of the reports Dr. Elterman had written in Dash’s case, Dr. Goodwell wrote in his letter to the College of Psychologists, “I am afraid that this is not the case in this matter. It may be that this is quite uncharacteristic of Dr. Elterman’s work, but I am unable to turn the other way and ignore something that has such serious and unnecessary ramifications for a son and his mother.” Goodwell wrote, “I could not follow the logic of Dr. Elterman’s arguments and could only deduct that either he was aware of information he was failing to report, or that his conclusions were coloured by prejudice or bias. I could not see how his conclusions were warranted by his reported observations or findings.” As an example of bias, Goodwell reported that, in 1990, when Dash was six, Elterman had quoted me saying that “Peter and Dash have a wonderful, warm relationship. He adores Dash and Dash adores him,” but didn’t quote any of my very real concerns about Peter’s physical violence toward me, his drinking, lies, secrets, and controlling, aggressive, and manipulative behaviour.

  My therapist, Bob Armstrong, had for years watched, through my many, many sessions, my lack of access and dwindling relationship with Dash with growing anxiety for the child. Dr. Armstrong was appalled by Elterman’s weak suggestion — seven years into Peter’s sole custody — that Peter “could possibly have insisted” that Dash visit me more. Dr. Armstrong said, “in the absence of abuse or neglect, the custodial parent must insist that the child be with the non-custodial parent as per the court order.” Pointing to my stay-at-home-mom status, my stable and supportive marriage, and Colby and Quinten, two thriving, happy children, Dr. Armstrong told the college, “This is not the profile of a mother who would be so rejected by a child.” He was astonished by my repeated rebuffs from the courts and appalled that Dr. Elterman remained connected to our case. As Dr. Armstrong put it, the result Dr. Elterman had hoped for at the beginning of the whole process — that giving Peter sole custody would end the “war” and bring peace and normality to Dash’s life — had failed. Dr. Armstrong believed Dr. Elterman was trying to minimize the extent of Peter’s alcoholism when he suddenly diagnosed him with AADD in his third report. Elterman neglected to report Peter’s lies during their interviews about how often and how much he drank. Peter said he’d been drunk three times in thirty years. Denial is a definitively established red flag for alcoholism. Dr. Goodwell told the college that Elterman had failed “to deal with serious concerns of neglect and the failure of the father to facilitate the relationship between the mother and son. He appears to blatantly excuse these serious shortcomings by diagnosing the father with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder.” Bolstering my claim was the fact that Dr. Elterman saw Dash in ad-hoc sessions at his office. In a letter to Peter’s lawyer (but not to mine) in 1993, Dr. Elterman had said, “I believe that I have a very good relationship with Dash and he is very familiar with me and my office.” According to the college by-laws, it is a clear conflict of interest to produce assessments in court for a party one is also counselling, and to me it was a solid ground for complaint. It was a conflict of interest that had long alarmed me.