Every professional who had so far been involved with Dash believed that whatever learning difficulties he had were almost certainly caused by his years of emotional distress. The answer was not to send him off to fail at yet another school, while returning home to his father’s house every night. Everything would go back to what it had been before: total, utter failure. With this new and reckless involvement from Peter, I saw Dash’s life spinning out of control again right before my eyes. Peter hadn’t involved himself until now — perhaps because he had to do something to stop Dash being sent away again — and, given his chronic state of denial, he would dabble, or do it half-heartedly, or head down the wrong path with Dash. Certainly he wouldn’t have Dash tested in a secure environment like Ascent, where he was monitored around the clock and would be supported through the emotional fallout from whatever the tests revealed — academically or psychologically. Peter didn’t want Dash going anywhere, and neither, of course, did Dash. “They treated him meanly,” Peter told the judge, of Dash’s experience at Ascent. “He was handcuffed and treated like a delinquent.” Dash had requested to go to a public school in Vancouver, “so he can remain at home,” Peter said. “Ripping him out of here because he’s having troubles — has had troubles, I should say, and is trying to turn them around — to just rip him out of the only parent he’s ever known …” Peter broke off dramatically.
We needed Dash psychologically tested but Peter simply wanted Dash’s “writing, learning style and learning profile assessed by a proper educationalist,” he told the court. After all Peter had heard from Allison Burnet, Bob Lewis, Rick Brennan, and Lana Galbraith of Ascent, he still needed to believe that Dash’s problem was schoolwork. “His self-esteem is wonderful,” he said, “it only suffers at the schooling level.” When the judge pointed out how incongruous this was with everyone else’s opinion, Peter countered that Rick Brennan had met Dash for only “about an hour and a half” and “you can get an expert to say anything.” Allison Burnet, Peter said, didn’t know him. The Dash who said he would “die” if he had to stay at Ascent, the boy who had fought a stranger with a garden fork, who couldn’t get out of bed in the morning for school, and who simulated sex with his mother was a “happy” child, “really happy. He sings in the shower … he sings all day long. He’s very cheerful. He’s very, very healthy, emotionally and mentally and physically.”
Allison Burnet was incensed. She told the judge, “This child has a problem. And I don’t think it’s a little problem with not liking school. I think it’s a major problem.” Dash’s problem wasn’t that he inverted his letters, couldn’t spell, read more slowly than most of his peers, and had difficulty putting his thoughts down on paper, it was that for years the only parental involvement he had had in his life was abusive and neglectful. I don’t spell well either, and my youngest boy Quinten in his primary years needed extra help, but I worked with him constantly, and now his is a good solid student. His report cards had said, like Dash’s always did, “extra reading at home required, extra work during the summer required, nightly reading, help at home with his spelling.” Quin got it, but Dash had no help. And it had been the same in every aspect of his life. Allison Burnet said, “Dash has been caught on the horns of a great dilemma for years, and that is how to keep happy a father to whom he is, in some respects, devoted and his concerns about some of the things that have happened in his father’s care.” Dash hadn’t been supported in that home. And on some level, Dash knew it. That, on top of the profound trauma of PAS, had snowballed to such an extent that Dash could no longer function in a normal environment, let alone thrive.
Things had moved far beyond his lack of relationship with his mother; it had moved beyond the “custody battle.” Dash was the problem now. “This child has been precociously empowered,” Allison Burnet said. “We’ve been hearing for years that we can’t force this child to do anything because he’s eight, because he’s twelve, now, because he’s sixteen.… Well, now Dash is a lethal weapon in the making. His behaviour is outrageous and it needs to be modified if he is not going to be a threat to other people, particularly females. This is a child whose behaviour is so outrageous with his own mother that it gives me pause for thought for the kind of havoc he could wreak in any relationship with any other woman if something isn’t done soon.
“Mr. Hart is in denial,” she said. “He’s in denial about many things in his private life. He’s certainly in denial about this child. And at some point, somebody with some capacity to bring him to his senses should be telling him.” Peter couldn’t look after Dash. He hadn’t, because he was too busy fighting me, and now he couldn’t. Dash’s will had grown bigger than him. “Only if Mr. Hart gets some insights into his own attitudes and behaviour and his child’s and actively supports a program which will modify this child’s behaviour is anybody going to have much success with this child,” Allison said. “I have doubts whether Mr. Hart loves this child. A parent who is truly loving rises above a power struggle with the mother, rises above blind indifference and does something about the child’s problems.” Someone had to help Dash and, to a man, everyone involved with Dash believed he needed to be away in order to get better.
Justice Sigurdson had asked for the weekend to make his decision. Meanwhile, Dash had been picked up by the police. When we returned to his courtroom two days later and told him what had happened, he said he wasn’t willing to alter his decision in light of it. He did make special mention of the fact that he was “not fully aware” of all the circumstances of this case when Peter and Ken Westlake went before him for their ex parte. “On reflection,” he said, “I wish that I had the benefit of full submissions from Mrs. Richardson’s counsel and the family advocate before making the order that I did, even though I expected to hear from Mrs. Richardson promptly if she was opposed to the order.”
He gave me that admission but he wouldn’t give me Ascent. He wouldn’t give me Cascade. He had reams of material in front of him about the internecine battle between Peter and me over this child. He believed Dash was having a “very, very serious problem.” He liked the idea of Cascade. But what he wanted, after all that we had been through, was for Peter and me to go off and work out together where Dash should be tested and where he should go to school. The last two years of working with Bob and Rick and Oliver and Allison Burnet and the Ascent people and the Cascade people to try and get Peter on board flashed before my eyes. And even that wasn’t enough. It wasn’t enough that Justice Sigurdson had ignored Peter’s wreckage of his son’s progress at a well-respected therapeutic program. It wasn’t enough that he paid only lip service to his own rhetoric when he said, “Testing and tutoring for Dash’s writing difficulty alone does not seem to be the solution, because his schooling difficulties have gone on to such a degree for so long it seems apparent to me that while he is living with his father he cannot, whether in a public school or on a one-on-one tutoring basis, properly pursue his education.” It wasn’t enough that he brushed aside all that he had been told about Peter’s denial and sabotages — he said, “I think Mr. Hart knows that he can effectively veto any plan or court order because of the influence he has on his son.”
He wanted to give Peter an opportunity to redeem himself. “I think the time has come for Mr. Hart to put aside certain grievances and animosity in the best interests of his son,” Sigurdson said, glossing over nearly twelve years of history and giving Peter yet another chance to fail his son. Instead of taking away the last vestige of Peter’s power and forcing him to act in Dash’s best interests, Sigurdson said, “I think that the parents will have to show some leadership,” as though we were squabbling children. As though Peter was able to come around. Sigurdson wanted to make us work together, but he couldn’t see how far beyond that we were. It was as if we had been cast in Kafka’s The Trial. We had been in court for twelve years. Dash’s child advocate was there not to oversee a family picnic but to have Peter taken off the grounds entirely and have me re-empowered — after the debacle of
Dash’s removal from Ascent — to take care of my sick son. I had to get the legal power to keep Peter from interfering with any decisions, unpleasant and long overdue, that had to be made for Dash. That’s why Allison Burnet was there. That’s what we needed.
But Peter had suggested casually, in the middle of a grand speech at our hearing days before, that my sole guardianship be rescinded. He wanted to be Dash’s joint guardian again. “It has been, in fact, de facto that way for the past two years in any event,” he had lied. (Allison Burnet and I had begged for my sole guardianship because of Peter’s incapacity to act when Dash had spiralled two years earlier.) Peter had thrown it out as a shot in the dark, and Justice Sigurdson said he was going to give it to him. As an incentive to act better, perhaps. As a reward for even wanting it. My sole guardianship had allowed me to host the successful interventions of 1998, get Dash to Glen Eden, get Dash across the border and into the wilderness program, and in the blink of an eye it was gone again.
Jamie is far too professional to be outwardly demonstrative, but he stood mute for a second or two, utterly shocked. My own shock was almost physical; if I had been standing I would not have stayed on my feet. As it was, I closed my eyes and looked down at my hands crossed in my lap. A deep, leaden exhaustion filled me. Now I have no tools to help him with. Dash’s future, like so many grains of sand, had fallen through my fingers again. Peter would go right back to doing everything on a unilateral basis, or do nothing at all. He would again facilitate nothing, sign nothing, and support nothing but his own mercurial and haphazard ideas. We could forget Cascade. We could forget anything that would require mutual agreement and Peter’s commitment. By allowing us to share joint custody and joint guardianship — a “normal” divorce arrangement — Sigurdson had once more given Peter total control of our son’s life.
The end began. Without asking me or even informing me, Peter took Dash directly to the Edwards Thomas Learning Centre to conduct the tests Justice Sigurdson had ordered. But in the same way that Peter sought to limit Dr. Leslie Joy’s assessment of Dash back in 1993, he requested that Dash be given a battery of tests that were solely learning-related. Sigurdson had ordered “psycho-educational” tests; Peter ordered “educational” tests. He didn’t want to find any emotional problems. He didn’t want to find any trauma.
By the time I could get an appointment to meet with Stephen Thomas of the centre — it was already November — Dash had completed a number of tests, and both he and Peter had met with Stephen a number of times. Stephen was starting to form his own conclusions. As Peter and Dash were leaving his office the first time, they saw a car accident happen right out front. Peter rushed out into the street and gave out his business card, which struck Stephen as an odd move for this criminal lawyer who had been such a high flyer, going out into the street to rustle up potential clients. What had brought Peter down so? He had smelled alcohol on Peter and, in the short weeks that he knew the two of them, believed Peter to be an alcoholic. He told me, “I presume Dash has home issues based on that alone.”
“Alcohol is one of the issues there, Stephen.” He listened intently as I told him about what Dash had lived since he was five years old. Stephen added that information to details he had taken from his meetings with Peter. In front of Peter, after one of Dash’s sessions, Stephen said to Dash, “You know your mom loves you very, very much,” and Peter called Stephen as soon as he and Dash got home and told him, “Dash hates it when you say things like that. ‘Your mother loves you.’ Don’t say that to him again.” Stephen, astonished, replied, “Peter, I think it is important that Dash knows his mother loves him and that she has been to see me and is here to support him.” Stephen was concerned that Peter had made it such a priority to call him and that he claimed to speak on Dash’s behalf. Stephen told me, “The person who hates me saying things like that to Dash is Peter.” When I told Stephen about Dr. Brennan, Glen Eden, Ascent, and Peter’s ex parte order he said, “You know, I’ve seen this before — when courts not only give but continue to give the child to a dysfunctional parent.”
Still, the tests had shown that Dash did have learning problems. “Look, I’ve met the two of them a number of times now. I have no difficulty believing that Dash has suffered a great deal of trauma in that home, but the results of his testing still stands — there are learning difficulties here. Dyslexia and ADD have shown up, and while there are certainly other things going on here and Dash’s self-esteem is very poor, they do need to be dealt with.”
In Stephen’s view everything would improve for Dash if he attained some success at his studies. Stephen was a dyslexic himself, and its discovery, he told me, had changed the course of his life. He couldn’t speak highly enough about a school he had attended in New York State that had specialized in learning disabilities and had helped him overcome his own. He had talked with Peter and Dash about the school but, well-intentioned though he was, the lens through which he was looking at Dash was wrong, wrong, wrong. Not only did his approach focus on the result of Dash’s trauma — the by-now-significant learning disabilities — over the cause — his emotional state — but the school he recommended to Peter wasn’t a therapeutic environment. It was a regular boarding school in every sense. It even had uniforms. And so Peter began, or at least looked as if he began, an elaborate process of enrolling Dash in the New York school.
I panicked. We had come so far in the right direction and this was wrong. Dash would recoil violently from a structure like that, from anyone telling him what to do. He had learned years ago to rebel against any authority that wasn’t his dad, or opposed his dad. He would run away, or be quickly expelled, or be quietly asked to leave, and then just enter a new spiral. How much more failure and anger could his already crushed self-esteem take? I was so convinced that Dash needed a school for non-compliant children — Cascade, or at the very least an academically focused therapeutic environment, something non-coercive and tolerant of children like Dash. As Rick said, “Dash needs to not be able to get kicked out.” We had to fix Dash’s head and heart, not sit him at a desk in a starched uniform. Would Peter follow through and jump through all the hoops I had already gone through with Cascade to get Dash into the New York school? He had taken Dash out of the wilderness program protesting that he couldn’t get access to him — could he really bear to send him all the way to New York State? If so, why had he pulled him out of Ascent? Dash was there. I had paid the $20,000 tuition. I had now withdrawn my financial support, the only strategy I could think of that might have made Peter think twice about taking Dash out of Ascent. How was Peter going to find the money? Would he get halfway down the track and lose interest? Tell Dash they couldn’t afford it, because I still owed them a million dollars? Would Dash be left in the lurch again? He needed an environment like Cascade, where counsellors and teachers were available twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.
“I am not minimizing the learning difficulties, Stephen. It’s just that Rick and I feel that the therapy has to come first. Dash has to go to a school for non-compliant children because that’s what he is now. He needs to heal. Rick agrees. Everyone I have spoken with agrees. His learning problems are interrelated and integrated with his emotional straitjacket, the PAS. Until Dash is stabilized, I don’t see how we can tell how bad, or even what, his learning issues are. He needs to get away — yes, definitely, and we’ve been working toward this for years — but in a regular boarding-school environment he’ll get kicked out or run away. It will just set him up for more loss and more failure.”
“Pam, I just don’t agree. Maybe it’ll be a tough adjustment at first, but positive results from his academic successes will bolster his self-esteem and motivate him.”
“Stephen, can you please run some psychological tests on the side? Ascent was about to do this testing when Peter took Dash out. Cascade needs to see the whole picture, and the psychological testing is an important component. It will put the learning issues in the right balance. I have been to Cascade and I talk
ed extensively with their admissions department and with the principal. They already have Dash’s academic history and acknowledge how trauma has influenced his ability to learn.”
“Peter hasn’t ordered psychological testing. Listen, Pam, Dash is dyslexic. He has ADD. Does he have low self-esteem? Yes. Emotional problems? For sure. But, as I say, a school geared toward solving his language-based learning problems and bringing him some positive results ought to bring him up.”
I wasn’t turning Stephen’s head. Dash’s chronically low self-esteem didn’t come from an inability to think and write coherently (although certainly it didn’t help). It came from hopelessness and rage. Stephen’s treatment of the symptoms would again submerge the PAS and Dash’s depression, to be stumbled across at some later, perhaps catastrophic, time, like the breakup of Dash’s first romantic relationship or the death of a friend, or in a devastating moment of truth with his father. Or maybe it wouldn’t be discovered at all, but simply be left there, waiting to explode. Peter had set the parameters again. It didn’t matter a damn what Justice Sigurdson had actually ordered. It didn’t matter that Sigurdson had ordered Peter and me to agree on which professional was to do Dash’s testing and then what school he should be sent to. Peter had gone right ahead and ordered himself up another expert to say exactly what he needed him to say. I was in the same position I had been for so long — playing catch-up. Stephen had his opinion and, although it was different to Rick’s, Bob’s, and mine, it was a professional opinion. “I’ve talked to Dash and Peter about New York, and Peter is very keen on the idea,” said Stephen. “Dash has agreed to go, and they are both flying out there to take a look. That sounds positive to me.”
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