by Kim Noble
Even with my ignorance, the monitors at the mother-and-baby unit were impressed by how we got on. As I understand it, three or four personalities had the honour of holding Aimee that day. I think the body went into self-preservation overdrive, naturally showing Aimee off to all its potential dominant personalities, everyone likely to have a mothering role in the future. Luckily, we all bonded instantly, even those of us with no real idea why we were there. In fact, we obviously gave off such instinctively positive maternal vibes that the mother-and-baby unit officials didn’t even realise we’d been separated for four months. They’d assumed we’d been together all this time. In the end, instead of being made to stay the full half a year, we were released after just two months.
And so, in January 1998, completely without my knowledge, Bonny had carried our six-month-old baby daughter through the door of our house.
Thanks to Bonny and friends we had custody of our daughter but, Bonny was made aware, it was only a temporary measure. We had Aimee under a care order – essentially the same as the ward of court that the Maudsley tried to impose on us – whereby if we transgressed one rule, broke one promise or invalidated one condition then Aimee would be yanked away again. At that stage, since I didn’t realise she was my daughter, I was blissfully unaware of the ruling hanging over the house.
But then the social services did something life changing: they did nothing at all.
One of the tenets of the care order was that Bonny had to agree to weekly or monthly house checks from psychiatrists and social workers. Obviously she would have said yes to anything. By the time Aimee had celebrated her first birthday and Bonny still hadn’t seen anyone, she began to get twitchy.
As she told Dr Laine, ‘They either check up on us or leave us alone – they can’t have their cake and eat it.’
And so she went back on the attack. This time she put in a complaint and sent a copy to our MP, Malcolm Wicks. He was wonderful. He helped and supported her all the way and really put social services in their place.
Basically Bonny wanted to shame the authorities into admitting that she was taking better care of Aimee than they were.
‘If my daughter is so at risk, how come you haven’t bothered to visit her once?’
I wish I could have seen it!
Within a few weeks Bonny had the director of the social services fawning around our house because of the MP. ‘Going to the press’ and ‘compensation’ were mentioned and eventually she settled on a compromise. The local health authority would now take over funding of her – our – therapy with Dr Laine, even though she was outside our borough. In the circumstances it was the least they could do.
But still they refused to lift the care order. In fact, bringing it to their attention actually made matters worse. From being ignored, Bonny was informed that she would now have an assessment every six months to check progress. She’d agreed – after a fight, of course – but hated every minute of them. On paper the assessments might have had Aimee’s best interests at heart. In practice they just felt like a bi-annual exercise in humiliation.
The problem was that most care orders are for children in foster homes. So, every six months there is a ‘placement meeting’ to decide whether a child should stay with his or her temporary caregivers. This is where child services can be so cruel. Even though Bonny was Aimee’s actual mother, they refused to amend their terminology. Twice a year she would turn up for the meeting, tense and nervous, and listen to herself being described as a foster parent. At the end they always concluded in the same brutal terms: ‘We agree the child can stay in its current placement.’
Bonny would sit there, fuming, It’s not a placement – it’s her home!
I think the pressure of those meetings contributed to her cracking up. So when I became the dominant personality a couple of years later, I swore I would get it fixed. I didn’t care how long it took, I would do it.
I will get our daughter back.
During the court case, many experts had stood up to argue on both sides. A psychiatrist on Bonny’s behalf told the judge, ‘I work with mothers in the community who have killed their first child – and even they are given a chance with their second.’
Bonny was furious. She wasn’t looking for a second chance – she wanted her first chance.
‘How do you justify removing this woman’s child at birth,’ the psychiatrist continued, ‘just because she has DID?’
They couldn’t. So many people told Dr Laine and me they couldn’t see how the decision had ever been approved in the first place. Still, it didn’t matter now – in the end we got the result we wanted.
Unfortunately it came too late for one person.
Dawn.
Dawn had not come out since her baby had been snatched. She had gone through the operation, held our baby for the first time, experienced the maternal rush of first contact, seen baby Skye be weighed and measured and dressed, then held her again for what she imagined would be the rest of her life.
Dawn was there when social services snatched our baby away.
Dawn was the one who screamed and screamed and cried as she realised no one was going to help.
Dawn was the one whose world fell utterly and totally apart.
At some point our defence mechanism kicked in and Dawn switched. I don’t know who replaced her but I do know that a year later she still hadn’t been back. And then suddenly she appeared during a session with Dr Laine.
To Dawn, it was still August 1997. And her baby, lovely, beautiful little Skye, had just been taken from her.
To this day Dawn does not know that Skye was ever returned. Every time she appears, she’s as distraught as ever, constantly searching for her missing daughter. Worst of all, she refuses to recognise Aimee.
I had never seen this with my own eyes for obvious reasons until we were filmed for the Oprah show in September 2010. Watching it back with Aimee I couldn’t believe how brave she had been. There was Dawn, sitting next to thirteen-year-old Aimee on the sofa at Dr Laine’s house. They were chatting away – they’ve known each other all Aimee’s life, after all. But when the interviewer asked who the girl next to her was, Dawn replied, ‘That’s not Skye.’
‘Then who is it?’
‘She’s the daughter of a friend.’
It was too much for Aimee. She has known the truth about Dawn, she knows the pain that Dawn is going through on her fruitless quest for justice, but to be rejected so visibly was more than she could bear.
To be honest, it was more than we could bear as well. I don’t think our body thought I was up to seeing it and so for the first few times we sat down to watch a recording of the interview I disappeared and Dawn took my place. As you can see on the film, she’s utterly bemused why Aimee is upset. After all, Dawn’s the one missing a daughter. She’s the one who should be crying. Then, however, you see Dawn’s maternal instinct kick in. She leans in, hugs Aimee and sobs, ‘You’d have loved Skye.’
And that just makes it worse …
The way our brain protects each personality is very impressive. With some of the suicide attempts, I think there was occasionally a switch at crucial times. Over the years Dr Laine has received calls from various personalities saying, ‘I’ve just found a huge pot of pills in the car. What should I do?’ One of the alters, Ken, discovered himself sitting on a multi-storey car park seconds from jumping. We assume it was Rebecca who climbed up there. The body must have realised there’s no stomach pump that can reverse the effects of a high jump and intervened.
Some of its interventions aren’t such matters of life or death but they can save embarrassment. Ken, obviously, is a man. (He is a gay man, as well, which means he only sleeps with men – something at least our body has physical memory of.) When Ken needs a lavatory, obviously he uses a gents’ – but equally obviously we look like a woman.
Again, that’s when the body steps in. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve discovered myself standing directly outside a door marked ‘Men�
��. Occasionally I’ve actually seen a urinal before I’ve arrived. I’m sure it happens the other way round so Ken has near misses as well.
Watching Ken on the Oprah show was fascinating as well. Like Dawn, like Judy, like most of the others – like me for most of my life – he refuses to accept he is one of multiple personalities in Kim Noble’s body and mind. When the interviewer challenged him he said, ‘I’m a man. I haven’t got breasts.’
When she pointed to his clothes – my clothes – he looked down and said simply, ‘I’m gay. I’m not a transvestite.’ Then he turned to Aimee and they shared the most wonderful look.
It gives me genuine pleasure to see the connection she has with him because I can see she’s in such safe hands when I’m not there.
Some people are surprised that Aimee knows about the DID. (Bearing in mind its connotations – she’s too young to be introduced to the idea of child abuse – we’ve only told her about personalities. The details she’ll learn when she’s ready.) In fact, Aimee knew about DID before I did.
Aimee was six years old when I began to accept I had what Dr Hale and Dr Laine had been trying to help me understand for so long, and closer to seven years old before I emerged fully as the dominant personality. Up until then she’d always called me ‘Patricia’, as I’d asked her, just as she called the fifteen-year-old girl who used to look after her, Judy. Then there was her little friend Katie, a three-year-old, Ken, Dawn, and of course Hayley. Only Bonny was called ‘Mama’.
If you ask Aimee when she found out about our condition she’ll say, ‘I’ve always known.’ And she has. Until Aimee reached school age Bonny would naturally take her to Dr Laine’s. There she saw from a very early age all the different personalities coming out of Mama and talking. Just being in the room and seeing Dr Laine engage with them taught her not to be afraid when the different alters popped out at home. She learnt, almost subliminally, to accept each and every one of them as a person in their own right.
Even the child personalities.
DID poses a lot of questions for everyone who hears about it. Even after finishing this book I’m sure a lot of readers will still have some burning query they wish was answered. How do you do this? What happens when … ? One of the areas that seems to be a major sticking point for many, however, involves the existence of child personalities.
Okay, logically I can just about get my head around different adults talking through one mouth, but you’re a woman of fifty – how could you possibly sometimes be a child?
Even people who’ve managed to get their heads around DID can be floored by this. They suddenly think I ‘regress’ or start crawling around on all fours when of course I don’t – but that’s not to say the children don’t. The switch from adult to child is as total as from me to Bonny or anyone else. They are as real as us too, and just as rounded. They just happen to be a lot younger.
I know the most about a little girl called Katie because she used to come out a lot when Aimee was young. Katie is stuck at three years old, for reasons I don’t like to think about, so I suppose it was a lovely change for her to have someone near her own age to play with for a few years. I know Aimee loved playing with Katie, and Dr Laine, who saw a lot of them together during sessions and on home visits, said it was absolutely no different from watching any other pair of pre-schoolers.
So does that mean Katie talks with the vocabulary of a three-year-old? Absolutely. She’s yet to learn the language of an adult or even an older child. And does she toddle around the room, stumbling and leaping and climbing and falling and starting all over again? All the time.
I used to be embarrassed thinking about what it must look like, this adult body crashing about, playing with kids’ toys, but Dr Laine stopped me. In the time she had known us, Katie tended to mainly come out when Aimee was around. Anyone watching Katie and Aimee together probably wouldn’t notice anything more than a mother happily messing around with her little girl, Dr Laine insisted. ‘There isn’t a parent out there who hasn’t got down on hands and knees and regressed temporarily when playing with their own children,’ she said. ‘With Katie it’s just a little more authentic performance.’
Unfortunately Katie doesn’t come out as much any more, which Aimee is sad about, especially as it’s sort of her fault – because of course Aimee is much older than her now. Katie doesn’t question why Aimee has aged and she hasn’t. All she knows is that it’s no longer fun playing with a thirteen-year-old.
If I’m honest, it’s a relief, as the dominant personality, to know that a three-year-old isn’t as likely to take over the body these days. Looking back, though, there are the odd clues that she did used to come out even before Aimee was around. During my stay at Arbours, one of the visiting therapists had various nicknames for me but I ignored them at the time – mainly because I was offended by the ‘Drunk Kim’ tag (even though it might have been true). I think actually this therapist had identified the DID without even knowing it, because he also referred to ‘Giggly Kim’, ‘Angry Kim’ and ‘Baby Kim’. It’s pretty obvious to me now that he had previously met some of the other personalities, just as it’s clear Baby Kim was very likely Katie. In fact, Dr Laine has revealed that during our time at Arbours as well as the Cassel, Katie would hide in the wardrobe during some sessions. The clues were there!
Of course, it was the knowledge that there were child personalities likely to come out that fuelled social services’ argument to have Aimee removed from us. How can a child of three possibly look after a baby? I can appreciate how that looks on paper. All I can say in defence, however, is that the body makes it work. In the same way it won’t let depressed personalities go through with their suicidal plans – or it stops me walking into the men’s toilets – I don’t believe it would ever allow Aimee to be at risk. Katie would never come out when baby Aimee was being bathed, for example, or when they were out of the house. Whether the personalities appreciate she is their daughter or not, the bond between the child and the body is too strong to put her in danger. I really believe that.
While she had always been aware of the different personalities in our body, Aimee really came to formally understand the disorder when Hayley made her an amazing little book called ‘Amy’s Mama Had DID’ (Aimee’s name was intentionally spelt differently to protect her). It was a kiddy’s story version of our condition, in language that Aimee could understand. From what I gather, Hayley wasn’t around much at the time – Bonny was the dominant one – so it’s lovely to think her connection with Aimee was still so strong that she would spend so much of her precious fleeting time on it. It was worth it. Aimee says she was so pleased with it she took it in to show off at school and read it out loud in assembly.
If you ask her what it’s like to live with a mum with DID, Aimee will shrug and say what she always says, ‘For me it’s normal.’ As bizarre as it might look on the outside, this is how she has been raised. It doesn’t faze her a bit. In fact, she sometimes plays us off against each other. When she was thirteen, Aimee asked me for permission to get her ear pierced. I said I’d think about it. The following weekend, I switched with Judy and they’d gone out and got it done. I was so angry with Aimee. You can’t blame Judy – she’s only fifteen – but Aimee knew full well what I would say.
I suppose I’m just lucky Judy didn’t get it done as well – or worse!
It’s for reasons like that that Dr Laine had been keen to encourage me to develop to my fullest potential. Perhaps I would one day assume the mantle of dominant personality. Judy was too young – you wouldn’t ideally have a fifteen-year-old raising a family, especially one as potentially erratic as ours. Many of the others had their own problems – for example weight, self-esteem or issues with their sexuality. By comparison, I’d like to think I had fewer hurdles to overcome. When eventually I was ready to reach my potential, however, it was nearly too late.
Bonny’s descent from dominant personality to occasional visitor was gradual and sad. Like Hayley, who had withered und
er the pressure of fighting the court case, it was the long and arduous campaign to keep Aimee that got the better of Bonny. Even though she’d won, the effort meant she was soon showing signs of cracking up. Dr Laine spotted the tell-tale signals in her conversation. At home, however, it was when she began hoarding old newspapers that Aimee noticed. If Aimee had a new toy, Bonny would throw away the toy and keep the packaging. She became obsessed. Then one day Aimee went up to her room and on her pillow were several little wrapped presents. It wasn’t her birthday, so what were they?
She pulled the ribbon, tore the wrapping and ripped open the boxes.
They were full of shredded newspaper.
I didn’t know this but maybe the body was aware. Perhaps that was the moment it decided I was ready to accept the truth. Anyway, that’s the time I admitted to Dr Laine that she was right.
Accepting the diagnosis of DID had its baggage, of course, and I had to deal with that. In due course I would have to take over the running of the house, and all the practical responsibilities that went with it. More importantly, though, it also meant I was a mother. I had a beautiful six-year-old girl whom I loved and who loved me.
My initial feeling, though, was one of abject panic. I hadn’t been there to teach Aimee anything, I hadn’t weaned her, potty-trained her or any of the other parental landmarks. Whenever I’d been out with Aimee I only remember playing. That was about all I could manage.
I remember saying to Dr Laine, ‘I can’t do it. I don’t have a clue what to do!’
‘You’ll be fine,’ she assured me. ‘You’ve already done such a wonderful job without even knowing it.’
Had I? How had I? It’s one thing looking after a child you think is a friend’s daughter – it’s another taking full-time responsibility for another human being. Especially when I was just coming to terms with the fact that I hadn’t even been looking after myself for the majority of my forty-odd years on the planet.