Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) (44 page)

              A few days later things finally erupted.  Charlene attacked one of the wardens.  It all happened in a flash.  One minute we could see her screaming behind the glass in their office and the next she was thrown down by two guards who had suddenly appeared.  As we could only hear shouting, no-one really knew what was said or what had been the catalyst for this, but the result was that she was put in solitary.  I feared the consequences of how she would be towards me when she came out, but also pitied her.  Being caged day and night, no television, books or any entertainment whatsoever would have been my worst nightmare.  Boredom being one’s biggest enemy in jail and with no company other than one's own thoughts, can very quickly turn to despair.

              I had to be grateful for the reprieve of Charlene’s absence, if nothing else.  One of the Senior Wardens came to issue a warning after supper that night and suggested that any bullying would be treated the same way.  I realised that the majority would blame me for Charlene’s incarceration but to my surprise, whilst no-one reached out in friendship, no-one actively turned on me either.  I guess the fear of Charlene’s fate was enough to keep them from seeking revenge on her behalf.  It is well known that bullies are driven by fear, hatred and very often cowardice.  Charlene’s support group disbanded, quietened and the wing became quieter and more subdued.  This was just as well so close now to the Final Hearing.  I needed to focus on working on my files and making what notes I could for my legal team.  I both dreaded and welcomed the opportunity to make our case.  I still hung on to a vain hope of justice and the return of my beloved son to safety and the life we had before, with any hope of a return to the former status quo, slipping further and further out of reach.

              The weekend before the Final Hearing was a particularly hard one to bear.  I was alone in a place where I could not seek out the comfort of my friends and the familiar.  I was surrounded only by strangers to whom I did not relate and who saw me as an alien being, to be feared and mocked.  Their hostility hung heavy in the air, although now unspoken.  I felt the powerlessness of childhood when I had tried to tell my father about my mother’s drinking and the changes in her that I faced coming home from school, never certain how she would be and never sure how to be right for either of them.  Instead I had hidden in the fantasy world of my stories, scribbled on notebooks in the days before computers and to this same place, I now retreated. 

              As a child, I had been in trouble for things I had not done, mostly because my mother’s illness which I had no possibility of understanding, would lead to her laying blame elsewhere to cover her tracks.  My elder siblings found it harder to accept the extent of mum's problem or how it had impacted on me as the youngest child.  There was a gap of eight years between my eldest sister and myself and sadly we had never been close.  She left home when I was only eleven and married young.  It is a great source of sadness to me that she does not seek or want the closeness that I had with my middle sister who died tragically young. 

              Alcoholism affects all in the family - both those who acknowledge its existence and those who choose to deny it.  As the one who had seen the devastating effects on my mother over the years as she deteriorated further into the pain of her addiction,  I came to understand the problem and even went to Al-Anon to try to understand better her suffering.  It also made me very aware of the dangers of alcohol dependency and served as a very real warning that drink answers nothing and creates problems of its own.  I am no saint, I enjoy a glass of wine like anyone else, but in the agonising pain I was now in, and approaching this most frightening prospect, it was almost a good thing that I was unable to seek that sort of solace.  I am not saying I would have succumbed, but I have seen others in the same situation turn to all sorts of artificial means to try to blot out the intolerable pain of separation, grief and anger that losing a child brings.  Everyone has their own journey and their own way of dealing with things.  I seemed to have taken on the role early in life of family scapegoat.  If I was always wrong, it allowed others to be right.  This label stayed with me for many years and yet I have grown to accept myself against the odds and nothing helped me more in feeling loved and valued than becoming a mother.  The thought of losing the only identity that meant anything to me was an unbearable reality to face.  As in childhood, I turned to the only means I knew to cope with my pain - my writing.

              Here I was again, shut away in my room, scribbling my thoughts – trying to externalise the pain and fear and again in trouble for things I had not done – a scapegoat for the system.  Was this my karma?  Was history simply repeating itself and my poor darling M suffering the consequences of my ability to attract those who abused, bullied and destroyed all that was good?  That is M's question to answer in the future through his own journey through this horrific nightmare that had become our life.  I can only say that through all of it, his courage, his resilience and his ability to love despite all have both amazed and earned my deepest admiration. 

              I am not a believer in past lives or anything particularly out of the ordinary.  In fact, I am rather cynical about these things, but I do believe that our thoughts and negative beliefs can hugely affect the way we deal with the obstacles and challenges that come our way.  I have learned to find my own inner strength through this.  It fails me often, but when I have needed it most, there has always been the knowledge of M's love for me to keep me from giving up.  I would often escape into my reveries of past times together and whilst the longing for what had passed brought huge sadness, I wouldn't have changed our time together and the happiness of that for the world.  Every day that M and I were together during the first seven and a half years of his life was manna from heaven to me and I was truly blessed.

              I could not sleep that night.  I lay awake watching “Children in Need”, knowing my own child could be facing a horrifying future, purgatory pervading every fibre of my maternal being.  In my sleep, I cried out for someone to rescue him, as I could not.

              I blamed myself constantly for placing our safety in Dad's hands when he was no more able to protect me now, as he had been when I was a child or probably any of us.  Maybe that was why my elder sister had grown up emotionally detached and seemingly without compassion for others – if it was there, I had never seen it.  Maybe that was why she had built herself a gilded cage of security, whilst my brother had instead turned to God and the cloak of faith in the intangible.  I could not speak for them.  We only know ourselves in our interactions with others and our relationship with them. I only knew that nothing about my relationships with either of them was comfortable or warm and that saddened me deeply.  The closest familial relationship I had since my middle sister and mum had died, was Dad, whose only real crime was an inability, somewhat naively to lie under any circumstances - to live within the box and follow the letter of the law.  His justification was that you must always do the right thing, whatever others do and regardless of the outcome, but life is not always black and white and sometimes it is necessary to live within the shadows of the grey in order to shield those you love from the dark. 

              Thoughts such as these ran through my mind like movies through the night.  I would fall into places so deep and dark at times that I feared I may never resurface but then I would crawl my way out into that tiny shaft of light that I hoped I would still see when I opened my eyes.  It was only a flicker now, but it was still there burning in the corner of my eye.

              Dad’s faith in the lawyers was much greater than mine.  I guess his belief in systems was partly the reason he had given us up.  He had been persuaded by the lawyer who had represented him that he should sacrifice us and save himself, so that he could help us once we were found.  This made no sense to me, because had we managed to remain where we were and safe, we could have built a life that would have cost him far less in legal terms and given us our freedom.  I had no doubt that, once established, we could have built a wonderful future for ourselves in Florida.  It was trued that we had needed his help to get away and to find a base, but I was sure that with my qualifications, I would have found work easily and the lengths we went to do what we did, had all come to nought in a moment and placed my beloved M in danger.  The fact remained, that we simply do not know what the outcome would have been, had my father managed to protect our whereabouts. 

              Our now reliance on the ever-expanding legal team and the vast amounts of money being spent, I know aggrieved both Dad and other members of the family who felt some jealousy.  Surprising as that may sound – it did nothing to mend the already established rift between myself and my siblings.  For the elder resented the press coverage that had come as a result of our departure and the younger resented the hiatus created by our needs to his legacy.  I suspect it went deeper than that with both and I think on some level they simply needed to love themselves more and not see Dad's helping us as a sign of favouritism.  I am certain had either of them been in this situation then he wouldn't have hesitated to aid them too.  In fact my reliance on Dad for help, had cost us everything so it wasn't the huge accolade they seemed to think it was.   At the time of my writing this, things have healed to some extent between my brother and myself and whilst we are not terribly close we have found some common ground and moved forward thankfully.  I fear my elder sister is lost to me forever and I believe she will view my openness as a further reason for resentment.  But this is our story, M's and mine and in our  journey, all the pieces are relevant.  Their stories are their own and maybe one day a common denominator will be found, but I have given up trying to force it.  Attempts to do so, have only made things abundantly worse.

              All that said, the villain of the piece was still M’s father who had wrought this havoc on our world.  He had systematically destroyed our lives and in his vile and unnatural actions, had destroyed the life of his son and his son’s family.  He would never see it that way because he would always abdicate blame and see only my reactions to his actions.  It was very convenient for him that I had fled, because the spotlight was on my behaviour, not his and in doing so, I had, played unwittingly into his hands.  Looking back, perhaps we should have stayed to fight another day in the horribly corrupt Family Court - we would never know whether that would have made a difference any more than we would ever know whether Dad’s silence would have protected us from the jaws of the lion we now faced.

              At least the lawyers were now being straight with me.  They no longer pretended there was hope where there was none and I felt angered that they hadn’t taken the only action that I believed might have saved M from what seemed a foregone conclusion – In not appealing the Fact Find Judgment that had found for no abuse, they left us is in a position of acceptance and nothing else could turn our fate around or at least halt the galloping horse, other than to show that Judgment as the flawed and unsafe decision it had been - a decision of one man, at best an inexperienced Judge and at worst someone who had a vested interest in protecting a paedophile. 

              Right up until the first day of the Welfare Hearing, I was still pleading with them to appeal.  I knew that without this, M would be lost.  I also feared that if he ended up in his father’s clutches - a situation that would give him total control over both M’s life and to an extent mine, he would begin to drip feed M venomous lies about me in an attempt to alienate him.  I didn’t believe he could succeed, but I knew he would go to all lengths possible to turn M against me and to rewrite the past in such a way as to blur the lines between his chosen fictional version with reality.

              My QC was intractable in his position.  Philip believed that damage limitation was the best approach and that we must appease the Judge and the Court by not challenging the Judgment of the very man who would now decide M’s future for the rest of his childhood.  This is where I believe lawyers really fail in the Family Court system – very often they have their eye on their own future careers and want to “befriend” the Judges in the hope that they will rule in their favour in the future.  This goes unspoken, but it is obvious that alienating a Judge does no-one’s profession any good.  I wished now, that I had remained a Litigant in Person and had kept the challenges on the table that the first barrister on our case, had so quickly removed.  The legal strategy throughout had been one of defence rather than attack and I am certain that we should have attacked from the minute M made his disclosures and gone on attacking throughout.  The only way to deal with bullies, legal or otherwise, is to hit back and five times as hard as they hit you.  We had taken a victim position that did us no favours.

              I am not saying that all lawyers are bad people, but they are human like the rest of us and they play the Court like a game of chess, not a game of lives.  They do not always pick the right strategy and like any other tradesmen, they ply their trade until it fails and then blame their tools – their clients.

              We were facing an eight day stint in the Family Court beginning that Monday.  I was disadvantaged in every way, without access to my lawyers or files.  However, the biggest problem was that we were shutting the stable door after the horse had bolted and our horse had bolted so far now, that we would never catch it. 

              I remained convinced and do this day, that had we appealed and straight away after the Judgment, then we would not have needed to run.  Our biggest mistake was in  putting our faith in lawyers and I learned from this in the most cruel and hardest of ways, that the only person in life to put your faith in, is yourself.