My son had never been away from me for longer than an hour, when J started taking him away.
The first custody order, which was scrawled on a piece of paper and bartered in a half-hour across the hallway of Santa Monica Courthouse, allowed J visitation for a couple of hours every day. My ex’s reasoning was that this was a normal and reasonable request, and my attorney - a blustering fool - did not lead me to believe otherwise. I thought we had staved off the demands for overnights, which horrified me. My boy was so tiny, still breastfeeding. Overnights with a man who was either drunk or high or passed out with ice cream dribbling down him was my greatest fear. By agreeing to let J visit for a couple of hours a day, my attorney reassured me that I had shown I was calm and reasonable despite the maelstrom, I had reassured J that should he get his act together, we could co-parent together easily. I had naively assumed the order was temporary - because my dickwad of an attorney told me once it was agreed, we would reconvene in a few months to check in on how things were going and make any adjustments. I assumed so much that wasn’t explicitly outline. I assumed that J’s visits would be in my home, because J did not have a home (he hadn’t bothered paying any rent for the three years we were together). I assumed I would leave when J arrived, take a yoga class or go get a coffee, while he bonded with N, and that we would be grown ups about this painful new step towards separating our lives.
This was not the case.
Less than a week into the new agreement, I could see that this was unworkable. Whatever was on that piece of paper in his favor, J would enforce. No matter if N was sick, or sleeping, or feeding, or crying- everything would stop for J, N would be removed from the house, whether naked, screaming, hungry, wet, in the middle of a nap - and the circus would start. I would plead for some clemency. Time to feed N, to dress him, to calm him if he was crying. J would refuse, make some barbed, angry comments in a voice which he never raised. J had nowhere to live, and so had taken my VW van and parked it outside my home which meant, effectively, he had ‘moved out’ of the home, to a spot only twenty feet away from which he sat and surveyed my every moment with his various cameras and recording devices, until the time when he could enter the home to get N, and he would record me in my own home.
My every waking hour, which had revolved around my ten month-old baby, now revolved around a 36 year-old man. I had no privacy, and the man who hated me more than anyone else had direct access to my home and child - and me. The man who had hidden alcohol in coffee cups and smoked meth and heroin in the bathroom while I was inches away, heavily pregnant, locked in the bedroom, had not really moved out. If I was late, he would scream kidnapping and call the police and his attorney. If he was late, I would be forced to sit there until a half hour passed and take a boring video for my attorneys to prove I had waited for him. I was so stupid and so naive. My stupidity, my naivety, my tendency towards demonstrative emotion - this has been my flaw all along. I never saw the loopholes and the ways a simple agreement could be exploited. In my mind, if J came to get N and he was asleep, he would surely wait until he woke up. If J came to get N and he didn’t want to go, he would surely stay and sit with us in the living room playing toys.
My anxiety and depression increased. My friends - two kind British moms who were the only ones who didn’t freeze me out once J’s anger started boiling over and our cracks could not be hidden - started to notice how exhausted Nye was, how he’d stink of cigarettes and cooking oil after the visits, how he’d be mewling and fretful, dirty and spent. He was just too young to be ferried around Venice Beach for hours in a bike, to be napped in the back of cars, in a hot sticky baby carrier. J documented everything on an instagram account labeled ‘a boy and his dad’ devoted to ‘fighting for equal custody ‘ (he was not fighting for equal custody: every single filing had demanded sole legal and physical for him)
J would arrive, walk into the house without knocking, breath fiery with alcohol and cigarettes. Calmly, he would brandish his recording devices: a phone, a camera, his laptop, an iPad usually all of these - and try and pick an argument. I was sleep deprived, lonely, traumatized, broke, bleeding 350 bucks an hour to a lawyer and forbidden from leaving the country because J had told the court I was a ‘flight risk’. I had no work and I had no family members and no support group, and the one person I needed to protect the most - I couldn’t. So in his calm, deep, low rumble, thick with tar and nicotine, J would stir up whatever filth he could find in my soul. That was easy to do because, like most ADHD women, I had no filter and shared what I thought and felt without ever thinking of the consequences: that it might be used by the person I trusted the most in the world when he decided instead he wanted to destroy me.
My inner monologue does not need any help to go to a dark place. He knew I was hurt that my twin sister never spoke to me. “Even your twin sister hates you,” he’d say. He knew I was paranoid about my almost supernatural ability to piss people off. Back then, years before anyone thought to see if my rapidly firing neurons and my even faster mouth might be indicative of some kind of neurodivergency, I just knew I was different, weird, mouthy, divisive. “No one likes you. You annoy everyone. If it wasn’t for me you’d never have lived with the group. You’d never have had those friends.” Innocuous stuff. Stuff that would never rise to the level of a legal threat. But words which undid me because I was isolated and scared and lonely and needed to be shielded from him. My mental health - ironically, pretty robust before I met J, was another favored topic. “You’re crazy. You’re depressed. You’re a threat to N. You can’t cope with him. I did everything for N and you did nothing”. Imagine being in a locked room with someone whispering every awful thing you have ever thought about yourself. Day and night the only contact I had was with my baby and my ex, because I could not even socialize with ‘the visits’ stuck in the middle of the day. I would run to the store when J had left, or try and go to the playpark, but N was cranky and off, and I was completely drained, the ongoing, endless stress sucking leaving me like a husk.
I remember the day N was born, how his shoulders got stuck and ripped on the way out, and I lost so much blood I nearly died. They took N from me for an hour or so and handed him to J. J took out his camera and took pictures of me as the blood drained out and they warned I might die. They gave me a blood transfusion and some Fentanyl and put me in a quiet, dark room and a cheerful Scottish nurse came in and spoke to me and I felt so safe because I wasn’t alone with J. God, I loved that Nurse. She would wake me gently in the night, at all hours, to do god knows what. I had no window at UCLA so it was just me and N, in a tiny dark room, a smiling nurse at the end of a button. I do not remember J being around, but when he was he smelled of cigarettes and he didn’t look at me. I never wanted to leave that hospital. It was the last time I felt safe, and the last time I did not feel alone.
I took the agreement to new lawyers after a few weeks of being tormented every day by J and having N ripped away. The new lawyers were horrified. Horrified at my attorney for striking such a bad deal, horrified at what J had put me through, trapped in that Venice apartment flanked by him on one side, his crazy friends on the other.
These were not the worst months, but I did not yet know that. These were months when a strange kind of cocoon would settle when the sun set, and it would be me and N, alone, no one else. I would put N, exhausted, to bed - a ninety minute long process of white noise and breastfeeding and humming and songs and patting and bouncing and creeping out only for a wail to start, repeat the process, repeat even when I felt like screaming. When he finally went down I’d play the podcast ‘Serial’ while I put the toys away and mopped the wood floor and meal prepped (who the fuck meal preps? Not me. Not anymore) then I would sit, head in my hands, too shocked to cry, my soul spanked and starved.
I had thought the rupture would be the hardest part. I did not know then that the hardest part was going to be this man’s claim over not only my son, but every ounce of freedom I had.
I have a perpetual habit of always being an outsider. British in America. Irreverent in a country which loves hierarchy. Blunt when indiscretion is preferred. Unable to simply socialize and relax unless loosened by booze. When I became a parent, even with all the sadness in the background, the sadness of knowing that my husband was troubled and unhappy, that he was falling out of love with me, that he was starting to actively hate me, that our marriage was destined to end… even with all this heavy, heavy weight, I felt like I belonged to the realm of parenthood. I loved being a Mom. I had never really felt like I had a purpose, and had drifted without a community or family to really anchor me. N anchored me. He made so much sense. Sure, I woke up feeling like a freight train had hit me. I had no help, none, and my son breastfed every 45 minutes and cried if I left him for longer than ten minutes. But I loved it. I loved him. I was like every cliched new mom asshole, baking and cooking and cleaning and singing and nearly dropping dead from exhaustion and stress, but loving my kid, loving him so fucking hard that it hurt and the idea that he might be taken away made my soul shriek. For nine brief months I was a Mom.
After J took him, I stopped feeling like this. I stopped feeling like a Mom. I had too much time. I did not know where my baby was. I did not know what he was eating. I wasn’t allowed to call. I wasn’t allowed to know where he was. Once a stranger posted pictures of him on her instagram and labeled him her ‘best buddy’. Who was this person? How were they in my child’s life? There were so many absences and ellipses and gaps and questions, and this was exactly what I was afraid of. Because I had lived with J and I knew what those holes could be filled with, and how much they might hurt a child. Me.
Funny how people always default to the idea that co-parenting is great because of ‘the time’. You must have so much time! They shriek. Wow, all that yoga. That ballet. That surfing. That reading. That writing. You can do so much. You can have a career! They tick off the things I do to plug the yawning gap where my son should be, and they express envy for the things I have which they do not: for my tiny, malnourished, stressed out size 0 figure which gets smaller and smaller but nevertheless produces an endless and enviable supply of milk. You wouldn’t like being a full time parent, they tell me. Literally no time to do anything. No time at all. We spend a fortune on childcare.
I’m on CalWorks, I say in response, and because they don’t know what that is, they smile and move on. Now I am at USC, and they tell me how marvelous it is to see a single mother bettering herself, not knowing that it is my second graduate degree, the first was from Cambridge, and the only reason I went back to school is because I am forbidden from living outside a 20 mile radius of J. I am so tired of remaking myself. I am so tired of careers. Chef. Journalist. Academic. Sailor. Bartender. Screenwriter. Academic. Unemployed. Unemployed. Unemployed.
Recently, J revealed that his girlfriend is pregnant. She’s lived with N for over two years. Makes him lunch. Shares a bed with him. I have no idea who she is. Have never met her. Have never had a message, a call, a note, an introduction, a comment. Not once has J ever even mentioned her presence. It is as if she does not exist, but I only know of her existence because N mentions her in that casual, elliptic way children do. Oh, M really likes the brand of sun lotion you got me. M wears those little band aids for zits too. At first he would say, ‘Dad has a new friend, but he said she’s not his girlfriend’. I was like, Oh, OK. ‘She sleeps over but it’s just because she stays up late playing video games’. I have spent too much time surviving and fighting to even bother dating. The closest I came was with Jonathan P Linton Jr, a kind and funny and adorable friend who eventually met the love of his life and now only exists in friendly, supportive messages now and then. I miss him, and know nothing about his newest relationship except that he is the kind of happy he never was with me, and that is a beautiful and wonderous thing for a miserable man in his forties who was convinced he would be single forever. N was never in Jonathan P Linton Jr’s life. I kept the two very separate for the eighteen months or so we dated. In this greatest twist of irony, in a world where I have no idea where my Mum is, or what my sister is up to, or whether Jonathan P Linton Jr is truly content with the love of his life, I now have no idea what my son’s other life is like. The life when he is not with me in the tiny, shitty apartment, both of us stressing over homework, me watching another source of income dry up and shrivel away, another (by now estranged) relative or friend six thousand miles away die or retreat into the NHS never to return. I pray and I meditate and I surf and I dance and I breathe and I do therapy and I do EMDR and support group meetings and called my school counselor and reached out to endless lawyers and practiced gratitude and ‘small joys’, so much fucking gratitude and so much fucking small joy you could choke on it, but there is nothing that heals this pain and returns me to the person I used to be. It’s just a big hole. I have to either go on living with that hole, or I don’t. So many of us choose not to. They leave, they die, or they get eaten from the inside out by this shit.
I have spent fifty percent of my son’s existence wondering where he is, who he is with, is he safe, has he eaten, did he go potty, is his diaper clean. That is five and a half years of wondering, of not having answers, of letting my overactive imagination and rampant stress paint terrible, awful pictures which slap me and punch me and make me suck my breath in quickly in the middle of a sentence, before I blink and smile and pretend everything is OK. I worry less now that N is older, can use a phone, can cross a street, talk to strangers, is long out of diapers. But in its place is a different concern. That all of this time I’ve missed has turned him into someone who will one day hurt me just as much as his father still does.
The system is so broken. I remember the first time my ex came to visit my children. My daughter was five and she crawled into a kitchen cabinet to hide. Then she clung to my legs and I had to hand her over. Subscribing to follow your story.
It will be interesting how he navigates parenting a second time around. I have seen many different scenarios. I am sure you have thought about all of them as well. I bet you dream of escaping to London. I hope this dream becomes a reality for you and your son. I don't want to give you false hope. He may lose interest in this vendetta he has against you and if it continues his girlfriend will be left wondering: why?