Denial.

I’ve been having a bit of an on going discussion with Lou’s grandmother of late following an incident at school a week and a half ago where one of her friends inappropriately quizzed Lou about what is going on in her life. I can only assume this stupid chick thought she was doing everyone a favour, but it left Lou very upset and she needed to know her grandmother had no part in it.

So I emailed her for the first time in almost six months to find out if she knew anything about what her friend had done.

In the course of the interesting fucked up discussion that followed  she says this -

I believe neither you nor her father made adult decisions about joint care of your daughter and putting your personal feelings for each other aside in her best interests.  Also neither of you made any provision for her to have contact with her other parent when you were living in different states.

I’m now wondering where she’s been living for the past 15 years because it  definitely isn’t in any reality I know!

The freak and I separated when Lou was six months old after a beating and booting that left me with bruises covering the length of my spine and the size of footballs on my legs where he had thrown me against a wall and kicked me repeatedly while wearing his Doc Martins. The violence started 6 months after we met. We’d been together for 3 1/2 years at this point.

He told me if I ever stopped him from seeing his daughter that he would kill me and I believed him.

I never stopped him from being able to see her. Never. Not because of his threat, but because he is her father and as long as she is safe she has a right to know him.

He tried to bully me into taking a house on the edge of town with no access to public transport, no easy access to my family and no close neighbours. I managed to get a house two blocks from my parents much to his chagrin but he still used to show up at my house uninvited and unannounced and let himself in. I had to put extra locks on the doors and windows to lock us up in the house so that I wouldn’t keep having moments where I’d turn around and see him standing in the doorway watching me. I was a prisoner in my own home. This didn’t stop until a few months after I met and moved in with my husband and only after hubby threatened him in return.

Around this time I got legal advice to have access arrangements formalised and to stop him from coming to my house altogether because he still terrified me. There were more threats to kill me but in the end his lawyer told him to be grateful for anything he was given after what he’d been doing and we settled on him having Lou every Wednesday afternoon and every second weekend from Friday afternoon till Sunday afternoon. Picking her up from his house on Sunday afternoon was my responsibility, the rest was his. I had sole custody.

I also had built into the orders that he was not to approach my residence or harass me. There was no time frame on those orders affording me protection until Lou left home.

His parents weren’t particularly happy with what was going on. I tried to tell them how scared I was and how bad things had been but they didn’t understand, wouldn’t listen, told me that we were a bad match and I shouldn’t have pushed his buttons.

Things settled a bit despite her father becoming more reclusive and more paranoid. I was discovering that Lou had food intolerance’s and going through the process of eliminating things from her diet to help with that. Her father refused to comply with her diet. Didn’t want to know. He was the happy, fun parent who was all play, no boundaries and encouraged her to be naughty at home.

When she was nearly 2 1/2 we showed up to pick her up one afternoon and were met by a very hyped up ex excitedly telling us how he had saved our daughter from drowning that afternoon. As best as we could figure he had left her unsupervised on the side of a dam while he was looking for Jesus (literally) in a dead sheep carcass and she had fallen over into shallow water. Her cry snapped him out of it and he found her before she got into any trouble, but it could have been disastrous.

Three days later he was picked up walking naked along railway lines just out of town following Jesus in full blown psychosis. It was at this point that he was committed to a mental health facility and diagnosed with schizoprenia.

What followed next was a few years of him being in and out of mental health wards, in between periods of wellness, illness, court ordered medication, suicide attempts, more psychosis, alternating periods of reasonableness and rage, multiple 4 hour long phone calls from hospital while he rambled on at me about his mission from God as an archangel sent to unite the religions of the world.

And still I didn’t stop him from having access to his daughter. I just made arrangments from him to have her under his parent’s supervision so that there was always someone else around. They had a small unit underneath their main home and he often had her there affording him some privacy and me peace of mind.

It wasn’t an easy time for Lou. It was confusing to her that her dad was ok some days and not others and that he was not a consistent presence in her life. Sometimes he’d go months with very little contact. During the times he was hospitalized I’d let his parents take Lou over to visit him, but still, his contact was sporadic depending on his mental state.

The psychiatrist told me that his cycles of rage against me during our relationship fitted the pattern for his psychosis and that he believed I had seen the early stages of his illness. I really wanted to believe this. That it wasn’t really him who beat the crap out of me every 3 months, but his illness. Stupid I know but we shared a child and I wanted things to be ok for her sake.

While all this was happening I had another baby, seperated from my hubby for a couple of months, had counselling, got back togther with my hubby, got married and was battling to deal with the effects of periphial neuropathy in my feet which was causing me considerable pain and depression.

During this time we (me and hubby) realised that something was a little different about Lou and had her assessed by Westmead’s Child Development Unit. I didn’t agree with their initial assessment of an overall intellectual disability, but it was useful to further our access to much needed services.  Her local therapists and I did everything we could to counter the learning problems we could identify even though we couldn’t seem to tie them together in an overall picture.

She had speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, early intervention, speech therapy group, home programmes and socialisation help from a psychologist. We had family support workers and social workers involved helping us to cope with everything.

Her father refused to acknowledge that there was anything different about his child. He did not want information on her therapy, wouldn’t do any of the exercises for at home with her and still would not comply with her diet.

His parents weren’t too interested either. They sort of knew what we were up to but in a polite ‘we dont really buy this but we’ll play along’ way.  They were still regularly involved in not only Lou’s life and had also invited our other children to call them grandma and grandpa and had regular contact with them also, bought presents for everyone in our family for birthdays and Christmas for us all. They even gave us a case of champagne for our wedding along with a gift. They were a constant source of support and advice when needed, occasionally mediators and I really appreciated that.

Around the time Lou started school (with a teacher’s aide because the school took her problems seriously) her father decided that he had to get away. He couldn’t handle being in town where everyone knew that he’d been sick and tried to hang himself off the bridge in the middle of town (the rope broke and he landed on the river bank unhurt).

He wanted to go back to QLD where we had lived for a couple of years until a few months prior to our separation.  At this stage he was having longer periods of stability, seemed to be complying with his health carers and desperate to feel ‘normal’. I could understand that.

He told me that he would be coming to to visit Lou a couple of times a year until she was old enough to fly up to him as an unaccompanied minor. He promised me that as he was moving so far from her that he would pay all travel costs for her to see him.

He did come and visit her a few times, rang her semi regularly. She might hear from him every week for 3 weeks then nothing for 2 months.  He had one or two more psychosis before stabilising, but by the time she was 7 his parents had been up to see how he was going and he was okay, had a good support network and his doctors were saying he was stable so I let her travel up there for a visit. He also bought her a computer for Christmas at this time so he could ‘keep in touch’ by email and chat with her online, something that didn’t really happen because neither of them are great at that kind of thing.

He’d still verbally abuse and threaten me occasionally, but more often than not was reasonable and I really, REALLY, DESPERATELY wanted to believe that he would be ok. That all the bad stuff was his illness talking because then there was some hope that Lou would have the father she deserved. But he still scared the crap out of me at times.

So we did what we could to encourage Lou to email or ring her father which she didn’t like doing so wouldn’t very often, made sure she remembered his birthday and had Christmas presents (which her grandparents also did), we drove the 5 hour round trip  to Canberra for her to catch planes to visit him and drove back down to pick her up (unless her grandparents were going through and had offered to take her).

All through this we continued to do what we had always done in promoting her relationship with her father’s family by being really flexible in allowing them to have her whenever they liked for visits or weekends away or family gatherings and they were still very involved with our other kids.

Lou was visiting her dad once or twice a year for a few weeks at a time and he’d been stable for quite some time when we discovered that he wasn’t paying for her travel expenses at all. He was making his parents do it, he even stopped making the arrangements himself leaving that to them too. We were appalled but not really in a position to do much about it. If we put our foot down she didn’t get to go because we couldn’t afford airfares and we didn’t want to be responsible for cutting off her visits as he never came to see her after she got old enough to travel to see him.

He met someone, got married, started having more children, was involved with a church, seemed happy, stable and normal. He was clean. His parents decided it was the drugs that were at fault for everything.

All through this he found ways to get out of paying maintenance. He’d plead hardship even when he was working. After the child support system changed and he couldn’t get away with paying nothing he’d still get the amount reduced to bare minimum and make a point of saving it up for one lump payment as if he was doing me a huge favour handing over the measley $260 a year.

He always discussed with me (and frequently argued with me) the possibility of Lou living with him one day. He told me he had a vision that his daughter would be returned to his household by the age of 10. Then he started threatening me with that vision.

It seemed like he thought it was some kind of competition for ultimate ownership or something. It concerned me that he always spoke more like she was a possession than anything else. I didn’t understand it, but I put it down to his illness changing how he functions a little and let it go.

But then that vision became reality with a delightful (not) little piece of nastiness that had me throw my hands up in the air in despair and hand her over before my family was completely ripped apart.  I was still praying that it was me or his illness or the drugs that made him violent and hoped that she would be ok.

I didn’t expect him to go into full power-play mode once he got his hands on her. He would record my phone calls, listen in on them to make sure Lou didn’t say anything she shouldn’t, intercept all my emails, delete the ones he didn’t like/think she shouldn’t get and take me to task on anything he took exception to. He didn’t encourage her to remember his siblings or my birthdays and would take the phone off the hook on days I was likely to ring (like her birthday or Christmas) so I couldn’t contact her. She was cut off from my family almost completely.

His parents became my only lifeline for real contact with her. He decided he was happy for her to visit as long as she stayed with his parents and they appeared happy to facilitate this. I gratefully accepted what was on offer rather than try battle through the courts for something different. We’d been through enough defending ourselves from child protective services and the false allegations that had been made. We didn’t need to rehash that again.

Meantime he would ring me complaining that she wasn’t doing her chores, was miserable all the time, how he didn’t understand her and how he didn’t like what she spent the money I was sending her on. She never had any monitoring or help with her learning delays, very little socialisation to help her skills along, no counselling, no safe food diet, nothing.

After a couple of years of feeling like my heart had been ripped from my chest, and not knowing what was happening in my daughter’s life I contacted her school desperate for information, a report card, an indication of how she was coping with school, with everything.

Now you need to understand that all through everything the original custody papers were still valid. Even after he got her he never had them changed and there were never any orders made by the court when we were hauled over the coals to change them either so at this point I was still her custodial parent. This gave him a bit of a kick up the bum and he decided that if I really wanted to see her then I could, so we started negotiating for me to have her for at least half of EVERY school holidays, for my family to be central to the arrangements instead of his and for restrictions to be taken off my phone and internet access to her. We came to an arrangement on what we both wanted and I signed custody over. It wasn’t ideal but it was workable for me until she was old enough to make her own decisions.

I was actually expecting her to return home once she turned 16 after her father had started explaining to me his plans to ‘liberate’ her from anyone else’s control. He was planning on kicking her out as soon as he could do so without giving her back to me.

Then he had an argument with his lawyer over the bill and mistakes they made so they wouldn’t hand over the papers for him to file with the court but he agreed to let honour the new arrangement anyhow.

Lucky for us.

It was only after this and after Lou gained access to a mobile phone that reasonable contact was gained and her living conditions came to light – the neglect, the physical and verbal abuse she was both witness and subjected to.

It wasn’t me. It wasn’t his mental illness. It is just him. He’s a bully and a thug and a coward.

Her grandparents offered to pay for boarding school and her aunt offered a weekend home, both of which I gratefully accepted because Lou needed to be moved and he would let her go with them as long as he thought he wasn’t giving her back to me.

Had I tried to keep her and make my own arrangements he would have paid that lawyer’s bill, filed those papers and taken action to have her returned to him. The consequences for Lou would have been really, really bad. It wasn’t worth the risk.

It became apparent after around 6 months that the arrangement with her aunt and boarding school wasn’t working and I took steps to bring her home to me and my family. I told his family what I was doing and why. I kept them informed of my investigations and steps as I was doing them. They made a great song and dance about how I was the parent and in control and they would just help however they could.  A fact they seem to have now conveniently forgotten.

Her father isn’t happy, and still doesn’t want me to have her (or ‘win’ in his mind) but there is little he can do at this point and he knows it. He’s even less happy that his only available means of contacting me is through my lawyer who threatened him with actioning my restraining order if he bullies me again but meh. You get that.

Now I’m getting this -

I believe neither you nor her father made adult decisions about joint care of your daughter and putting your personal feelings for each other aside in her best interests.  Also neither of you made any provision for her to have contact with her other parent when you were living in different states.

and all I can think is ‘WHAT THE FUCK”

I could have taken their grandchild and run away and changed my name and hidden from him. I could have cut them out of her life. I could have refused to let her fly to QLD to visit him. I could have done to him what he did to me in restricting access.  I could have taken advantage of Lou’s trust fund and tried to leech them dry for every cent I could get and never paid for anything of hers myself just like her father did. Then they’d really have something to complain about.

I could have had him arrested for assaulting me numerous times or for stalking me. I could have dobbed him in for drugs too.  And with his record he’d have gone to jail and had his first psychotic break there. That could have been interesting.

I don’t pretend to have no made mistakes. There are definitely things I would have handled differently had I known then what I know now but I tried. God knows I tried. Unfortunately it doesn’t matter how hard one person tries if the other person is a loon.

Her grandfather apologised to me last year for not believing me about the abuse, but only because his son was talking to him and in a fit of remorse confessed to some of what he’d done. But they still don’t get it. I haven’t even  told them about the backhanders across the face, suspected fractures including my jaw from being punched or the concussions and four day headaches from being thrown into walls or onto the floor. There’s no point.  Her grandmother is now referring to Lou’s time with her father as being ’so unhappy” instead of being neglected and abused and thinks she should be all better now…………….

I’d really like to know how anyone puts emotion aside when they are dealing with someone who has no concept of boundaries? Who is reasonable one minute and screaming obscenities down the phone at you the next, who has everyone (his parents included) walking on eggshells ALL. THE. TIME. lest they attract his wrath with an ill placed word picked at random by his whim or current obsession.

How am I meant to turn off that ‘flight, fight or fright’ reaction that was my survival mechanism while living with him when I was still subjected to his rages on a regular basis when I needed to put our child first instead of letting him manipulate me into going along with his latest harebrained scheme?

Because every time he rages at me I am taken straight back in time to being curled up against the wall trying to protect my head while listening to my infant daughter scream and scream and scream because he was yelling and I was screaming in pain as he kicked me over and over and over until I couldn’t move or scream anymmore and the whole time I’m wondering if he’ll be able to stop himself soon and if I’m going to end up in hospital this time or if he was going to kill me.

And now despite my best efforts and vain hopes my daughter has those images in her head that she flashes back to whenever anyone raises a voice or a door bangs too loud and I didn’t think my heart could break anymore.

I’m being criticised for not putting emotion aside? For not having her best interests at heart?

Fuck.

Denial must be a wonderful place to live.

Where’s my ticket?