Love That Lasts Forever

by Pat Barrow

  Dad had taken Jonty and me to Alton Towers for our birthday treats and we’d been allowed to take our best friends too. Of course, I took Suzie and Jonty took his friend Bertie. I knew that Bertie’s mum and dad didn’t live together and that more recently, Jonty had talked to Bertie about how it was for him. I was pleased, I’d always worried he hadn’t got anyone to talk to and that had encouraged him to hide the reality of our lives from his friends. We’d had a fantastic time, of course we had, who doesn’t love Alton Towers? We’d gone on all the rides and felt sick and dared each other to go on the more scary ones, well Suzie and I did, but Jonty and Bertie were envious because they weren’t quite tall enough. We’d all gone on the log flume together and even Dad had enjoyed it, as we all screamed and whooped as water sprayed over us. Just a little bit of me wished that Mum had been there too.

  We did have a sort of birthday celebration with her too a few days later. We went for a picnic in the grounds of Powis Castle and she’d been pleased we wanted to take our friends with us but somehow it wasn’t quite the same, it wasn’t as exciting as usual celebrations because there was this black cloud hanging over us that soon Mum would be gone and we’d never have another chance to enjoy ourselves like this again. We wouldn’t even see her on our next birthdays, she’d be up in Whitley Bay and we’d be stuck down in Welshpool waiting to see her during the next holiday; that’s if the court let us and if Dad ever took us.

  In my darkest moments, and yes, I had lots of them, I just knew he’d wreck it, he didn’t want me to see Mum, not ever, not really. He hated her and all the Carols in the world couldn’t change that. I tried to reason myself out of those feelings of self-doubt and to get rid of the nagging voice in my head insisting ‘Dad might win, Dad might win, you might hardly ever see your mum again. He only wants you to go in the summer and maybe at Christmas and then the weather would be too bad and you probably wouldn’t be able to go anyhow. There’d always be some reason why he couldn’t take you’. Those black thoughts descended on me and spoiled any time we did have with Mum. I desperately wanted things to be different. She kept asking me why I was so miserable and I just didn’t have the words to explain. Sometimes I just snapped at her. “Well, you’re leaving us, dumping us. What do you expect?” It sounded so cruel, I couldn’t believe I could be so nasty to Mum, but I couldn’t help it – the words just poured out. I reckoned if I wasn’t miserable, I’d just howl and howl and howl and never stop. The tears would pour down until they drowned me, that’s what it felt like, I felt oh so wretched and I don’t think Mum and Dad had any idea. Just like Carol said, sadly parents don’t realise how difficult it is for their children.

  Chapter 27

  Carol 1

  To be honest, I wasn’t surprised to hear that Hetty and Jonty’s parents were back in court. It had been one of those cases where I had experienced nagging doubts that the future would be plain sailing. Shared residence was certainly not something which Jeremy had wanted and he had only reluctantly agreed at the eleventh hour to avoid the expense of a final contested hearing. However, I had been surprised when not long afterwards, Hetty and Jonty’s solicitor had contacted me to say that Ceri had made an application for a change of arrangements because she would be moving away. She wasn’t applying to take the children with her but she wanted clear cut contact arrangements and a secure place in the children’s lives well established prior to her move. The court had reappointed me to meet with the family to gain Hetty and Jonty’s wishes and feelings and to prepare an addendum report.

  What a difference those few months had made. At the time of the previous court hearing, Jonty had shown some reluctance to spend much time with Ceri, refusing to go during the week and insisting he needed to stay with Jeremy. I’d spent several sessions with him encouraging him to chat about home life so I could understand what was triggering his change of heart. It had soon become clear that Jeremy’s negativity towards Ceri rather than their own experience of her was no doubt encouraging Jonty and Hetty’s anxiety. They had been equally relieved to express their concerns and hopes for the future and then for clear-cut arrangements defined in a court order, rather them having to carry the can and make endless painful choices themselves. Without doubt, that had been a huge relief. Jonty had expressed in no uncertain terms that he wanted to spend the majority of his time with Jeremy, however, he made it very clear that like Hetty, he wanted regular time with Ceri. Hetty, always the peacemaker, wanted it to be equally fair between her parents, but almost certainly didn’t want her mother to be the ‘loser’ as she put it. A 60/40 split of the children’s time seemed right and had been reluctantly, as I say, agreed to by both parents.

  Now within months, Jeremy had apparently eroded those arrangements with Jonty flatly refusing to spend time with Ceri during the week and then full of excuses and complaints at weekends. Once he was with her, he seemed okay as long as Jeremy wasn’t around. Talking to Ceri, she made it clear that her realisation that life would never be any different had reluctantly driven her to make the drastic decision of seeking a work transfer. She was planning to relocate to Whitley Bay, commuting into Newcastle where she had secured a new and better-paid job. She explained that she had spent much of her childhood in the north east when her parents had moved there from Ferndale in the Rhondda valley after the closure of the coal pits in the 1980s. I knew that her father had died of pneumoconiosis during Ceri’s teenage years and her mother of a stroke whilst she was at university. Her two sisters had immigrated to Canada but Ceri had no doubt felt a certain sense of kinship with the area of her childhood.

  Yes, it was a good promotion with more pay and it would give Ceri a better chance of starting again but at what personal cost? She had sensibly ruled out the possibility of weekend contact with the children, and to be honest, it would have burdened them with the impossible strain of long tedious journeys and I guess Ceri just wouldn’t have the means to meet the financial costs she would incur – either funding the children’s travel or her own. Instead, she was proposing the children spent 50% of all holidays with each of them and for them to continue to share the residence of Hetty and Jonty. Had she really weighed up how difficult such a change would be for Hetty and Jonty and that their interpretation of her move was highly likely to be that she had abandoned them – almost certainly that would be the explanation Jeremy would gleefully promote. Ceri insisted she wanted to get it right for the children and for them to understand that her only wish was to make life easier for them; she considered it imperative that Hetty and Jonty each had a chance to talk to me and hopefully to feel able to tell me how they really felt about what she saw as Jeremy breathing down their necks and controlling everything they did. I wondered – was that an accurate depiction of life with Jeremy? I realised that much as I may surmise that this was the case, that unless the children opened up to me it remained pure conjecture which would be hotly denied by Jeremy and any court. I wondered – did Ceri really appreciate that her proposal was likely to create as many new obstacles to the children’s relationships with her as it solved?

  My discussion with Jeremy left me in no doubt that if Ceri relocated, a continuation of shared residence was going to be a major sticking point. Jeremy considered that the children’s sole residence with him was perfectly justified. Ceri was moving away, it was her choice, she could have contact, but no he certainly wasn’t going to agree to sharing residence and as to a 50/50 arrangement in each holiday, that just wasn’t feasible – Ceri didn’t have sufficient annual leave and he wasn’t going to agree to anything which meant that the children were inadequately cared for or farmed out with child minders. “Over my dead body and a waste of time going back to court – there’s no argument, she just needs to get real and appreciate how accommodating I am,” were his final words on the subject. There was no suggestion of what the children’s views might be. From past discussions with him, I knew that in Jeremy’s eyes, the children would ‘of course’ mirror his views exactly.

  All case
s are unique and present different challenges but somehow this family were particularly tricky. Jeremy certainly held the trump card, Ceri without doubt underestimated that she was facing an uphill struggle. I mulled over the facts. Ceri must have hit rock bottom and felt really desperate to have decided on such a drastic move. I guess she’d reached the end of her tether and it was all too painful to carry on battling for Hetty and Jonty to spend quality time with her. To give her her due, she knew that the pain she was suffering was mirrored by the children. She had reluctantly accepted that it wasn’t going to get any easier for Jonty or for Hetty realising from her own bitter experience Jeremy was never going to change and never going to give in.

  I had spent considerable time with both parents encouraging them to appreciate Hetty and Jonty’s need and permission to love them both. I had read their statements and considered their proposals and now I needed to arrange to see Hetty and Jonty together and then separately. I needed to carefully consider all the possibilities. How was I going to go about eliciting the information and detail I needed from two children who had learned to be guarded and cautious when discussing their parents? Without doubt, Jeremy will have painted me as someone the children should be wary of and I was well aware that his amicable jolly demeanour thinly disguised his belief that I was the fly in the ointment, someone to guard the children from.

  Chapter 28

  Carol 2

  My task is invariably to figure out how best to engage with a particular family. I need to consider what encourages particular parental behaviour and thought patterns and to avoid falling in to the trap of labelling individuals. Experience has convinced me that to do so fails to illuminate the nuances and complex dynamics of each family. What seems to be happening with the Taylors is a gradual, subtle but very definite erosion of the children’s relationship with Ceri, and seemingly for no apparent good reason. So where does the blame lie? Is it with Jeremy or is there some hidden deep-seated problem with Ceri just as Jeremy so readily insists?

  In my experience, there can be a whole raft of reasons why children become estranged from one parent or the other. Almost always the rejected parent is the one who is non-resident, that is, in the child’s mind the one who ‘left them’, ‘deserted them’ and of course the one who ceases to be the main influence in that child’s life.

  On occasions, there is justifiably good reasons for a parent to be rejected. The parent who has been abusive towards a child during the family relationship is quite rightly rejected by that child when the separation occurs. They usually need little encouragement from the resident parent although the ex will inevitably be blamed by the absent parent. In my experience, parents are notoriously bad at accepting responsibility themselves where relationships with their children are at stake. Sadly, in some families, the relationship between the child and the non-resident parent was so tenuous before separation that rebuilding a new and strong relationship in the absence of a firm foundation is almost impossible however much support the resident parent gives. Once again, it is likely that the resident parent will be blamed for turning the child against their absent mother or father.

  Invariably, whatever the cause, the child’s reluctance to engage is usually loud and clear to the resident parent. Of course, that parent will listen and take notice when their child becomes angry and critical of the absent parent. Some of the child’s heightened emotions may be coping strategies as they struggle with the massive upheaval of the breakup of their family impacts upon them. The child of a broken family has to manage a whole raft of emotions; they hurt and are often bewildered and scared. However, with the right level of reassurance and encouragement, usually those negative feelings gradually dissipate and the certainty of a continuing good relationship with both parents helps enormously. However, in the absence of genuine support from the resident parent, loving both parents becomes increasingly challenging even for the most resilient child. Screaming that you hate the absent parent may at least make the parent you live with happy but at what personal cost?

  Children who have rejected a parent in the absence of abuse or any other legitimate reason may well harbour a secret wish for someone to call their bluff, compelling them to reconnect with the parent that they claim to hate. At least then, they don’t have to choose one or the other. This means that it is imperative that whilst the children’s stated wishes regarding parental contact have to be listened to and considered, they can never be determinative in contact arrangements. To do so may mean that the confused, frightened child ends up with the absent parent missing from their lives. What if the child insists that they hate one parent? Hatred is not an emotion which comes naturally to any child. On occasions, it is a parent’s own hatred of their ex that can intentionally or subconsciously encourage a child to hate or fear the other parent for no justifiable reason. On those occasions, the mental and emotional health of that child is endangered, not just in the present but ongoing often extending into adolescence and adulthood and affecting every aspect of their lives.

  I know full well that so often children will identify with the resident parent in order to maintain their relationship with them even if that means stating their dislike of the other parent. They simply cannot risk stepping away from the party line because that would risk rejection from the person that they depend upon. Identifying with the resident parent avoids more pain and so becomes a necessary survival strategy.

  Many may argue that a child who rejects a parent must have a valid reason that somehow the hated parent must be responsible for the child’s dislike of them. Yes, in some cases, I am sure that is the case, but somehow in this family, I can’t find anything amiss in Ceri’s relationship with either child. There just don’t seem to be any legitimate reasons for the children seemingly to push her away. Both Hetty and Jonty describe a close and loving relationship with Ceri; which I observed very quickly got back on track after the pain and upset of their parents’ unplanned separation, in spite of there being quite a long gap with no contact at all and seemingly no active encouragement from Jeremy.

  It is easy to misinterpret the family dynamics in families such as this. How simple it would be to blame the targeted parent, Ceri, for contributing to the children’s rejection of her. ‘Poor Ceri couldn’t cope with the children’s love for Jeremy and so began to find fault with them and when they objected her behaviour became more extreme and more negative’. How easy it would be to absolve Jeremy, to give him the benefit of the doubt. Life with Ceri must have become unbearable for him and the children, why else would he leave the luxury and comfort of the family home? On the surface, he seems to have a very healthy, loving and normal relationship with both children but I know from experience that if I dig down a bit more under the surface, there is likely to be a clinging enmeshed parent-child relationship, one which may well suppress the children’s natural feelings of their need and love from Ceri. They will be unable to resist his manipulative behaviour designed to maintain their solidarity with him. They will be in no doubt of the risk of rejection by him; it is something they will fear if their loyalty to him is misplaced. Without doubt, this will quell any resistance or objection on their part and encourage their apparent negativity towards Ceri, at least when Jeremy is around.

  Of course, it is highly likely that as the children became more distant, more detached that Ceri will have begun to exhibit symptoms of anxiety, depression and fear, symptoms which so easily generate a tendency to irrational behaviour and angry outbursts; not major character flaws but signs of frustration, powerlessness and extreme sadness. How easy it is, especially in the heated atmosphere of a courtroom then to label Ceri as being the ‘guilty party’. True those flaws which she displays may well on occasion contribute to the children feeling somewhat unsure and so expressing that as their dislike of her. However, the reality would be that on occasions, she seems different to the calm and stable Ceri they know and have experienced throughout their lives and it doesn’t make sense to them if suddenly her behaviour becomes
unpredictable. Jeremy is unlikely to attempt to reassure them but instead he will seize the opportunity to fuel their fears and suddenly they are thrown into confusion and turmoil and so they back away even more. As a result, poor Ceri is driven to utter despair by Jeremy’s demeaning and controlling behaviour. She watches powerlessly as her relationship, the close and loving relationship that she had with both her children, is eroded, perpetuating the cycle of instability, her anxiety and anger and unpredictable behaviour in turn reinforces Jeremy’s power over the children.

  So what can I do to a) make sense of what is going on in this family and b) attempt to encourage a resolution which is best for both children? To start with, it is critical to consider the family history. What was the parents’ relationship really like in the past? Were there hidden difficulties? Was it as Ceri says that once she no longer worshipped Jeremy he engineered change, gradually chipping away her self-confidence and manipulating arguments so that she always carried the blame and gradually lost the children’s respect?

  As always, my aim is to establish a shared parenting arrangement. 50/50 is invariably impractical in most families – work commitments, parenting skills and preferences need to be taken into account but when there is an agreement in which both parents accept that they are equally responsible for their children, the risk of them encouraging the children to turn against one or the other of them reduces considerably. They can see that it actually becomes much easier for the children to maintain a normal relationship with them both and of course, children are less susceptible to the toxic influence of alienation. Neither parent fears that they will lose their children completely. In many cases, I have dealt with in the past parental conflict reduces and a level of co-operation is established albeit pretty shaky at the beginning.