Come Back With a Bonus Excerpt: A Mother and Daughter's Journey Through Hell and Back

by Claire Fontaine

  THE AUTHORITIES STEP SIX:

  THE CHILD PROTECTION TEAM REPORT

  Recommendation: Protection of Child from Father until he is under treatment, further evaluation of the Child, mothers-of-abused-children therapy for Mother.

  Treatment? For what, a sexual preference? As far as I was concerned, the only treatment that would work was measured in miles.

  I applied to a college in another state. We would get counseling there. Not so fast, said the authorities, your divorce is now a matter before the court. You’re not going anywhere. I had to start the application process all over again, to a local university.

  For the next two years, our fate lay in the hands of the Honorable Judge Percy Moran. He was handsome, curt, easily angered. I was alternately afraid of him and furious at him. For two years, the judge ignored what I said about Nick’s violence, threats, or bizarre behavior.

  Nick denied touching Mia. The judge knew there was evidence to the contrary. The judge didn’t care. He wanted more proof, more reports.

  He initiated Round Two of the system: The Experts. Court-appointed psychiatrists and psychologists, experts in sex abuse, psychological testing. We endured two years of smaller hoops with bigger fires, so the honorable judge could get at The Truth. Of course, all he needed to do was talk to Mia. She was the keeper of Nick’s secrets. But why listen to a small girl? Courts then didn’t listen to big girls, ask rape victims, ask black-eyed wives.

  Anything Mia or I said was invalid until one of the experts said it, too. And I never got over the fear of the consequences if they didn’t. It was ever present, my fear that he could hurt her again.

  I was reduced to two emotions, love and fear. I felt them so intensely, it must have altered my DNA. I’d mutated into a Mia-protecting machine. Equipped with heightened receptivity to every nuance of her behavior and mood. To the judge’s. To knowing when to least expect something. To everything, everywhere, every day. I lost the ability to think one thought at a time. No thought was unaccompanied by fear. Especially thoughts of Mia. My feelings for her became entangled with it.

  Having Mia had taught me that love is expansive, that its strength and magnificence come in unleashing it. Fear’s potency is nuclear, it comes in harnessing it, in compression, density. It generated the heavy fuel I needed then. Because vigilance is a hungry animal.

  There were two bright spots in the midst of this. I got accepted quickly into a local university and secured grants and scholarships to pay for it. And I found Elaine, a lawyer who was just the kind of woman Nick hated. And just the kind we needed—brilliant, principled, unyielding. Our very own gladiator.

  Nick needn’t have worried about the family name. Their reputation followed them thousands of miles away, right into the deposition of one of Nick’s doctors. I noticed that the legal stenographer there seemed uncomfortable. She followed me to my car when it was done, making sure no one saw her.

  “I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “This is the P. family from Philadelphia, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, how did you know?”

  “I was good friends with his sister in high school when I had a boyfriend my parents hated, who, by the way, his sister slept with behind my back. Her mother called me one day to tell me that since I couldn’t bring my boyfriend to my own house, he and I could go to their house and have sex anytime we wanted.”

  Something on my face made her pause, then say, “You did know the family was…you know,…kinda weird? You know, sexually?”

  The reports from Moran’s experts started rolling in. They’d spent months with Nick, with Mia, with me, and they all concluded to varying degrees that what Mia reported was true, and once she was sure Nick couldn’t hurt her again, she reported plenty.

  I found out what “plenty” was in a cold, dim court hallway. I opened the file Elaine had given me and read the things he’d done to hurt her, things I hadn’t known, things she “patected” me from.

  My heart twisted, my lungs felt as if they were being wrung. I sobbed going into Moran’s chambers for the hearing. Which greatly annoyed him. Until he read the report himself, snapping from page to page. The recommendations in the report were no less painful. They recommended treatment and immediate supervised visitation; after treatment, well, Mom and Dad should make some rules, say, like no nudity between father and daughter.

  “You mean he can still see Mia if he gets therapy? And you think this time around he’s going to follow rules?” I asked outraged.

  Dear naïve, stupid Claire. How unsophisticated. How primitive. Don’t you think the experts know what they’re talking about? Don’t you know that a hundred years of psychology has allowed us to evolve in our understanding of human behavior and the laws that govern it, made us wise in these matters?

  And our wisdom, our bottom line is this: we don’t think molesting a child is a choice—we don’t think he could help consciously calculating for months to hide what he was doing or stop himself from telling Mia not to tell on him. We think it is a disease.

  Of course you do. To a hammer, everything is a nail. If the almighty psychologist can change a gay person’s desires, as they thought they could then, why, of course they can make someone stop finding little kiddies irresistible, too.

  “You mean you really think you can cure this ‘disease’?”

  Well, okay, maybe not cure it, maybe just control it. Maybe. So, we’re also recommending therapy for your violated child so she can learn how to avoid future molestations. We recommend that she understand her “private zones” and what to do if she is touched inappropriately.

  We’ll give you the opportunity to do it again after treatment, Mr. P, but with a new vocabulary. After all, a man is entitled to his biological child, even one he betrayed and violated in the worst possible way.

  What about what Mia wants, you ask? Why, Claire, she’s hardly four years old, how can she possibly know what she wants? We’ll tell her what she wants.

  And as for Mom, well, she’d best learn to cooperate with you and to control her angry expressions.

  This was how they protected our children in family court. It made me sick to my stomach. Who it protected was themselves; it was men scratching each other’s backs. It still is. It’s not so hard to figure out. Men become politicians and judges: politicians and judges make laws.

  Elaine no doubt told me what I could expect, but it didn’t stick. Even though we were in family court and jail was never a possibility, I was sure that once the judge got at The Truth, Mia would be safe for good. What a fantasy. Perhaps what she needed protection from were my own delusions.

  The following week I ran into a very upset Carrie in the courthouse. She’d just learned that a respected judge was found fondling his granddaughter. She told me of another judge who watched a videotape of a visitation between a little girl and the father who molested her. When the father entered the room, the girl started screaming and tried to force herself under a low coffee table to hide. It was horrible to watch, she said.

  “What did the judge do?” I asked, afraid Mia might face the same fate.

  “He shook his head and said, ‘We just have to find a way to get those two back together as a family.’”

  To his great credit, Judge Moran did insist Nick complete a full course of MDSO therapy, as in Mentally Disordered Sex Offender, before any kind of contact with Mia, even supervised. Nick got the judge to change the wording to just Sex Offender therapy.

  Mia never saw Nick again. But not because of anything the system did. Because he decided not to go to the therapy as ordered.

  In between all the madness, Mia and I moved on campus and began what would be two of the happiest years of our lives. When I wasn’t battling my ex, I loved my life. Mia attended the campus nursery school; I majored in art history and film studies.

  A few months after starting school, Mia began to smile again. For a long time, she started every day by asking if she’d have to see “him” today. One day she was climbing a slide and
said, “Are you really really really sure I won’t have to see him today?” Really really really, little monkey. She reached the top of the slide, looked down, and smiled her gorgeous wide smile, and I thought my heart would burst.

  The university became Mia’s big playground. The generosity of everyone there was wonderful. Cafeteria workers fed Mia for free for two years, financial aid worked miracles. Mia made friends at school. She rode through our new world on the back of my bike in her shiny red helmet and decided her name was really Queenie Princess Arosia. For weeks, if I didn’t call her that, she didn’t answer.

  If one part of me was discovering what was rotten in the world, the mother part of me felt like it was always spring and each new day was green with laughter. I had the joy of looking up from writing a formal analysis of Gericault’s “Raft of the Medusa” to see Mia clonking about in my high heels and fur coat as she whispered to an imaginary person, “Does it get cold in your spaceship?” Here, she said kindly, taking off the fur, this should help, and my coat is off to Mars. I watched her from around a corner as she solemnly pledged allegiance to the refrigerator, with liberty and dust is for all.

  I looked for the flag at her nursery school and, sure enough, it was beside the refrigerator. How vast and inscrutable the world must seem to a child, even their small corner of it. They need for it all to work, so they simply remake it as they go, as it suits them. Why wouldn’t people pledge to honor the big white box where they keep the food?

  They remake themselves as well. I overheard her talking to her stuffed animals, “her children” as she called them—“Amember when the mean daddy cut up all the walls? And I patected mudder from all those fings he frew? Well, you don’t have to worry nooooo more, ’acause he can’t come see us!”

  I was astonished—where had she kept the memory of that night? I thought she’d forgotten it forever. She’d simply buried it twelve months deep. Until the moment she was able to recall a night of terror as a night of heroism. Till she could transform paralysis to courage. I felt as if I were witnessing the actual creation of a human trait—confidence. She was creating herself anew in a way that all the therapy in the world couldn’t.

  I didn’t share any of the dark clouds with Mia, the fear or sorrow. She never saw that face, the alert, frightened one with eyes in the back of her head. She saw the singing face.

  I had a clear and ringing voice and sang to her all day long. Singing expressed our joy in each other, it knitted up our frayed edges. At night, just the two of us in the dark, singing created sanctuary, my lullabies were as hymns. It was the closest I ever came to praying.

  She still had nightmares of Nick, still acted out what happened. She’d say she wants to kill her dad without even looking up from her fingerpaints. We were sitting in a theater watching a Maya Deren film when I noticed Mia on her back with her dress pulled up, her legs in the air, and no underwear on. I pulled her quickly onto my lap, glancing around the dark for her panties. They were on the floor by the door, where we’d stood waiting in line.

  She continued to see a wonderful psychologist named Ella, and her sexualized behavior faded slowly. She grew stronger and happier as I headed for graduation.

  I’d formed a friendship with a gentlemanly professor who became a kind of father figure, at a time when fathers weren’t high on my list. He was mortified that I had no intention of ever getting married again. But, Claire, he said, you can’t possibly want to live alone. My marriage has been the best part of my life for forty years. You just need time, he assured me.

  I met Paul at a downtown film gala. He was handsome, fair, and dark-haired, with huge dove-colored eyes that turned down at the corners. A talented designer without the artistic personality that usually goes with it, Paul was the kind of Southern gentleman that’s practically extinct. He stood when a woman entered a room and still called his parents ma’am and sir. We dated for six months, until I was certain it was a lasting relationship, before I introduced him to Mia.

  At their first meeting she was so possessive of me, she slid off my lap, whacked him in the face with a stuffed animal, and crawled back into my lap, scowling. Still, she agreed to let us take her to the zoo next time. She had a screaming tantrum the entire car ride there. Well, I thought, there goes Paul.

  After we parked, she got out, sniffled herself quiet and put her little hand up for me to take. Then she put the other one up for Paul to take and we never looked back.

  Paul’s appearance in our lives meant that she got doted on by two. She was the center of our lives and she loved it, loved that she had a kind man who would protect us both from what she now called her “old dad.” She had a new father. But she never called him Daddy, he would always be Paul or, after enough years passed, occasionally “Dad.”

  Sometimes it was his arms that held her and walked her back to sleep after nightmares of Nick pulling a long needle out of his jacket and sticking it into her while he laughed in his curly blond wig.

  Paul taught her to paint, to pitch like a boy, to skateboard. To fly. Literally. She was so fine-boned and light that he would throw her up in the air high above his head and catch her as she sailed down, squealing with delight.

  I took photos of Mia looking like she was falling from heaven. Photos of her making big muscles and ferocious faces, of her galloping, laughing, waving a sparkling magic wand. Of Mia the Powerful.

  Mia ruled.

  5.

  Paul, Mia, and I moved to Los Angeles when she was five so I could pursue a career as a screenwriter. I worked regularly, and in genres women rarely wrote in then—action and futuristic thrillers. But my primary ambition was to be a great mom. I knew these were magic years and reveled in them. So did Mia. She thought it was Herself that magically controlled the TV. She turned it on and off and changed the channels because she had The Power. Mia would swing her arms around, zap the TV with a “Poof!” and it obeyed.

  We thought she’d outgrow it, as children outgrow the tooth fairy. She didn’t, and by age six, we were afraid she’d be humiliated at some friend’s house. So the TV began to disobey her little by little. It was both heartbreaking and comical to see her keep swinging and poofing to no avail. I told her the TV grew up and had its own power now.

  “Oh, no, it didn’t, Mother, TVs don’t grow up!”

  There are so many ways we commit crimes against our children, even out of love. She didn’t want to grow up and leave her magic behind. I didn’t want her to, either.

  She eventually realized she didn’t have The Power, but she wasn’t ready to give up magic yet. So, God got the job. But how could we be sure He was qualified?

  I had no idea what to tell her. I’d never talked to her about God and she’d never seen me pray. I’d never seen me pray. My experience of the divine was entirely culinary. Potato pancakes at Hannukah, matzoh at Passover, starvation at Yom Kippur.

  Absent any help from me, Mia decided to prove not just God’s existence, but his usefulness. “If there is a God, why doesn’t he do something already? I mean like now, not fifty years ago when he parted the Red Sea.” She came up with a True Test, one that would vastly improve her life.

  She had a terrible fear of toilets “overflooding and drownding” her. We always had to flush it after she was a safe distance from the bathroom.

  “Mother, Paul,” she announced grandly, “I’m going to the bathroom and I’m going to ask God not to overflood it and drownd me when I flush. Weeee’ll see if there’s really a God.”

  We waited in the hall while the exam was administered. She went. She flushed. We could just picture her waiting for the rising tide with her hands over her eyes. She finally emerged, beaming and proud.

  It’s not every child that’s able to prove that there’s a God. And she expected Him to be darned grateful she did.

  It was in her play that I saw remnants of the abuse in her emotional life. A recurring theme in Mia’s psyche was of evil lurking behind good. The clown of her nightmares always pulled off his blond wig
to become Nick. When she played with her horses, the kind, strong stallion would suddenly become evil and try to devour the younger horses. The mother horse was always shuttling her foals from one “secret cave” to another to protect them.

  I heard Mia muttering after midnight once and went in to find her combing her stuffed animals. An evil man made an oil slick on purpose, she whispered, and left them to die, so she was cleaning their fur to save them. Her horses and stuffies had as many calamities as they had tea parties.

  Her nightmares had stayed behind in Chicago, but her memories apparently hadn’t. Her second-grade teacher, Sara, a gentle, perceptive woman in her forties, called us in to show us Mia’s weekly journal.

  “Sometimes I feel bad when I think of certain events,” Mia wrote, “such as when my old dad did bad things to me. But all I have to do is not think about it and then I feel better.”

  She assured us she’d keep Mia’s journal confidential should she want to continue writing about “certain events.” Sara and Mia forged a deep bond that soon included Paul and I. She had a calm, spiritual presence that was often an anchor for our family.

  I asked Mia if she still remembered what Nick did to her. She looked at me as if I was daft.

  “Of course, I do, Mama,” she said. “I just don’t remember which birthday it happened on.” Then she wagged her finger at me and scolded, “You know, Mother, you shouldn’ta got married with that man.”

  How could I reply? Tell her that if I hadn’t, she wouldn’t be here? What a terrible truth for her to one day realize. The price she paid for her existence.

  “He did what?” said Judge Moran, outraged.

  I had flown back to Chicago to settle a child support dispute, and my lawyer told him that Nick had remarried and had more children. I had just found out myself and was half hoping the judge wouldn’t, because I knew he’d have Child Protection investigate him again. Then, Nick would blame me and would want revenge.