we’re not all like Courtney Love…

By alice | October 31, 2005

Here’s a horror story to strike fear into the heart of any mother whose children’s father has a tendency to use deceit, manipulation, coercion and/or threats to get what he wants, rather than being capable of compromise and civilised negotiation. It’s not just drug-addled trailer-park mums who lose custody of their kids these days:

“What was my crime?” she asks. “I’m not a drug addict. I don’t drink. My GP says I am completely sane. But I couldn’t persuade my son to go on contact visits and so my children have been sent to live with their father.”

The couple split up when Iona was still a baby. It was an acrimonious parting and Angus told Naomi that he would one day “destroy her” and “get the children”. The boy heard his father abuse his mother – even saying he “wanted her dead”. He felt he was being used as a pawn and that his father was a bully, so he started resisting contact. Naomi tried her best to keep the relationship going.

“I would have liked nothing more than for them to see their father. Iona went to every contact without fail, but David didn’t want to go. On one occasion, he threatened to cut himself.”

It’s been inevitable since the perfectly reasonable campaign for divorced dads got underway that some courts would replace default maternal custody with a sort of best-parent competition, whereby any apprent breaking of the rules leads to total control being handed to the other parent. The trouble is, court systems are adversarial, which means people are always going to use the court to get what they want, by misrepresenting information on purpose, rather than simply honestly revealing information to help the court genuinely find the objective best solution for the children.

It is one person’s word against the other’s. How does the court know which one is telling the truth? It takes a risk, and often gets things wrong. One can easily present almost any behaviour of the other parent as bad if one really wants to. Courts cannot diagnose love, genuineness, generous motives as opposed to paranoid, egotistical and psychotic ones. Ordinary human beings are bad enough at that: for every warring divorced couple there are another ten unhappily married ones staying together for the sake of maintaining control over their children. People do not regard children as people in the same way as adults. Children are self-justifying projects. People want kids to make them feel good about themselves, provide them with social upward mobility, to have fun with because their lives as adults are empty, to get love from because there is no adult love in their lives. They want them for entertainment, to show off, and so they can feel like proper paid-up members of society. All these reasons are bad, and when a person’s life is totally defined by their children they will sink to any depth to maintain what is effectively nothing but a socially-legitimised unhealthy and addictive lifestyle.

Courts can get better, but they will never solve the problem. The problem is on the one hand that psychotic egotism is common and widespread, not limited to Freddie Kruger types who hang around street corners, and on the other hand that we are not aware of it, which makes us vulnerable. I would go so far as to argue that most families are probably psychotic. It just doesn’t show until someone changes things, or tries to break out and threatens their “supply”.

One serious concern is how to educate our young people- mostly women, but also men- to recognise and stay away from those dodgy people who, when crossed or upset, turn into stalkers, murderers and nutcase child-stealers. This won’t happen until they have enough confidence not to keep giving “the benefit of the doubt” to people who continually treat them with disdain, disrespect or just plain shoddiness. Manipulation and implicit threats are no way to solve problems, but very many adults regard them as perfectly “OK” under circumstances of uncomfortableness (eg, whenever they have a problem they would rather just ignore). The best way kids can learn what they need to know is to be brought up with parents who interact with other adults in confident, mature and civilised ways. And of course, it is better to have one parent who does this than two parents whose private life is characterised by a special kind of distance and disdain.

Nobody wants to think about this subject much. The old prejudices protect people from their fears. Judging others makes us feel superior, and if we want to believe that bad things can’t happen to us, then how much more do we want to believe that bad things can’t happen to our children? But if society blames victims, nothing can improve. We have at the very least a responsibility to remain open-minded and able to question and update our old assumptions, and more than that to evolve our civilisation and make it better, more humane and more just. Not everyone with lung cancer used to smoke cigarettes, as Cathy Seipp encourages us to get into our brains, and not every non-custodial mother is a junkie. And if those facts make people feel uncomfortable, then they should get over it and start doing something useful instead.

4 Comments »

4 Responses to “we’re not all like Courtney Love…”

gcotharn Says:
October 31st, 2005 at 7:14 pm

I’ve got this bizarre and hilarious(to me) mental image of your gravestone:

Your Name
Birth Date and Death Date
“Not every non-custodial mother is a junkie, damnit!”

:)

Tatyana Says:
November 3rd, 2005 at 11:06 am

“…unhappily married ones staying together for the sake of maintaining control over their children”.
-or for the sake of children living in remnants of normalcy? With traditional distribution of family roles intact, even if the actors of the show let it slip every once and a while. And when the pretence is no longer possible, simple action of separating becomes hell under current family court system.

I have a fresh and very painful (for the child, first, and his mother) case in mind, when I say this: it’s almost impossible for a woman “try to stay away” from the stalking control freak and protect her kid’s fragile personality, when the courts (and indeed, her own money-grabbing lawyer) do everything to hurt. Examples of their logic:
-sick 5 y.o. comes at night to his mother’s bed for comfort: she’s a potential child molester.
-she is the one working, her x-husband receives unemployment benefits: she’s ordered to pay all bills on the house and 2 cars, plus 2 lawyers’ expenses, and awarded no child support.
-she loses her job, her x-husband finds one: she’s told she has no material means to support the child and she should surrender custody to the father.

And so on, it still continues. 14 months and 25K in legal expenses, the case still unresolved.

alice Says:
November 3rd, 2005 at 1:24 pm

“…unhappily married ones staying together for the sake of maintaining control over their children”.
-or for the sake of children living in remnants of normalcy?

Absolutely. If one of the parents is a repressed psycho, which a lot of people are in relation to children, trying to leave can be vastly more dangerous than staying.

Does that mean the victim is morally reprehensible if they do leave? Of course not. Victim-blaming is moral inversion, ie, evil.

There are sadly a lot of unbelievably bad things going on in family courts; they are incredibly easy to manipulate. But nothing is going to improve until we stop blaming the victims and accept that a problem actually exists.

Mary Says:
January 24th, 2006 at 10:06 pm

Have you written a book on this subject, maybe you could, should, would?

Reading you and your readers makes me grateful my children’s father abandoned them instead of fighting me them, that would have been terrible, he would have had to pry them from my cold lifeless arms.

The father and I were raised in crazyland and compared to our parents, our own early adulthood craziness was multiplied exponentially. By an irresistible grace, I was the only one who went for help. A little voice told me, and I knew, I could not live with myself without breaking that ol’ generational curse.

The spell has lifted and the kids (28 and 20) are doing well, comparatively speaking. But the poor father, who never recognized his own psychosis, well, Lord have mercy.