Child is the real victim of divorce
/The Boston Herald
Beverly Beckham
Sometimes you don't want to hear it. You want to drive past the house, away from problems that shouldn't exist at all.
He said this. She said that. He has a lawyer. She has a lawyer. Two adults who vowed to love each other now spend their time tearing each other apart. And in the middle there is always a child, a bewildered child, who loves them both.
This time the child is not even 3 when Mommy leaves.
A moving van arrives as the child is playing and she watches as men pack all of Mommy's things and take all the furniture away - everything except what's in the child's room.
The men leave and the van disappears and the house is empty. Mommy gets her keys then and takes the child to the baby sitter's.
She never says she's not coming back. She never says, Mommy's not going to live with you anymore. Mommy's not going to see you for a while. But I still love you. I'll call. You can come visit.
She just doesn't bother to return to pick her up.
Daddy comes instead, hugs her and says, don't worry, everything's gonna be OK.
And Daddy tries to make everything OK. He borrows a table to put in the kitchen and takes a couch from the cellar to put in the living room. He makes her oatmeal and washes her clothes and drops her off at the baby sitter's or at her aunt's when he goes to work. And on weekends he takes her to visit her friends, her cousins, her aunts and her grandmothers.
She sleeps in her familiar bed and plays with her familiar toys and watches "Sesame Street" and "Bambi" and does all the things she's always done.
But Mommy isn't there anymore; for months she doesn't see Mommy and she misses her a lot. Three times she talks to her on the phone and that makes her happy. But when she hangs up she is sad again.
Then one day Daddy says: Pack your suitcase. You're going to visit Mommy! She spends three days with Mommy in her new apartment, which Mommy shares with a friend named Paul. Then she goes home to Daddy for four days. Back and forth she does this, week after week, all summer long.
Then one day, Mommy says she can't see Daddy anymore.
Now on she will live with Mommy and Paul.
At Mommy's she sleeps on the couch in the living room because she doesn't have her own room. During the day she goes to day care.
Does she miss her Daddy? Does she miss her room and her toys? Does she wake up in the middle of the night wondering what she could have done to make her Mommy leave first and then make her Daddy go away, too?
Soon Daddy comes to visit but they are never alone. Why can't I go to Daddy's? she asks. Why can't I stay there?
But nobody answers.
Just before Christmas, she gets a wonderful present. She gets to see her Daddy alone! She gets to spend days with him.
She spends more and more days with him and in June, a few weeks after her fourth birthday, she packs her suitcase and moves back home with him, back to her own room, back to her own bed, back to her familiar surroundings. Now it's Mommy she visits two times a week and every other weekend.
But now she also visits a psychologist.
And a speech therapist.
Her father has tried to protect her. He is still angry about the long-term psychological effects of her mother moving the furniture in front of her. "Why did she have to do this? Why?"
But it was his ex-wife's allegations of sexual abuse that upset him most. Children's Hospital found no evidence of abuse, but the state denied him his daughter anyway, treating accusation as fact.
For 15 months, this 4-year-old has been pushed one way, then another, in theory for her own good. A quarter of her life has been lived in turmoil. She is a baby, but look what she's been through. Look what she's still going through.
She is the real victim of divorce. She is the one who has been irreparably hurt.
