I couldn’t have done that. Could I?
I was scared, because I knew it was a criminal act.
‘He’ll have to go to the police, won’t he?’ I asked in a timid, terrified voice. ‘He’ll probably enjoy that.’
‘I asked him about that,’ my friend told me. ‘And he said he won’t do it. Perhaps he feels deep down that he deserved it. If he reported what you had done, the whole sorry story would come out, and where would that leave him? No, he
won’t report it. He just said to tell you that he knows it was you.’
I was shocked to the core that I didn’t remember what I had done. How could someone do something so awful and not remember? What was happening to me? I had done that with my little girl watching and I had absolutely no recollection of it. What sort of state must I have been in?
That’s when I realised that I needed help to move on and change my life. The following day I went to see my doctor. I told him what I had done and that I had no memory of it. He said that possibly, because of the stress and trauma of losing my baby, I had ‘flipped’, as he put it, momentarily lost control. He changed my medication and said I would soon feel much better. He also offered to write to the local council to get me housed away from where all of this had happened.
The next day Edward and I decided to put the bungalow up for sale.
It was only then that I was able to write my letter for my son. It was a poem, three pages long. When the social worker came to collect it, I asked if the adoptive parents would keep his elephant toy and the clothes he’d been wearing on the day he left me and give them to him along with the poem when the time was right. She rang later and said they had agreed with my wishes. She also said that he was to keep the name Jack, the name I had given him. But that didn’t help, not one little bit.
Melissa and I moved into a council house. They allocated us a three-bed one for some reason and I couldn’t help thinking how neatly little Jack would have fitted in there with us. If I’d
had a three-bedroom house at the time would that have made any difference to the social worker’s attitude? Probably not.
It was hard, but gradually I began to meet people and make a social life for myself. A friend of my brother Tom’s moved in next door with his wife and two daughters. Then an old college pal tracked me down and invited me to a party she was having. A neighbour said she would look after Melissa for the night, so off I went. And there I met a man called Robert, a carpenter, who was strong, good-looking, funny and seemed kind. We started dating and within a few months I had moved in with him. He seemed to get on well with Melissa and told me he loved me—and I needed to be loved so very much at that time. I was still on very strong doses of medication that left me befuddled and numb, but I thought I was making a good decision.
The first indication that all was not as it seemed came after about a year when I broached the subject of fighting through the courts to overturn the adoption of my baby boy.
Robert was shocked. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said, sounding alarmed. ‘He’s not yours now. You can’t do that.’
‘But he
is
mine, he’s my son. Now we’re together, perhaps they would let me have him back?’ I was getting upset, the feelings of panic rising. ‘It won’t make a difference to us.’
‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ he shouted. ‘Of course it would. If you try and get him back, perhaps we should think about calling this off.’
I wanted to shout that it wasn’t fair. Couldn’t he see my grief, my pain? But I didn’t say anything. Perhaps he was right. I was being selfish. I think I knew, really, that the authorities
wouldn’t change their minds anyway. There was nothing I could do. So I did nothing.
Soon after this, I was sick one morning and realised that I was pregnant. Robert was over the moon about the news and we decided to get married. He also said he wanted to adopt Melissa so she would be just as much his child as the new baby, so we organised that. I registered with his doctor and it was agreed that I could stop taking my tablets because I was concerned about the effects on my unborn child.
The pregnancy was awful; I was suffering acute withdrawal from the drugs and became very depressed. Being pregnant brought back all the memories of my previous pregnancy and the awful things that happened after my son was born, and I struggled to cope.
When my baby daughter Lucy was born, she was immediately rushed away to an incubator because she was blue and they thought she might have a heart problem. The next day when she was finally brought in to me, I couldn’t stop crying. The midwife, who had read my notes, thought I was crying because the baby was a girl.
‘You were wanting a boy to make up for the previous one, weren’t you?’ she asked. ‘The one you lost.’
But I didn’t ‘lose’ him! What was she talking about? And how could anything make up for him? She couldn’t understand that my grief for my son and my joy for my daughter were all mixed up. I was happy and I was sad at the same time. Nothing would make up for my loss. Nothing. But no one would ever take my baby daughter Lucy away from me.
Robert had promised to love Melissa, to treat her the same as any other children we might have, but he didn’t. After Lucy was born I noticed a definite cooling in his attitude towards my elder daughter. Both he and his family began to treat her differently from Lucy and her cousins. I spoke to him about my concerns but he did nothing about it, and that hurt me. I wasn’t going to allow my little girl to feel different, the odd one out in the family, the one who didn’t belong, just as I had grown up feeling. The echoes were too familiar, too sad.
We began to argue. Our sex life wasn’t good because for some reason my childhood issues were coming to the front of my mind a great deal at this time and so I had difficulties making love, which Robert couldn’t understand because I never explained it to him. Much of my life was in a daze from the tranquillisers I was on. I looked after my children and my home, but it was a constant struggle.
Lucy, our baby, had a serious hip problem that was only discovered after numerous visits to a paediatrician. She screamed and cried all the time, she wouldn’t sleep and I knew she was in pain, so I kept going back to the doctors insisting they look into it, even though I sensed they thought I was neurotic. After an X-ray showed she had a condition called hip dysplasia, she had to wear a splint that kept her legs wide apart the whole time, making it very difficult to transport her around. What with the drugs, the endless visits to hospital and the rows about Melissa, life became fraught.
Robert also kept me short of money. I would have to sell things to buy clothes for the girls. We had a nice home that he
had bought for us, he had savings and investments, and to other people he was a generous man, but he was mean with housekeeping and I knew that if I refused to have sex, then I wouldn’t get the housekeeping at all. I felt trapped. Life was becoming intolerable. Then one night I must have missed taking the Pill and became pregnant again. This time I wasn’t full of joy. This time I was exhausted and worried that our marriage wouldn’t survive.
The doctor suggested I consider a termination because he said he was concerned for my health and thought that the hip problems Lucy had could be genetic. I needed proof of this. He arranged for us to see a genetics expert, who told us he could see no evidence that the unborn child should have any problems. So that was that. I was going to keep it and I began to get excited about the prospect of a new baby.
Then, when I was five and a half months pregnant, I felt unwell one morning and phoned my doctor, who said she would be round later. I knew something was wrong and asked my friend to have the children. I told Robert how scared I was and asked him to stay with me, but he went to work anyway. I phoned my doctor again and she said she would come out after surgery. The pain was intense. I struggled upstairs to the bathroom and there, on my own, I lost my baby. The child they wanted me to get rid of. The child I had grown to love. The child whose lifeless body was lying on the cold bathroom floor.
I didn’t look. I couldn’t look.
When the doctor came, she scooped up the little body and forced me to look at it.
‘It will help you to see this, Cassie. Just take a quick look.’
I didn’t want to, couldn’t face it, but when I did finally find the courage I could see that my baby had a huge head and what looked like a twisted spine. It was a little boy and he had spina bifida and hydrocephalus. It seems nature had taken control and let him go, rather than see him suffer. Yes, it did help, eventually. But on that day, the day I lost another son, it didn’t help at all.
For some strange reason, my parents came over that evening. My neighbour and friend, Christine, had phoned them. Mum had never visited my house before and she had shown no interest in my marriage or my baby girl. So why now? What did she want? What was she going to do?
Soon after she arrived, Mum started crying and Christine had to comfort her. She didn’t know about my mother. I hadn’t told her how unloved I had been as a child and about the cruelty of this woman. As Christine comforted her, I saw Mum glance in my direction. Not in concern, not in love. She was happy because she was the centre of the universe and all the care and concern were for her. Even at this awful time, she was play-acting. She had an audience in the midst of a drama. Suddenly my miscarriage was all about her.
Dad tried to show his love for me but I wasn’t sure I agreed with his sentiments. ‘It’s just a test,’ he whispered. ‘It’s God testing you.’
‘Why would God test me? Why did he let me become pregnant if he was going to take my baby away?’ I cried.
‘He knew how burdened you were and how hard life has been,’ he went on, ‘and he was testing to see if you would take the easy way out.’
‘What do you mean?’ I was getting upset and a little bit angry.
‘God was testing to see if you would have an abortion or not. That would have been the easy way out. And you didn’t,’ he replied.
‘So why did he let me lose the baby after I had refused the termination?’ I went on, confused.
‘Perhaps it was because you chose not to have the termination that God made the decision for you. He tested you, don’t you see?’ Dad clearly seemed to believe this.
I think he was trying to help me but it didn’t work. I left it there, still confused, still upset and still angry.
After this I became very depressed and was put back on medication again. I managed to look after my children, but the marriage was going from bad to worse so I devoted all my time to being a good, loving mum. However, at around the age of nine, Melissa’s behaviour changed and she started to become disruptive in school. I knew it was because she felt unwanted and unloved by Robert and his family, but I didn’t know what to do about it.
We attended family therapy and the psychiatrist straight away identified a problem between Robert and Melissa. We all went a few times, then Robert said he didn’t need to come with us any more. He said the unit doctor had told him that I was suffering from postnatal depression and grief from losing
my two sons. He had persuaded the staff that he was fine, and that I was the one with the problems. They obviously agreed with him and somehow the tension between him and Melissa had been forgotten. Perhaps they were right; perhaps I did need help. But we had come there as a family, to be treated in a family unit, and somehow, for reasons I couldn’t understand, I found I was being admitted to hospital as a voluntary inpatient.
It wasn’t so bad to begin with; in fact, it was good to have a rest. I had the children with me all day and got some muchneeded sleep at night. But then things changed. I was kept in bed in a room on my own and I only saw the girls for ten minutes each evening. I wasn’t allowed visitors or phone-calls, only letters. It was horrible. I didn’t understand why they were doing it. Why was I a prisoner?
In desperation, I told them that my mother had been poorly so they let me ring her. I told her what had happened and begged her to help me. I told her how scared I was and how I felt that my past had affected my judgement and that I desperately needed her help. How stupid was that? Why was I still hoping for help from her after all these years?
Her voice made it obvious that she was pleased to be able to refuse me her help yet again. ‘You’ve made your bed,’ she said. ‘Now lie in it.’ She really did hate me.
My medication had been increased and I was taking tablets to make me sleep, tablets to wake me up, tablets and tablets and tablets! Robert refused to help me get out because he said it was ‘for the best’.
I was at my wits’ end. All the staff saw was a terrified, anxious woman who wouldn’t go along with their orders willingly. I didn’t want to take the tablets. I didn’t want to stay in bed. I
wanted
to see my children for longer than ten minutes a day. I
wanted
to go home.
I was in this unit under these conditions for six awful months. Then during one of Robert’s visits he told me that he was going to apply for custody of the girls, sell our house and move away. He could do that because he had legally adopted Melissa.
‘It’s for the best,’ he said. ‘I’ve been looking at a school where your daughter can board, a convent school, not too far away, and then she’ll only be home in the holidays.’
That said it all.
My
daughter. I was shocked.
‘You can’t do that. I won’t let you.’ I tried to sound strong, but he seemed to take it for granted that he could get his own way. What could I do, shut away in there?
I wrote a letter to my solicitor. A nurse refused to post it for me so I had to get another patient to sneak it into town to a post box. He came to see me as soon as he could, and immediately raised an injunction against the sale of the house. He also took steps to make the girls wards of court as a temporary arrangement to prevent them from being taken away. I felt better about this. And he told me that, contrary to what I had been made to understand, the psychiatric unit could not keep me against my will. I could go home any time I wanted to.