You might wonder why I’m putting this story here in the middle of a bunch of “Back to the Land” tales, but it provides some background for the post that will follow. I also ask that you accept that our actions were “noble” ones. The devil is in the details, and I hope you know me well enough by now that you can accept that there were reasons – too long and complicated to go into here – for believing that Daughter would be better off without close contact with her biological father. We also did everything humanly possible to make this transition a positive and happy one for her. Some affirmation of this came after the move: the "neutral" pediatrician involved in the court ruling sent us a personal letter containing her congratulations and best wishes for us in our new home.
A Child Lost, A New Life Begun
In the summer of 1974, after making the decision to leave the city, I put my condo apartment on the market. My wasband, exercising his rights of visitation, came to take our daughter one Saturday, and upon their return, spotted the “For Sale” sign.
Five days later, the man in the rumpled suit rang our doorbell, said my name with a question mark, I answered “Yes?” and was handed legal papers stating that I was an unfit mother, that my current husband was attempting to sabotage Wasband’s relationship with his daughter, and that the child’s father was a far more suitable custodian. After all, he had a larger income and a larger house near an elementary school. Somehow the petition omitted mention of his mental instability and drinking problem. In these papers he looked like the hero of “Father Knows Best.”
At that time I was a little more than three months pregnant. Maybe it was a bit of a rush on our part (or was it that we were just careless?), but already having a five-year-old, Husband and I were thrilled to be expecting a baby.
In divorces in those days, a biological father almost never was granted custody of a daughter of kindergarten age. It only seemed to happen in the rare case where the mother was so unfit as to be in jail or otherwise institutionalized or perhaps a known prostitute or sexual offender. The law was definitely biased toward the belief that the place for a little girl was with her mother. And yet this “rule” was not set in stone, a fact weighing on any mother facing a custody challenge. I came apart at the seams.
The custody petition was served on me on a Thursday. The next day I began to bleed, and despite bed rest and a great deal of love and reassurance from Husband, the bleeding became hemorrhagic, and our unborn child was lost. My body had traumatically aborted, unable to deal with its sudden awareness that a child loved can also be a child taken away.
We removed the “For Sale” sign and resigned ourselves to fighting the court battle ahead of us.
I’ll spare you the gory details. Six months later, on December 31, 1974, the judge – on his final day on the Family Court bench – ruled that Wasband was to pay unpaid Child Support, seek mental health counseling, and continue the responsibility of visiting the child one day of any weekend in the county of her residence wherever that might be. That last phrase was hand-written into the margin of the document on the morning the case went to court, and it was what we needed to be able to make our move to the country.
There was one problem: There is nothing to prevent a person from filing a lawsuit at any time. Had Wasband thought we were going to move, he could have filed his petition again, and we would have had to defend ourselves again. He could have stalled our plans and obtained an intolerable (to us) visitation agreement. The only way we could move without risking that was to do it under the cover of darkness. That meant keeping our plans a secret, even from Daughter.
On a Thursday less than a month later, the court denied a scheduled Saturday visit by Wasband because he had not yet complied with the order to seek mental health counseling, nor had he paid the owed child support. The next morning we explained to Daughter that we were going to move, rented a 20’ U-Haul and began loading everything we owned into it. Our friends joined in the frenzy of piling dishes, piano, toys, bedding, books, and even canned food into about 1200 cubic feet of truck. We worked well into the night, loading all of our worldly goods, leaving nothing behind, and if that truck’s storage area had been a cardboard carton, the whole thing could have been accurately labeled “MISCELLANEOUS STUFF”. The next morning we were driving east on the Thruway, on our way to a new life.
I have written about our first year in the North Country, searching for and finding land, and a couple of the trials and tribulations involved in beginning to settle on it. Most of this was a joyful time, a relief from the stress of on-going wasband battles, and it was the beginning of an adventure. There was, however, one unhappy fact. During that first year, I was having some medical problems, and in that summer of moving the trailer and putting up the pole, I was diagnosed sterile. Husband and I would have no children.
Next: Water, water everywhere...
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