I hope they are eating KFC and watching K-Pop Demon Hunters and going into the bathroom to flush the toilet 10 times just for the hell of it. I hope they are having a three-hour bubble bath. I hope they never have to go camping ever again.’’
Custody disputes are dreadful times. The heightened emotions make people act crazy. When I left the father of my only child a few months after she was born, taking her with me, he started sleeping in his car outside my new flat and following me around Dunedin.
A new baby was the biggest responsibility of my 22 years, my only treasure, and only worry. She had been born premature, taken from me and placed in the Nicu ward. After the birth I went home, baby-less, and in the fog of things happening that I wasn’t in control off or fully there for, somehow got married as well.
When I left this hasty marriage of the young and clueless, motivated by his parents’ fear that I wouldn’t let them see her, the child’s father took me to court seeking full custody. The focus of my life narrowed to panicking at the latest summons in the letterbox, weeping through the court sessions, infuriating the judge: "If you don’t stop crying Miss Scott, I will have to ask you leave.’’
I was too young and too emotionally overwrought to realise that this drama would end, that my baby wouldn’t be taken away from me, that a path to co-parenting existed, if only we could step back from the escalating hatred and resentment, from all the hope turned into rage.
Finding myself in a system that was all hard sides and no empathy, and unable to face it, I ran away, babe in arms, to my aunt’s bach, Rotten Cottage, in Barrytown on the West Coast. I didn’t tell her father, I just left, boarding a train with wooden bench seats and rattling windows at the Dunedin Railway Station (you could do that back then).
As the only single mother in the history of our large West Coast family, I’m not sure how the situation was met - probably with confusion, I do think someone suggested I go back to my husband. I was too much of a sodden lump to pay attention. The non-stop crying (mine, not the baby’s, she was always a dream child), the limp days: I was probably just depressed, but I felt under siege.
It didn’t take long for the small Barrytown community to find out that a young woman with a baby was staying at one of the baches on her own. Baking appeared, invitations to the community hall for craft days and the local Plunket. Rides were offered so I could go into Greymouth to get groceries.
The wet bush muffled the world, the beach in front of the bach had no sand, just rolling wet rocks that cracked together in the foamy waves. The sea was unswimmable, vomiting up a dead seal with a shark bite on its side. The hungry tide bit into the coastline, chomping the land away. The bach would eventually fall into the sea, but back then it still clung to a slim raft of volcanic rock.
I can’t say it was an enjoyable time. It was a monumentally selfish act. I didn’t want her father in my life, had no use for him anymore, and I didn’t want to play fair either. The child was mine. I remember feeling outraged, cornered.
We stayed there just over a month. Her father was so upset he threatened to shoot my dad if he didn’t tell him where we were.
I came back, of course, and after a while things calmed down. He didn’t really want full custody, he wanted to be a musician. I wanted to go to university. We made it work so we could each have what we wanted, and both sets of grandparents got to enjoy the little sunbeam in their lives.
But I don’t think we ever got over what we’d put each other though, that long scream of hatred, the bitterness that followed.
We could have saved ourselves all of that.
