Mummy Where Are You? (Revised Edition, new) by Jeanne D'Olivier

even enjoy them. 
                  I stood freezing, clutching a coffee with the other parents on Saturdays on the Tag Rugby field.  I moaned at the time, as they did, but I would have given anything in that moment to be right back there with M safe with his friends – if only the abuse hadn’t happened.  
                  For my son had dared to tell me.  He had dared to ask Mummy to help him to escape from the hell he was experiencing every time he stayed with his father.  He had expected Mummy to save him, but right now we had just swapped one hell for another.  I will never forget that night and I don’t expect M will either.  I can only imagine the damage it has caused him.  For me, I will never be the same – the person I was is long gone – all that is left is a shell of unhappiness and grief and longing. I have faded into this black and white movie that refuses to end and plays continuously day and night through my mind.  Does it play through M’s?  I may never know.
                  My anger at Dad was almost as crippling as my anger at the system that had done this.  The far-reaching evil hands of Social Services – the cruel manipulations of a Court determined to punish us for daring to thwart their orders,  a Court that would hurt an innocent child to punish his mother and make her an example should others decide to take their lives into their own hands and seek freedom.  For we were not alone, there were others in the same situation – I did not know just how many then.
                  I was now caught in between my need for the comfort of having Dad with me, and my desire to never set eyes on him again.  But part of me wanted to understand what had made him give us up – what was it he was thinking as he signed over our lives to the cruel hands from which we had run – even after the night before he had gone to Court my son had begged him on Skype – “Please Grandad – be strong – I love you.  I know you can be strong.”  A little boy of seven with his life still to live – a life that had been damaged and full of fear so far – a little boy who was begging his Grandad to protect him from his abuser – to let him live free with the Mummy he loved.  The Grandad he looked up to and adored, had given him up in a moment – a moment of human weakness and fear.  It was one of my greatest challenges to overcome this but over time I did and over time I tried to understand - that journey may never end too.
                  I was to later learn that Dad had also not admitted his part in the abduction and that was another test on my love for him - but he had taken the advice of a lawyer that had a vested interest in helping to protect the system she herself benefitted from in every relationship break-up that walked through her door.  Sadly there are few lawyers out there who really do fight for their clients in the family court system.  It is a combination of two things, one that they need to keep in favour with the Court and the system if they are to maintain their livelihoods and secondly they are powerless against a juggernaut that has so much force it crushes everything in its wake.  So long as the Courts go on allowing hearsay evidence behind a wall of secrecy, injustice will be common in an environment that hides behind a mantra of "best interests of the child."  What that means in reality is the power of the system to act in its own best interest.
                  Despite everything Dad was still my father and I loved him and I have had to forgive his weakness as it was borne not out of a deliberate wish to harm us, but out a lack of understanding of how this would end - if it ever did.  At that time I firmly believe he thought that the truth would out and justice would be done.  He could not grasp just how corrupt the system was and what sinister groups may lie within it - paedophile rings - freemasonry -