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Continued from 360 Degrees: Who Says You Can't Go Home Again?

BD had accused me of anything he could think of in his certification to the court. We both had to write up letters summarizing our cases and his was complete fiction.

He was asking for sole custody of our son, saying that my parenting would be “detrimental” to our child. I was furious. It was a feeling I still wish I could have felt about a year and a half earlier.

I think back on some of those events and it all too surreal, like it was somebody else going through all that. I can’t even imagine it being me. How could it have been me? People who know me insist I wasn’t myself at the time.

“It was like you were somebody else,” a friend told me. That sentiment was echoed by others.

...Continued from Psyching Out the Psych

In the midst of waiting on our court date, agonizing over the psychologist's report, and still having to deal with BD's antics -- He'd began following me every week when we exchanged our baby at the train station, trailing me to my car or my train depending upon how I was traveling that day. It didn't stop until I involved a police officer and produced our court order. He threatened to haul him in for domestic violence. Yes, domestic violence as he was intimidating me and disobeying the court order by sticking around past our exchange. He said he wanted to make sure his son was "safe." He just wanted to see who I was riding with, if I was riding with anybody. -- It seems I'd come full circle.

Continued from Studying First Impressions, Analyzing Second Thoughts

My first visit with the psychologist was horrible.

Her office was fairly friendly and unintimidating. There was a bookshelf of toys and puzzles for children right next to the large, comfortable sofa I sat on. She was seated across from me in a recliner, shoes off, feet up and note pad in hand, with reading glasses on her nose. I relaxed a bit. Her Birkenstocks lie abandoned on the floor. She wore capris and wild, red curly hair. She looked to be about the age of 60 and she struck me as a bit of a hippy. Not at all what I'd expected. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. I'd arrived an entire hour early for the visit and used the time going over my notes in the car. Perhaps I'd over analyzed, becasue it seemed that from the very introduction, the tears began to fall.

And I sobbed. Uncontrollably, I mean. I boo hoo'd like a baby.

Continued from Round One: And the Winner Is ...

I spent the next 30 days between the library and that friendly lawyer's office back home. I read everything I could get my hands on about preparing for a custody trial and successfully getting through a psych evaluation. We'd both been ordered to visit a court appointed psychologist who, after several one-on-one visits with both of us and one visit with each of us along with the child, the doc would enter a written report detailing her findings and recommendations to the court. It's not the only thing the judge would rely on in making her decision, but she would depend on the psych's words heavily.

I was not at all confident.

Continued from You Got Served ... With a Court Order

... Not me. At least it didn't feel like that, the day I was forced to hand my baby over to BD and leave the courthouse without him.

You really shouldn't talk about matters like this in the sense of winners and losers, but it was hard not to feel that way. From the moment we walked in, the building was filled with opponents and challengers. Prosecutorial attorneys, defense lawyers, plaintiffs and defendants, all supposedly working together in the best interest of whatever poor, unfortunate child was caught in the middle of a pair of parents' mess.

Continued from Plan B: Running

The drive home was long, the car was packed down and cramped and I could hardly move my arms, pinned against the window in the back seat next to the baby in his car seat. But he slept peacefully and obliviously.

What I wouldn’t give for innocence like that. To just lie back in my seat, knowing nothing of the turmoil surrounding me, trusting that it would be taken care of and I would be unconditionally loved and blameless. A million miles from reality. I was in for the fight of my life and there would be no tag team. You know how in tag-team wrestling, how the guy can tap his partner and then the other dude comes in the ring and fights for him, before switching off again? The battle I was in for would have no such reprieve. (I am not a fan, by the way. My grandmother used to sit in front of the TV with a beer watching wrestling for hours).

Continued from Time to Start Packing. Again

My mom and my aunt flew out a few days later to help me get my business in order and prepare to leave. My uncle was supposed to have come, but couldn’t at the last minute. There are people in much worse situations than mine who don’t have people in their lives who are willing to drop everything for them, take a few days off of work and come out of pocket because a loved one needs something. I was thankful for having that kind of support and finally ready to make use of it.

They’d both been vehement about my staying home the first time, trying their hardest to convince me. For all the people who have since told me you can’t talk reason with an unreasonable person, my mother was the first.

Continued from I Always Feel Like Somebody’s Waatchin Me-e

It was time to start packing again.

I’d only been back for two weeks before I gave my job two weeks notice and told my landlord I’d be leaving. Every evening after work, I began quietly packing my things away after the baby was asleep. I kept the shades drawn at all times, I walked quietly and purposefully across the wooden floor, I inspected blemishes in the wall … I felt like BD was always watching me. I slept in hour, maybe two-hour increments, I just kept waking up, so I’d schlep through the living room and check and double checking the bolt on the door, peering motionless out the peephole into the hallway, each time expecting to see him staring back. I talked in a little more than an enunciated whisper on the phone, afraid that somehow he would hear me, learn of my plan to run away and God knows what he’d do. The walls were thin. I no longer put anything past this man.

Continued from Walking Back Into a Well-Laid Trap

I could’ve sworn that clock was there on the wall one day and a couple days later I look up and it’s not there. It was BD’s and I didn’t miss it. But I could have sworn it was there. Maybe I was remembering it being there from before I left. Maybe not.

BD had assured me he’d returned his key to our landlord and the Shafik’s had confirmed this. Still, there were little, subtle things. We had this snow globe with a picture of the three of us, me and BD holding the baby on one side, and the baby laughing by himself on the other.

I didn’t like the “family” picture. We looked so happy, smiling, loving, in that picture and I felt like such a fraud. That’s not at all how we were. The snow globe sat on the dresser in the bedroom. I'd turned it around, so that the baby’s picture was facing out. The next day, I’d find it turned back around, the family picture facing out. I turned it around again.

“I knew it! You’re turning our picture around on purpose. I left it like this,” BD said illustrating the way he’d positioned the photo. “I wasn’t sure, but now I know you’re doing it on purpose.”

I had pretended like I didn’t know what he was talking about. But this night, when I returned home from work with the baby to my now empty apartment, the snow globe was not the way I left it. I wouldn’t have left it like that, I don’t even like looking at that picture.

I got the locks changed the next day, a whole week in and I was just now doing something that shoulda been done from day one.

Continued from He Calls the Cops, I Catch a Flight

Against all wise counsel, I flew back to New Jersey that Sunday night. I did not want to go home. I didn't want to retreat, to come back after leaving for the bright lights and big city, head hung low, with child, alone. I did not want to leave my job and I wanted to make a life for myself. That's why I'd moved out here in the first place. Besides, women did this every day, right? Why couldn't I live in New Jersey and raise my child with the assistance of his father with some kind of reasonable visitation plan? What was wrong with that? And as long as BD had vacated the apartment, we shouldn't have a problem.

BD had assured me that he'd moved out and I believed him. He knew I wasn’t bringing our son back unless he had gone and I trusted that he wouldn’t chance it. Meanwhile, I was leaving all too much up to chance.