January 4, 2010
Alienation as anticipated?
Just as anticipated, my son Sam suddenly seemed to become evasive.
He was due to fly to South Africa to spend Christmas there away from his parents. Naturally I wanted to speak to him before he went. Also, at the weekend, Penny had helped him to make candles as presents for friends and family, and I had helped too. But they hadn’t been sorted and wrapped, so I needed to ask him what he wanted to do about that too.
I sent him a text message to try to organise taking him out for some dinner or at least dropping his candles off. He said he had to speak to his mum and then declined and said he needed to call me at the weekend. Then I asked him to call me. And he simply texted:
No
Strange and disrespectful. Over the weekend he told me that he no longer wanted to come up to Scotland with me and Penny because he would only have just got off a flight from South Africa. The trip probably wouldn’t have been organised if we didn’t have Sam. I tried to talk him out of it. And yet I made it clear that the choice was his and that he wouldn’t be punished or judged harshly for that choice. He chose not to come. I could hear his mother coaching him in the background, very clearly. ‘Are you alright?‘, ‘remember what to say’, so there is no doubt that (whatever Sam’s feelings) she had encouraged him to decide not to come with us or at least to feel empowered and supported in his choice not to go. (And let’s not forget that this wouldn’t have happened if she had sent accurate dates for Sam’s return.)
By this point, I had become concerned that his mother was manipulating him into declining contact with me. This had happened a number of times before – in fact, some sort of nurtured alienation seemed to be a matter of course whenever Eva was upset with me.
Sam and I agreed to have a Skype video call on Christmas day and was going to give me his aunt’s phone number in South Africa so it could be arranged. While I was on the phone to him his mother refused to give him the number, telling him ‘I won’t give him the number because of the way he behaved the last time he spoke to her’. We made other arrangements and I assured him that I had not said anything untoward when I had last spoken to her.
The last time I spoke to her was face to face at Eva’s house. Everything was amicable and polite on all sides. The time before that I spoke to her about 9 years before – around the time of the divorce – when Eva and I were fighting and the future of my relationship with Sam was threatened. My conversation Eva’s sister then was entirely amicable too, even if I did speak frankly about Eva. I don’t recall much about the details of what we said, but I do remember that her sister told me that she had been worried that Eva would be unable to cope and offered to take care of Sam if we needed her to. I thanked her, but told her I hoped it would be unnecessary.
What I suspect was behind Eva’s words was the fear that I would talk to her sister about what happened and that it would make Eva look bad. Indeed, it made me wonder whether this had happened during the divorce too. Eva had certainly fallen out with her best friend Olga because Olga had heard my side of the story and ‘taken my side’ (another story for another time), so perhaps Eva’s sister had challenged her on a similar basis too.
As it turned out I discovered that my mum had Eva’s sister’s number already and her email address was included in the email about flight details that was forwarded to me. I emailed her, asking about arranging the video call. She told me that Sam had gone off with his cousin to the beach house and she’s be joining them later that day – they would be there until after Christmas. There was no phone or Internet connection. I asked her to wish my son a happy Christmas and she said she would.
I called Sam’s phone on the 31st – the day he was supposed to return – no reply. And then called the house phone. Eva answered.
Hi. Is Sam there?
He’s not back yet.
When will he be back?
He gets in tomorrow.
[I was puzzled by this since his flight was supposedly due that day – it turned out that we’d misinterpreted the date on the email. If Eva knew, she said nothing.]
Can you ask him to call me when he gets back?
I’ll ASK him.
There was something menacing about the way she said that and I felt troubled by it. What she meant was ‘I will ask him to call you, but he probably won’t want to’. The fear grew that she’d been saying things to alienate him from me and manipulate him into not wanting to speak to me or spend time with me.
It was important not to reward Eva’s behaviour by allowing myself to be ignored or rejected by my own son – if there was any alienation or upset I wanted to deal with it face-to-face rather than over the phone and if he was being pressurised by his mother I didn’t want to put him in the middle by applying pressure in another direction – so I didn’t want to chase him too much. The following day I simply left this message:
Hope u had a lovely Christmas. Have a good New Year too. We all miss you up here. lots of love, your dad xxx
The following day I had a warm and reassuring reply:
Happy new year dad I had a great time in SA can’t wait to see you
Later he called me and seemed to be in good spirits. We mostly about what we’d been doing, the snowy weather and about computers. It seemed clear that any attempted alienation by his mother on this occasion had been minimal (she hadn’t been spending much time with him after all) or simply unsuccessful.
I’m looking forward to seeing him at the weekend.
Unreasonable Behaviour 