Jean · The First Abduction

The First Abduction Or "How to hold your own kids for Ransom"

My Mother's first attempt to hold us emotional hostage against our father occurred when she took me, my brother and sister, and went to hide at a friends house in Palm Springs. We were there almost a month, and missed that much school. She left after an argument on my brother's birthday, and returned on the 30th of March. This removal from our home without my father's knowledge or permission was like a trial run for what she would do later.

Just before my eleventh birthday, my parents seemed to reach a temporary resolution to their situation. My father was living back at our house, and they decided to buy a motorhome to take family vacations.

Nothing will ever convince me that this wasn't a plan on my mother's part for what she did later.

We drove across country in the camper, a trip that was uneventful until we reached Massachusetts. My mother had a younger brother, my favorite Uncle, Tim. Tim was the baby of the family, years younger than the others. He was only twenty that summer, and had a friend named Joel. My mother disappeared on more than one evening with Joel and one night, when she was supposedly going out with her mother, she didn't return until four in the morning. My father was obviously upset. Given that my mother was constantly accusing my father of screwing around on her, this behavior was as blatant as it was disturbing. Given her history with "unusual attention" toward much younger men, I think he had further reason. Several reasons actually, including her once being caught in a parked car with the teenage son of one of the firefighters on the street. And sending a drunken teenager in the family car to buy beer, during which he was involved in a hit and run accident on his way back to Jean. She was 35 at the time. These two young men were both under 18 at the time of the incidents.

I wouldn't learn all of my mother's history with "younger men" for several years, and when I did, I watched certain patterns establish themselves during my teen years, and then would watch with disgust as that pattern repeated itself over, and over again. I had friends later tell me how my mother had hit on them, or about very pointed comments she made, laced with innuendo, that caught them completely by surprise.

The family trip to Massachusetts was essentially over after Jean's late night out with Joel. We headed back to California. At some point, Jean truly realized that she wasn't going to get everything she wanted through a divorce. They had been co-habitating, and the filing she had made during her first disappearance to Palm Springs was likely going to be tossed out by the court.

And though Jean believed occupying a house was the same as owning a house, it really wasn't. The family home was a big mortgage payment and a tiny bit of equity. The cars, the camper, and everything else they owned were mostly bought on credit. It was only by my father working every day that bit by bit they owned a little more. And my father told her that it it was likely the divorce would be tossed out of court, there was no reason for it, except for her strange obcession with getting one and that they would 'live together afterwards'.

So Jean planned. She made arrangements for my Uncle Tim to fly in from Massachusetts. She waited, then when the moment came, the weekend before the final hearing in her divorce filing, she packed every valuable item she could carry - televisions, small appliances, everything, into the camper. She had initially planned on renting a trailer and hauling every piece of furniture she could carry behind the camper - but was talked out of it by a family friend.

And then, like an afterthought, Jean dragged us out of our beds in the middle of the night and put us in the camper and drove away.

First she went to one of my father's friends, a man he worked with, a man he trusted. A man who my mother had convinced should help her, because she convinced him and his family that my father was a secret batterer, secretly wanted to kill her, was secretly the most evil man alive. Not only did she corrupt the minds of his children, she corrupted the minds of his friends. Unlike myself, these friends were never there to see that the things she said didn't match the things she did. That the things she claimed never happened.

And when my Uncle arrived, they took the camper on the road to Massachusetts.

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