There was a gap after my father took me back to America from France. It was one of the few moments of peace and true happiness I have known, and one of the most innocent times of my life. It is tempting to see the whole thing as just the build up to the moment when my father took me to Mexico, kidnapping me for the third time, but it didn’t seem like it at the time.
Instead, it seemed simply like childhood. We moved to Jackson County, where my grandparents lived, and where my father had come from. Given his life of moving around and international travel up to that point, it was probably the longest he had been in one place up until that time. We lived in a small house, but when I was so young, the whole place seemed vast, and wonderful and exciting.
I want to stress just how normal things were, though. This wasn’t some tense time, when we were just waiting for the next thing to happen. I think that my father must have felt that things truly were over when he managed to bring me back from France. For him, it must have seemed that my mother had kidnapped me, and he had gotten me back, so that it was all finally over.
Looking back, it is easy to see how misguided that was. My mother had already filed charges in France, where she had custody. For her, it must have been a moment where things were just starting to build up towards everything that would happen next, especially since I now know that her parents were emphasizing to her that she had to do anything she could to get me back. For my father, though, it must have seemed like the end of a story, rather than its beginning.
One beginning came in the form of a new relationship for my father, with a woman named Patricia, who had a son called Joseph who was close to my own age. Joseph quickly became my closest friend, and we became a family in every sense that mattered, living together in the small house that we had, doing all the things that a normal family would have done. We used to go out bowling together sometimes, and play all kinds of other sports, from baseball to soccer.
A typical kind of day would see Joseph and me waking up in our room, getting breakfast, going off to pre-school. One or both of us would have some kind of sports practice most days, and we spent a lot of the time when we didn’t have anything like that simply riding around on our bicycles, enjoying ourselves.
I’m sure as a reader, you’re wondering why I’m emphasizing this. There are a couple of reasons though. One is that I want to stress that, when my father had a chance to do so, he was able to give me a very normal, safe, happy kind of childhood. Another is just that this is how things happened. There was a gap between one moment of being taken and the next, and the thing that rushed in to fill it was… well, just an ordinary kind of childhood.
A third reason is that this truly is one of the happiest times that I can remember. I remember going to school, having friends, going to a lot of birthday parties. It’s exactly the kind of thing that I can imagine any other kid my age having done at the time. I remember in particular a party for my 5th birthday, where we all went bowling, along with plenty of my friends. We had pizza, and I can remember feeling as full of joy as I ever have.
Other moments were even simpler. I have a distinct memory of riding around a parking lot with Joseph on our bicycles while my father and Patricia watched, just feeling the warmth of the sun on our faces. It must have been Fall, because I remember leaves falling, and I know that I had only just learned to ride a bicycle, but I don’t know when it was, exactly. I could feel the breeze as I cycled faster, and looking back, it seems like the kind of pure, uncomplicated happiness that only the very young can manage. I wonder if my father was as happy in that moment? Perhaps he was, having found a family and the situation that anyone would be happy with. Perhaps he even thought that it was permanent and settled at that point, assuming that my mother would never be able to follow to America where she had, it must be remembered, already taken me from my father’s custody.
Now, it is easy to see how this phase might have stretched out. Joseph and I might have stayed as friends and near brothers. My father and Patricia might have stayed together and been happy. Most of the memories I have of them together are happy ones, and the ones that weren’t, I feel were probably influenced by the stress of the situation they started to find themselves in.
That wasn’t to come until later though. For the moment, I want to keep painting a picture of this moment, so that you understand the way those few months, maybe a year at most, stretch out to more in my mind when I remember them. Obviously, the cycling was a part of it, just for fun, but I think my father encouraged us because he had cycled pretty seriously through the Alps when he had been in France. Joseph and I used to ride our bicycles all the way along a path that ran next to the river, racing one another to get home.
There were other sides to my life at home, of course. Food was another big thing in the house. I’m astonished now that I wasn’t hugely fat as a kid, given how into food I was. I can remember deciding with the kind of certainty that little kids sometimes get that I was going to be a chef when I grew up. Looking back, it was probably another phase like wanting to be an astronaut or a scientist, just one of those things kids do, but at the time it felt like a huge thing. I always wanted to help around the kitchen, and even though my father only let me do the parts that were safe for such a young boy, I can remember feeling as though I was really cooking, really being a part of it.
I was into matchbox cars, which we would get from Walmart or Toys R Us, taking so long about choosing this one or that one that we might have been picking out a real car. Joseph and I would race them, but I think a lot of it was just how cool they were as objects. I was really into video games too (I still am, even today). I think at the time, we had a Sega Genesis, because I can definitely remember playing Sonic the Hedgehog over and over, trying to work out all the best ways through the levels, trying to catch up to as many of the rings as possible.
Jackson County was also the place where my father’s parents lived, so this phase of my life meant that I got to see them a lot. These days, it’s easy to look back and see a normal but pretty conservative couple who were probably trying to do their best for their son and grandson. At the time though, they seemed larger than life. To a five year old, my grandfather in particular seemed huge, and his personality dominated any room he was in. I remember him as chewing on cigars constantly, although that is probably just one childhood image stretching out through the lens of memory.
I think this childhood phase was probably the time when I was happiest in my grandparents’ house. Later on, when I came back, there would be arguments that were partly about how far apart we had grown in our views of the world and partly just the normal pressures of me growing up and wanting space.
I think, in that sense, it mirrored my feelings about Jackson County more generally. Later, it would be a place that seemed too small, too caught up in the effects of economic depression and in the past. As a child though, it was a happy and safe place, made beautiful and carefree by its natural surroundings, where I could have fun and know that there would always be good things to do.
Most of the times in my grandparents’ house were happy, but it is also the place where I remember the most tension even in this happy phase. I think maybe my grandfather in particular understood that it might not last, and later, he and my father would argue. Both of my grandparents would ask “What are you going to do about Marc?” At the time, I didn’t understand what that meant. Now, it is easy to understand just how much pressure my father and my grandparents must have been under.
That pressure only grew once my mother decided to come to the United States. I think my father thought that it would never happen. As far as he was concerned, since my mother had been the first to take me, in defiance of the original custody order, she was the kidnapper, not him. He thought that if she were to set foot on American soil again, she would be denied entry at best, arrested and imprisoned at worst.
At the time, I didn’t think anything like that. I loved my mother; my only problem was with Patrick. I still remembered them in this phase, because even so young, who wouldn’t remember living in France? I remembered my mother, and I would have been happy to see her. I didn’t understand any of the complexities around the situation. Indeed, I barely remembered the start of any of this.
Whatever my father might have assumed the legal situation to be, my mother did come back, and I believe that her own parents may have had something to do with the need to do that. While I may not understand this correctly, and I can’t pretend to speak for my mother, my understanding is that my maternal grandparents’ values insisted that a child should be with his mother, regardless of circumstances, and that this increased the pressure on her to return to the United States and not accept the way things had turned out, regardless of the possible legal dangers.
She did so, and that must have taken courage. I accept that, from her perspective, she was travelling thousands of miles into uncertainty in an effort to be with her child. She must have cared very much in order to do that, with or without the prompting of her parents.
When my mother arrived, the consequences for her were significantly less serious than my father might have imagined. She was not sent back to France, or refused entry the way someone who had actually been found guilty of a crime might have been, because she hadn’t been found guilty of anything. She wasn’t arrested and imprisoned. At worst, she may have received a slap on the wrist from a court that was inclined to agree that the rights of the mother in custody cases were almost more important than anything. This was a period where the assumption still seemed to be there that the child should be with his or her mother in custody cases unless there was a good reason for them not to be.
I am unsure of what legal wrangling took place behind the scenes, although neither of my parents ever tried to hide anything from me; I just know that a phase followed where my mother was suddenly there again, visiting once every two weeks. I was happy to see her again, I think, because who wouldn’t be happy to see his mother again? Obviously there are custody cases where the child doesn’t want to see one parent or the other, often for very serious reasons, but this wasn’t one of those. I want to make it clear that my mother was never anything but kind to me, and that I would have happily lived with her; the custody problems came from my parents’ international divisions, rather than from any kind of cruelty.
When I was older, a teenager, I remember thinking back on this phase and wondering why my parents couldn’t just sort everything out. I think a part of me even thought that they might just have gotten back together, which was ludicrous, and filled with teenage arrogance. Now that I’m older, I can see that my parents were fundamentally different people, and there was no way that they could have been happy if they’d been stupid enough to “stay together for the child”.
Another way my teenage self thought that they might have sorted things out in this early phase was through some plan of me living for six months with one and then six months with the other. This was another vague dream without any thought of the practicalities or the costs involved. Neither my father nor my mother was rich enough to afford that kind of travel, even if they had been willing to agree to it, and the idea of trying to grow up caught between two different school systems, two different worlds, just wouldn’t have made sense.
Perhaps it might have been feasible for me to have remained with one parent and gone to visit the other through the summers. It is a strategy that does occur sometimes to deal with complex custody situations, and it can help in international custody situations where constant back and forth travel is not an option, and each parent wishes to remain in the place that they consider to be home. Again though, I suspect that finances would have been a real problem for an arrangement like that, and it would only have worked in any case if I had been able to overcome the problem of my dislike for my mother’s boyfriend, or if she had left him, neither of which seemed likely.
Looking back, I can see a deeper problem, which is that it would have required my parents to trust one another. By this stage, it is clear that they did not, and that the divisions between them had only been widened by my previous abductions by each of them. In France, my father and my mother might have gone back to being quite good friends, but now, there was no sense of them trusting one another. My mother was understandably upset that my father had “stolen” me, while my father was very wary that my mother might try to do exactly what she had done before, and what he had done to get me back. There was a stand-off there between them, governed by the legal process.
I want to stress that most of these thoughts came later for me, and that they were not the thoughts of my five year old self. At the time, I wasn’t in a place to think through all of these options. I had a vague sense of being stuck in the middle of my parents, and of wanting to make everything all right, as if I could, as a child. Even so, I’m not going to pretend that I had any idea of the ramifications of what was going on around me at the time.
Perhaps because I was so young, people didn’t mind talking about what was happening in front of me. My grandparents were prepared to discuss the situation with my father, knowing that I wouldn’t understand any of what was happening. My mother asked me several times if I would want to move back to France with her. I was aware that there was a legal process going on, and that my father had to talk to lawyers and judges, but didn’t know the details of it all. I can’t say the kinds of submissions that each side made with any certainty.
Broadly speaking though, it may be possible to at least try to sum up what their arguments would have been. Each would probably have brought up the other taking me away from their custody, and that probably made for a complicated legal situation. The Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of Child Abduction (1980) tries to provide guidance on what should happen in such cases and states that in general, the status quo before the abduction should be returned to. Of course, each of my parents would have made a claim to being that status quo.
The convention presumes that a child will be returned to the place where they were “habitually resident”, but complexities arise once we start to consider the range of possible defenses against return that are set out in the convention:
(a) that Petitioner was not “actually exercising custody rights at the time of the removal or retention” under Article 3; or
(b) that Petitioner “had consented to or acquiesced in the removal or retention” under Article 13; or
(c) that more than one year has passed from the time of wrongful removal or retention until the date of the commencement of judicial or administrative proceedings, under Article 12; or
(d) that the child is old enough and has a sufficient degree of maturity to knowingly object to being returned to the Petitioner and that it is appropriate to heed that objection, under Article 13; or
(e) that “there is grave risk that the child’s return would expose the child to physical or psychological harm or otherwise place the child in an intolerable situation,” under Article 13(b); or
(f) that return of the child would subject the child to violation of basic human rights and fundamental freedoms, under Article 20
In one sense, I suppose things might have seemed quite straightforward to my father: he had been the one initially granted custody, was the one with whom I had been living for some time now since returning to the United States, but these exceptions would have complicated things. I do not know which arguments my parents relied on in court, but it seems likely that they would have focused on me being resident with my mother for more than a year, and possibly the idea that my father’s involvement around the edges of things in France constituted consent to my living with my mother. The fact that my mother asked me if I wanted to go and live in France may also suggest that she might have been considering an argument under section (d), but I do not know this for certain, and would not like to guess. It may just have been that she planned to ask the courts to consider my wishes in a more general way.
There were other arguments about access, separate from the core custody issue. Whatever had happened, or was going to happen, to me, the fact was that my mother was now in Jackson County and wanted to see me. The courts were of the opinion that a mother should see her child, even if my father was cautious about the prospect, and they permitted fortnightly visits with me.
My mother and I were not alone for those visits. Perhaps because of the circumstances around her taking me to France, the court ordered supervised visits every second weekend, watched over by a court appointed official. They never left me alone with my mother, which even now I can remember creating a weird atmosphere of being watched. We would go out to parks or to places to eat, and there was just this… person there, watching everything I did. They weren’t a part of things, weren’t there to interact with me or my mother; they were just a pair of eyes making sure that everything went smoothly and that I got back to my father ok. The courts and my father were worried about the prospect of my being taken to France in a way that I wasn’t as a child. Being that young, it never occurred to me that kids couldn’t just go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
The presence of the court appointed watcher made things odd, but I suspect that it wasn’t the only thing. We would go out to parks and to restaurants, and occasionally I would get the feeling that my mother didn’t entirely know what to do with such a young child. She would understandably want to know about how things had been with me in the previous couple of weeks, or talk about school, but she would also want to talk about books or my feelings, or how I was dressed. The things that she knew about were things in her life, and not those of a boy my age.
How could it have been any different? My mother had me young, and still seemed to be a person who wanted to have her own life. When I hadn’t been around for so many months, was it any surprise that she didn’t really know how to talk to me? Was it any surprise that as a child, I just wanted to play, whereas she hadn’t seen me for two weeks at a time, and would want to talk and talk about things that just seemed so normal and boring to me?
One thing she did talk about a lot was France, or maybe that is just how I remember it. It seemed to me then that every week, she would ask me whether I liked living in North Carolina, and if I would like coming back to live in France more. I didn’t think anything of those questions, although as a kid I liked North Carolina just as much as France. It was beautiful, and the things about it that would put me off living there when I was older were invisible to me then.
I used to tell my mother on those visits that I would be fine with living in France, and with her, but the sticking point was always her partner, Patrick. I want to make it very clear that there was nothing untoward when it came to Patrick; he was not cruel or abusive to me in any way. It was simply that I was the son of another man, and I felt as a child that he had no interest in me because of that. At best, I felt that I was something that went along with his relationship with my mother, to be endured for the sake of everything he felt for her.
I might be wrong in that, and my mother always assured me that Patrick liked me, but when it came to things in North Carolina, my childish view of him was the part that mattered. That view, rightly or wrongly, told me that he didn’t like me, and I didn’t want to live with him. I found him to be quite a domineering, aggressive personality, who got angry easily and seemed to be in control of things around my mother. I was used to something much more laid back. I actually remember telling my mother that I didn’t want to live with her while she was with Patrick. Today, that seems highly manipulative; did I really think that I was going to persuade my mother to break up with him? Even if she had, I can only imagine the resentment that it might have caused.
The trouble was, I was set in my position: I really wasn’t prepared to go back to France if it meant living as a big happy family with Patrick again. I was stubborn in the way that I think sometimes only a kid can be, and I flat out told my mother that, again and again, when she asked. I can only imagine the pain that I must have caused her by doing that.
Some of it, I don’t have to imagine, because I know how much I upset her by saying that I didn’t want to go back to France and see Patrick. My mother would try to defend Patrick, and to defend France in general, telling me how beautiful it was there, and how my grandparents would love to see me. I believed those parts, but when she told me that Patrick would like to see me too, I found that much harder to believe. I think that was what my mother wanted to be true: that she genuinely hoped that we would all be one big happy family if only she could get me “home”.
It was obvious that she didn’t like North Carolina. I imagine a part of that was simply that she was in a place that was so obviously connected to my father. It was where my father lived, and where she had been forced to come to get me back. France was her home, and now she was in a place far from it, trying to get her son back.
That was part of it, but I suspect another part of it was down to the differences in values between Europe and Jackson County. It was a place that was quite economically depressed, quite cut off from the world, not cosmopolitan or urbane in the ways she was used to. It was an English speaking country, rather than one that used her native language, and considerably more conservative in some ways than much of Europe.
Things settled into a kind of rhythm for six months to a year. It was normal, or as close to normal as things could be with everything that was going on. Plenty of families have difficult custody situations, and plenty have supervised visitation, especially in cases where there has been a history of attempts to abscond with a child. These cases are anything but rare, with as much as a 1.2% chance of it happening to any given child in a year (Finkelhor et al., 2017).
Even a normal situation can create pressures, though. I heard my father and his girlfriend Patricia talking about it when they thought that I wasn’t listening, and I knew how afraid my father was about the situation. Because my mother had taken me to France once, he was convinced that she might do it again. He was against the visits, perhaps because of this, or perhaps because of the way he’d managed to take me to Morocco under almost identical circumstances. Whenever my mother asked whether I wanted to live in France, I think that she intended it to be about persuading me, on the basis that if that was where I really wanted to live, the courts might go along with me. My father, though, took it as a warning sign that she would take me back there any time she was given the opportunity to do so.
I thought that this was the way things were now, and that it would always be the same. Gradually though, the parts that I overheard told me that things weren’t going the way my father would have wanted. I want to emphasize that everything that follows is what I have gathered after the fact. I now know that the tipping point for my father came on the day that his lawyer contacted him, explaining a conversation that he’d had with the judge in charge of our case.
You have to understand that, in many ways, Jackson County is quite a small place. People know one another, or did at this time. Those involved in the legal profession would have had reasons to run into one another all the time, and would have talked to one another about all kinds of things. Perhaps it was even considered a good way to do things, sorting problems out without the necessity of going into the court.
The result was that the judge told my father’s lawyer, and he told my father, that he was considering relaxing the conditions around my mother’s visits. The eventual plan, he explained, was for the visits to be unsupervised.
From that moment on, there was a timer on my life in America. Initially, that timer was set in terms of years, because that seemed to be the timeframe before my mother would get unsupervised visits. Our lawyer seemed to think that would be consistent with other cases he had worked on, so there was no reason to think that things would move any faster than that.
This kind of timescale was enough to reassure my father a little, even though he found the thought of my mother having unsupervised access frightening. Right then, I was only around six years old, but he thought that at eight, I might be old enough to be safe. He thought that by that age I would have more of an idea of what was going on, so that if my mother tried to take me back to France, I would be able to say something, or call for help, or just run away from her. I actually remember him having a conversation with me about what to do if my mother tried to take me on a flight to France, telling me to find someone and explain to them that I was not supposed to go.
In these days of tighter security at airports, that would be exactly the right thing to do. In fact, it’s the advice that is given to parents and children worried about child abduction, and airlines now watch out for signs of children who appear to be travelling against their will. In those days, though, I wonder if people would have noticed, or taken me seriously if I had said something. Especially as such a young child, I suspect that my mother would have been able to explain things away, or just override me.
If I might have been safe in two years, the news that the timescale was being moved up must have terrified my father. News came from the lawyer that instead of years, we were now looking at one or two months before my mother would have unsupervised visits. I want to emphasize again that all of this was hidden from me, but I knew that things were getting more tense, and that my father was making preparations for something.
I now know that my father started to gather money wherever he could, from whoever he could. He took money from his parents and from friends, sold what he could and made preparations. He also talked to people about what to do next. My grandparents weren’t happy about the kinds of next move he was talking about, but they also didn’t want to see me taken back to France, and didn’t want to see their son in jail.
The dilemma, as my father saw it, was simple. He believed that my mother would take me as soon as she had the opportunity to do so, based on the fact that she had done so before, on his own actions in France, and on the part where she saw me as rightfully belonging with her there. If he followed me, and he would, then there was a warrant outstanding in France for him, since he had violated a French judge’s custody order in taking me back. We couldn’t stay where we were.
At the same time, where else could we go? I know about this part, because my father talked it over with me. First, he did the most important thing: he asked me if I wanted to go and live with my mother. I told him that I didn’t, because I was still thinking about Patrick. He told me that we had to leave, and go to live somewhere far away. He told me that we were going on a trip to Mexico, and I agreed. I say that I agreed, but I don’t want to pretend that it was an equal decision. I believe that I knew what was happening, and that I genuinely chose to go, but I also understand that I was only very young, and couldn’t possibly have understood the full implications of what was about to happen.
This was a day or two before we actually went, and I know that my father had been gathering money for over a month by then. He had obviously been making plans, and knew how difficult this would be. He’d made as many preparations as he could in a short space of time, especially since he was a man who typically didn’t like to plan things in that kind of detail.
Hearing him tell me that we were leaving helped me to make sense of some of the things happening around me, and particularly some of the unhappiness that I’d sensed from Patricia. For most of the month, I’d sensed her growing less happy, and seen how stressed she was. My father had talked to her about what was happening, and for the two of them it meant something very simple: they would have to break up, probably never to see one another again. Patricia and Joseph couldn’t come with us; even if Patricia had wanted to, she had to think about her son’s well-being, and couldn’t risk dragging him into the middle of that kind of trouble. The situation must have been a horrible one for her, knowing that there was no real choice, and that whatever happened would leave her unhappy.
The actual plan was quite simple: we would drive to Mexico and disappear, finding somewhere to live where I could be brought up with as close to a normal life as possible. My father timed our escape for the day after one of my visits with my mother, so that we would have the maximum amount of time before she realized and raised the alarm.
We set off in my father’s car: a Suzuki Samurai that seemed huge at the time but probably wasn’t very big at all. We drove south, straight towards the border, in a journey that would ultimately involve 2300 miles, spread out over three days. My memories of that journey are mostly of the roads, which seemed to stretch on forever, and of the nearly identical hotels we stayed in at night.
An escape to Mexico should probably be more dramatic, but the point of my father’s planning was that there wouldn’t be any drama. The journey took three days, and we had at least a week before anyone noticed that we had gone. There was no time for sightseeing, or for making it into some grand road trip adventure, though. While we were driving, my father kept us going, pushing forward so that we could make it to the safety of the Mexican border before we were discovered.
When we finally made it to the Mexican border, we drove straight over it. It’s a plan that wouldn’t have worked today. Today, the border is much tighter, but in those days, it was normal for people to go back and forth, dipping down into Tijuana to party and then coming back. It was a time when you didn’t even need to show a passport. Post 9/11 in particular, just driving away like that wouldn’t have worked.
From the moment we crossed the border, we were on the run. It’s hard to say from what, though, because as far as I can see, the only legal difficulty was my father’s failure to have me there for my mother’s visits. She didn’t have custody in the US at that point, and I was going with my father willingly.
Even so, I didn’t know that at the time. All I had was the sense from my father that everything had changed once we had headed into Mexico. We couldn’t go back, to where the judge and the courts waited for us. We could only go forward, towards what my father hoped would be a new life for both of us.
Living on the run: My life 