Authors: Kim Noble
I’ve since seen the report. It makes me sick reading it years later. How must Hayley have felt when she saw Dr Hall’s instructions to social services which effectively said: ‘Remove baby at birth – arrange adoption, mother will never cope, so do not let any bonding take place.’ It sounds like some evil punishment, but there was more, the worst bit of all: Dr Hall had thought that if I had any contact with the baby, I might hurt her.
Hurt the baby? Hurt our baby?
How could they believe that? After everything Hayley had been through, her track record of risking her own life to protect anonymous children, she honestly felt she’d been stabbed in the back.
No wonder she faded away soon after.
It wasn’t just Hayley who had cause to feel upset by the report. Dr Laine had conducted her own risk assessment of each of the alters and their separate attitudes to the forthcoming baby. She had been very moved by Hayley’s transparency, especially when admitting she would be the first to ask for the baby to be taken away in the event of any risk. Professionally Dr Laine felt accused of being so biased towards her patient she would not see the danger to the unborn baby. She thought her own ethics regarding child abuse were being called into question. Dr Laine was quite certain that the alters she had met would all love and care for Aimee although extra help would be needed over some trigger areas.
Hayley, unlike Dawn, knew that Skye was healthy and alive. Tragically for her, it wasn’t enough to keep her from taking a step back. Gradually as the legal fight to win our daughter back commenced, Hayley gave way more and more to the personality called Bonny.
Suddenly she was the dominant alter. She was the one in charge of finding our daughter.
Bonny’s first step was to demand to see our file at the social services’ offices. What better way to bring her up to speed? To say they were less than helpful is an understatement. However, by trying to hinder Bonny’s progress they actually played straight into her hands. The standard procedure in this instance would have been for a social worker or other employee to have accompanied Bonny into the office while she perused the files. There was bound to be some harrowing reading matter in there. Policy was to protect the readers. But someone had left Bonny alone. That was a mistake. Not only did she not get upset – she stuffed page after page of notes into her bag and read everything marked ‘private’. Everything about baby Skye was in there – foster parents, their address, how much they were being paid, plus social workers’ logs and reports. There would be no shortage of information when we reached court.
It’s such a harrowing story, yet to a large extent I may as well have been reading it in a newspaper. I didn’t feel that loss felt by Dawn and Hayley at all. I didn’t meet our baby until she was four months old. By then she was called Aimee. That had been Lorraine’s choice after a solicitor had advised Bonny that if she was serious about pursuing legal action to have her daughter returned, then ‘Skye’ might seem a little too hippyish. Bonny’s attitude was ‘I’ll change whatever you like to get my daughter back’, so she agreed. I don’t know how it came about, but Bonny had actually chosen the name ‘Ben’ for Lorraine’s son and so she thought it would be a nice gesture to return the honour to our sister. So that’s where Aimee came from. Bonny chose the middle name, Melissa.
I don’t know if Lorraine was aware of the irony or if Bonny had worked it out. Thirty-seven years earlier we had been named ‘Kim’ by a nurse. I had always sworn I would never let that choice be taken away from me. And here we were, decades later, and our daughter had gone through exactly the same thing. Was it fate? Damn bad luck? Had we wished it on her somehow? I still have no idea.
Actually, it gets even more complicated than that. Before we got her back, Aimee’s foster parents went against all procedure and renamed her Daisy – and even gave her their own surname! That’s the name that appears on the front of her red medical book.
So before the age of one Aimee had already been given three different names. And I thought I was the only one with identity problems!
The foster parents should have done lots of things differently. Dawn, Hayley and later Bonny were told that we could expect regular updates and photos of our daughter. That never happened.
Luckily, we had our own source.
Lorraine was allowed to have contact with Aimee in a social services office and brought home photographs for Bonny. At least someone was on her side.
The first time any of us set eyes on her again was nearly four months later after Bonny had started legal proceedings to get Aimee back. Aimee was brought into an NSPCC contact centre where they were set up to observe children with adults. There was a TV camera in every corner, two-way mirrors and hidden microphones, everything the scrutinising psychiatrists needed to make a judgement. I don’t know how anyone was meant to act naturally in that environment but Bonny was allowed to go in. We have an amazing photograph of Aimee looking up at Bonny and you could see that she knew who it was. Aimee was laughing and the pride in Bonny’s face is unreal. (I wish it had been me!) This meeting became a weekly ritual until finally the court inspector was content that there was a bond and that we were not a threat. Only then were we allowed to go into a mother-and-baby unit where we could be monitored with our baby over a six-month period. If we looked like we could cope, then the courts would consider letting us be reunited.
It was such a lot of pressure. In a way I’m glad it fell on Bonny’s shoulders and not mine. She’d campaigned in court long and hard with support from Lorraine, our councillor friend Anna, and Dad. Some of our neighbours were amazing as well, Jean and her now late husband Stan welcomed us round there to talk or just sit, and Dad’s sister Ivy was always there for us as well. I never appreciated why, of course, so from my point of view it was just nice to see them all. But they were a great help to Bonny.
The case went from magistrate’s court to county court and all the way up to the high court where the judge was appalled that it had reached that far without being sorted out sooner. It had been a gruelling four months but finally Bonny was getting to live with Aimee – even if it was under twenty-four-hour supervision.
All the while the court case was going on, we were having no treatment from Dr Laine. Not officially, anyway. Our lawyer had pulled out for a good reason – a conflict of interests. On the one hand we had been asking him to highlight our disability to qualify for free therapy from Dr Laine. Then Aimee had come along and we had to focus on the positive to convince a court that we were of sound enough mind to look after her like any normal person.
Obviously there was a conflict and only ever going to be one winner. But even after we had to drop our therapy, Dr Laine still kept in contact by phone, encouraging and doing as much as she could.
By the time I learnt the facts of this horrendous story, some months after finally accepting the DID, Hayley had already been superseded by Bonny as the main player in our day-to-day lives. Bonny, in turn, had become the true mother to our daughter, Aimee. Looking back, it feels criminal that I didn’t accept our diagnosis earlier. If I had, I wouldn’t have missed out on so many important years with Aimee. At that age every day is special and unique. You never, ever get them back.
It was at the mother-and-baby unit – basically a large house like an Arbours centre – that I first met Aimee. I realise now I’d been virtually mothballed for months. The last time I’d looked it had been August – and now we were in December. In hindsight, the other personalities had had more important claims on the body’s time – and obviously it had shielded me from a lot of the harrowing details. But here I was, at the end of 1997, in a room with a little girl. There was no preparation, no run-throughs with Dr Laine. One minute I was enjoying a glass of wine in the summer, then it was winter and I was with a little girl people claimed was my daughter.
Even with my ignorance, the monitors at the mother-and-baby unit were impressed by how we got on. As I understand it, three or four personalities had the honour of holding Aimee that day. I think the body went into self-preservation overdrive, naturally showing Aimee off to all its potential dominant personalities, everyone likely to have a mothering role in the future. Luckily, we all bonded instantly, even those of us with no real idea why we were there. In fact, we obviously gave off such instinctively positive maternal vibes that the mother-and-baby unit officials didn’t even realise we’d been separated for four months. They’d assumed we’d been together all this time. In the end, instead of being made to stay the full half a year, we were released after just two months.
And so, in January 1998, completely without my knowledge, Bonny had carried our six-month-old baby daughter through the door of our house.
Thanks to Bonny and friends we had custody of our daughter but, Bonny was made aware, it was only a temporary measure. We had Aimee under a care order – essentially the same as the ward of court that the Maudsley tried to impose on us – whereby if we transgressed one rule, broke one promise or invalidated one condition then Aimee would be yanked away again. At that stage, since I didn’t realise she was my daughter, I was blissfully unaware of the ruling hanging over the house.
But then the social services did something life changing: they did nothing at all.
One of the tenets of the care order was that Bonny had to agree to weekly or monthly house checks from psychiatrists and social workers. Obviously she would have said yes to anything. By the time Aimee had celebrated her first birthday and Bonny still hadn’t seen anyone, she began to get twitchy.
As she told Dr Laine, ‘They either check up on us or leave us alone – they can’t have their cake and eat it.’
And so she went back on the attack. This time she put in a complaint and sent a copy to our MP, Malcolm Wicks. He was wonderful. He helped and supported her all the way and really put social services in their place.
Basically Bonny wanted to shame the authorities into admitting that she was taking better care of Aimee than they were.
‘If my daughter is so at risk, how come you haven’t bothered to visit her once?’
I wish I could have seen it!
Within a few weeks Bonny had the director of the social services fawning around our house because of the MP. ‘Going to the press’ and ‘compensation’ were mentioned and eventually she settled on a compromise. The local health authority would now take over funding of her – our – therapy with Dr Laine, even though she was outside our borough. In the circumstances it was the least they could do.
But still they refused to lift the care order. In fact, bringing it to their attention actually made matters worse. From being ignored, Bonny was informed that she would now have an assessment every six months to check progress. She’d agreed – after a fight, of course – but hated every minute of them. On paper the assessments might have had Aimee’s best interests at heart. In practice they just felt like a bi-annual exercise in humiliation.
The problem was that most care orders are for children in foster homes. So, every six months there is a ‘placement meeting’ to decide whether a child should stay with his or her temporary caregivers. This is where child services can be so cruel. Even though Bonny was Aimee’s actual mother, they refused to amend their terminology. Twice a year she would turn up for the meeting, tense and nervous, and listen to herself being described as a foster parent. At the end they always concluded in the same brutal terms: ‘We agree the child can stay in its current placement.’
Bonny would sit there, fuming,
It’s not a placement – it’s her home!
I think the pressure of those meetings contributed to her cracking up. So when I became the dominant personality a couple of years later, I swore I would get it fixed. I didn’t care how long it took, I would do it.
I will get our daughter back.
During the court case, many experts had stood up to argue on both sides. A psychiatrist on Bonny’s behalf told the judge, ‘I work with mothers in the community who have killed their first child – and even they are given a chance with their second.’
Bonny was furious. She wasn’t looking for a second chance – she wanted her first chance.
‘How do you justify removing this woman’s child at birth,’ the psychiatrist continued, ‘just because she has DID?’
They couldn’t. So many people told Dr Laine and me they couldn’t see how the decision had ever been approved in the first place. Still, it didn’t matter now – in the end we got the result we wanted.
Unfortunately it came too late for one person.
Dawn.
Dawn had not come out since her baby had been snatched. She had gone through the operation, held our baby for the first time, experienced the maternal rush of first contact, seen baby Skye be weighed and measured and dressed, then held her again for what she imagined would be the rest of her life.
Dawn was there when social services snatched our baby away.
Dawn was the one who screamed and screamed and cried as she realised no one was going to help.
Dawn was the one whose world fell utterly and totally apart.
At some point our defence mechanism kicked in and Dawn switched. I don’t know who replaced her but I do know that a year later she still hadn’t been back. And then suddenly she appeared during a session with Dr Laine.