Blast from the . . .

A dozen years ago Stephanie and Vincent’s father were locked in a bitter custody dispute over with whom Vincent would live. This culminated with a trial that lasted over 15 days. Over time some of the characters with whom we battled were Vincent’s then stepmother, who hated Stephanie because she believed Vincent’s father was still in love with Stephanie; Vincent’s father who hated (and loved) Stephanie because she left him (and also wanted to prove to his wife that he didn’t still love Stephanie), a court-appointed, poorly trained if somewhat well meaning volunteer (pictured above with her son) who was entirely taken in (as new volunteers often are) by Vincent’s father’s and stepmother’s con job, and this volunteer’s lawyer (who hated our lawyer). On our side was Stephanie’s lawyer. The end result of years in court (partly also over child support) was that Vincent stayed with his Mom, but not without lots of heartache, stress, physical danger to Stephanie (and really Vincent too), and expense (to us and taxpayers who footed the bills for among many things the volunteer’s lawyer). Just this summer we’re about to finish paying off the $50,000 plus (plus interest) in legal bills.

The volunteer (Lisa) eventually dropped out and her mean lawyer took over. I ran into Lisa at the Columbus North Market a year or two later, when she was about to head off for the Bay area to go to seminary. Although she asked about Vincent, she primarily asked about the health of Vincent’s stepmother, whose half-con job mortal illness had recently generated $30,000 in fraudulent fund-raising through a local TV station. This just underlined how completely under their spell Lisa was and how completely she misjudged the (negative) impact her actions had on Vincent’s life and on our lives.

After moving to Louisville, I saw that one of our surveys had gone out to Lisa, because she had apparently graduated from a Presbyterian seminary (San Francisco seminary) and perhaps she had been ordained, but my colleagues couldn’t find her listed in any church with our minister file.

Hundreds and hundreds of people have come through the exhibit area of the Presbyterian meeting in the past week. It took me a while – after handing a promotional card to her – for me to figure out who the woman maybe slightly younger than me and the young boy with her. And I had to ask Lisa her name (how could I forget – although her name had morphed in our vocabulary to a nickname). She’d graduated from seminary, gotten married, and had a kid and was not currently serving a church and was looking to reconnect both with her pastoral training and her old volunteer work by going into social work. She asked about Vincent and said – although he probably wouldn’t remember her (with cues of course he would) – but said to say hello. I even reminded her of some (mildly) fun things we had done with her (carving a pumpkin, she and Vincent playing chess) at Stephanie and Vincent’s old Cobblestone apartment.

I’m not sure why both times I’ve run into this woman I failed to confront her – inertia, exhaustion, water on the bridge (we’ve gotten along OK with Vincent’s father for the past 3-4 years even though he’s only paid $25 in child support in three years), timidity, a sense that it could still somehow be to our advantage to be in with her, kindness, or just the general difficulty of explaining the devastating impact of actions that she and her partners in crime undertook.

I can still remember talking with Stephanie minutes before she and Lisa first met, when Lisa visited Stephanie at her mother and stepfather’s house and Stephanie – a strong person but also a depressed, terrified 22-year-old college student single parent whom social workers and the courts penalized at once for being a single parent, instead of a married, full-time-homemaker parent with no job or studies, and for having professional-managerial-class aspirations.

(Lisa’s lawyer turned something Stephanie’s mother said that night into us being “elitist” – much like the current job against Senator Obama – when Stephanie was growing up across the street from Vincent’s father and his family (who briefly de facto adopted then largely rejected her), Stephanie’s father’s mother did not allow her to have any contact with the family – not only because his family was working-class but because he was a lying, violent, child-molesting drug dealer.)

I also remember Lisa also taking Vincent for private walks away from the house trying to keep him going with the child abuse stories that Vincent’s father and stepmother had half-planted in Vincent and Vincent had half-drawn from whatever abuse he witnessed his father perpetrate on other kids.

Vincent’s personality and our relationship with him (and his relationships with others) will never be the same partly because of Lisa’s actions, and no doubt our lives will be shorter also. But how do you get the courage and energy to explain this all succinctly to this woman who was probably at least 10 percent afraid of visiting us at Stephanie and Vincent’s apartment as we were every other week of trying to pick Vincent up from his father’s apartment/house?