On Reaching Out To A Lost Child

It is now some nine years since I lost contact with my thirteen-year-old son. At the time of the loss, I was sad and angry in equal measure. It was all so unnecessary and served no purpose except to exact revenge, by a super vindictive, mentally unstable, ex-wife, determined to destroy the only thing that I had left from my marriage to her.

She took my house, my car, my expensive business computer, personal belongings, and even men's clothes which served no purpose to her at all. And then she took the boy.

In the end, having spent a small fortune looking for the boy, without success, after five years, I moved on. I met somebody else, my present lovely wife who is an absolute angel.

Then, not too long ago I finally re-established contact with my eldest son by my first, equally vindictive, ex-wife. I have to tread on a great many eggshells and dance around the truth as my son will not hear a single word against his mother. That’s ok, I can do that if it means holding on to the little contact that I have with my son.

Then, right out of the blue, I got a message from a reader of the story I published in Medium, ‘In Search Of A Lost Child’. Although the original story was written and published almost exactly two years ago, Patricia Ross has only just read it. And something Patricia said to me resonated with me at a very optimistic level.

What Patricia said was “Don’t give up hope.” And it made me realize that that was exactly what I had done, I had given up all hope. And I thought that that was really not fair to the boy. It is not his fault that his manipulative mother did what she did. At thirteen he had no way of knowing that he was being fed a pack of lies by an unstable, pathological liar of a mother.

And so, re-invigorated to once again try to re-establish contact with the boy, now a twenty-two-year-old young man, I have tried to set things in motion.

The path I have chosen is potentially fraught with danger, but I have no other choice. I have written an email to my eldest son, with whom I have re-established contact, and who I know is in contact with his younger half-brother, to ask him if he could sound out my younger son about whether or not he wants any contact with me.

I felt the need to explain some of the background pertaining to the younger boy’s disappearance so that he could understand why I needed him as a go-between. And therein lies the problem.

Some time ago, my younger son’s manipulative mother inveigled herself into the company of my three children from my first marriage for ulterior motives. Basically her reason for chumming up to my first three children, who she previously hated with a vengeance and constantly called fit to burn, was to turn them against me to lend credibility to her cock and bull story that I was such a bad Dad, that nobody wanted anything to do with me. In a nutshell, those three children she once hated, are now convenient allies.

Now then, this shameless woman has been so successful at cozying up to my other three children that they will not hear a word said against her. She can be quite charming when she wants to be, to the point that anybody who has only seen that side of her, cannot accept what an absolute monster she can be.

And so, although I am hopeful of my elder son’s help in this matter, of being an effective go-between, I am also half expecting to hear that I have ruffled his feathers with what I have had to tell him about my nasty ex-wife, his younger half brother’s mother. There is even the possibility that I will even re-lose my elder son, all over again. It is a risk I have felt compelled to take, whatever the outcome.

So the email has been sent and all I can do now is wait to see what sort of a reaction I get from my elder son. Either he will understand what I have told him and help me, or he will tell me he never wants to hear from me again and cut contact once more. Only time will tell.