By Sue Anne Pressley Montes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 6, 2006
Thinking back on it now, Carl Dodd realizes he expected too much, but who could blame him? He had waited 13 years to see his daughter again. He wanted to hug her and take her home with him.
But the teenager who greeted him at the police department in April was distant, doubtful. She asked him pointed questions: Why had her mother been arrested? Why were so many reporters around? Sunglasses partially hid her eyes, and when Dodd asked her to take them off so he could really see her, she refused. She made it clear she intended to stay with her grandmother in Wilmington, Del.
The reunion may have ended Dodd's determined search for his daughter, Marilyn Byrd, who disappeared with her mother from Southeast Washington when she was 4. But it was just the beginning of the long road back to a relationship with his only child, now a young woman of 17.
For people who spent their childhoods hiding out with a distraught parent, taking on new identities, the hardest part comes when the child is recovered and so-called normal life resumes. That is when they finally can afford to get angry about being used as a pawn in a nasty battle between the two people they loved the most.
Few understand Marilyn Byrd's conflicting emotions better than three people who spoke recently about their lingering bitterness over childhoods on the lam:
· Rebekah Ford, 28, a Wisconsin resident, still shudders as she recalls the most shocking moment of her childhood. It was the day the FBI came to her elementary school and showed her a flattened milk carton with her picture on it. Until then, she did not know that she was a missing child and that her name was not Heather Ann Brown.
· Sam Potash of Philadelphia, who just turned 19, can finally speak publicly about the 8 1/2 months he spent on the run with his father when he was 10. He got used to pretending his name was Ben Davis and repeating the lie that his mother -- who was desperately searching for him -- was dead.
· One of Liss Hart-Haviv's most vivid memories is trying to comfort her sobbing mother in a phone booth outside a California women's shelter after they had fled from her father. She was 10 and felt so old and alone. She even had a different name. "They called roll call at school, [and] the first thing I did every morning was lie," said Hart-Haviv, now 38 and living in Kalama, Wash.
Three years ago, Hart-Haviv started Take Root, the first national organization for adults who went through such experiences as children. The cases continue to grow: More than 200,000 children are taken each year by a parent or other family member, according to the Justice Department.
Often, the outcome for families is tragic, with feelings damaged beyond repair. "Many of our members end up losing both parents," Hart-Haviv said.
Even their memories feel like mockery.
"We spend a portion of our lives on the run from a parent, then we spend the rest of our lives on the run from our childhood," she said.
Hart-Haviv was 10 when her mother told her that her father was so volatile that they had to run away from their New York City home. "I was a daddy's girl," she said. "I never once thought of him as dangerous until Mom told me on my way out of town."
Life in hiding was lonesome, she said. Her mother worked all the time to support them. "So I raised myself," Hart-Haviv said. "She would come home at the end of the day, leave a microwave dinner for me and go to bed."
Meanwhile, her father was "obsessively" searching for her, she said. A drinking habit worsened, and he developed mental problems. By the time he found her two years later through medical records, too much had changed.
"I was scared of him," she said. "I saw my mother live in extreme fear. We were in hiding. We were afraid of being followed and our phones being tapped and people wondering who we were."
She and her father never fully reconciled. They did not have time; his health failed, and he later died. "I was his entire world," she said. "But he was looking for a little girl I just wasn't anymore. And there was no one to tell us this was understandable."
Twenty-five years later, she calls her relationship with her mother "a work in progress."
"I'm trying to get to the point of forgiveness," she said.
Becoming 'Ben'Today, Sam Potash is a tall, healthy-looking 19-year-old with a friendly manner -- and a matter-of-fact attitude about the nightmares and emotional problems he suffered after he was recovered. He recently completed his freshman year at Temple University and talks about becoming a social worker to help youths in the same predicament.
"It doesn't feel like it really happened to me anymore," he said in an interview at his mother's Philadelphia home. "It feels like a story."
His story began in July 1997 when his father, who was supposed to drop 10-year-old Sam off at a camp in New Jersey, kept driving. He drove across Canada and on to California and Texas, spending money wildly on gadgets and toys and telling Sam they were going to have a great time. Later, the boy would learn the source of the giddy display of generosity: His father had emptied Sam's $40,000 college-savings fund. After the money ran out in less than a year, Sam's father telephoned a cousin, who notified authorities.
When Abby Potash flew to Dallas to retrieve her son, she was struck by how big he had become; he had gained 30 pounds. "I never went outside," Sam says. He was so accustomed to calling himself "Ben" that, on the flight home, he told the airline attendant that that was his name. Later, he would tell his mother that he never contacted her because he was afraid of being arrested. His father, who lives in another state and phones Sam once in a while, served 16 months in jail.
Counseling was little help as Sam tried to put his life back together. He did not think the therapist could relate to what he had been through. For a long time, he was inexplicably mad at his mother, as if he wanted to make true all the negative things his father had said about her.
"He kept trying to push me to the wall," Abby Potash said. "When he first came home, I was afraid to discipline him."
Sam said he got the most comfort from talking to people who had been through a similar experience. He compares it to surviving cancer, and he is still trying to sort out his emotions.
"After seven years of struggling to find out who I am, I realize I can't," he wrote at the end of his college application essay. "All I know is, for the first time in my life, I can respond with the confident answer of at least a name: I am Sam."
Finding a Way to HealThere is hope of a happy ending. Rebekah Ford once thought that impossible, back when she found out she was not an only child, that she had a father who loved her after all.
Ford had known, deep down, that something was terribly off about her isolated life with her mother. But the truth struck her as "so unreal." The face of the 4-year-old on the milk carton was hers, but she, then 12, did not recognize herself. Her mother was under arrest, her father would be taking her home to a Chicago suburb, she had three older siblings. "I cried and cried. I was so confused," she said.
Looking back on it now, she said, her father set the standard for how to behave in such uncharted waters. He kept things light, asking her what sports she liked, telling her, "You're going to love it at our house," when she replied. Through her hurt, she liked him instantly, she said, but he was a stranger.
"We just talked," she said. "I was this awkward 12-year-old with glasses and a ponytail. I told him I wanted some L.A. Gears when I got home. . . . We talked about everything and anything, not, 'Do you know why your mom took you?' He approached things very nonchalantly, very casually."
It has taken much longer to reconnect with the mother who whisked her away. "There were times I had anger I didn't know what to do with," she said. "I was primarily angry at her. I was angry at the whole situation."
Her father made Rebekah keep in touch with her mother, but it was not until recently, when the grown-up Ford spoke on the subject of parental abduction at a Nashville convention, that her mother telephoned her with the message she had hoped to hear.
"She said, 'I'm really proud of you and what you're doing, and I'm really sorry,' " Ford said. "I think she is sorry, but she feels justified at the same time. I think she wishes it hadn't happened."
Reconnecting, SlowlyFor now, Carl Dodd is taking baby steps.
He and his wife, Paula, returned home to Fort Washington without his daughter after their disappointing meeting. "I guess I could have made her come by force," Dodd said, "but I didn't want her to come down here and be miserable."
He mailed her a belated birthday card with money inside. He knew it could not make up for the fact that it was her 17th birthday the day U.S. marshals finally found her and took her mother, Mary Jane Byrd, to jail. But Dodd wanted to mark the event somehow, to show his daughter he remembered.
Charged with a felony, Byrd was released from a D.C. halfway house last week, a move that indicates how tangled and sensitive this issue is. Although Dodd was awarded full custody of Marilyn a few months after she disappeared, the judge allowed Byrd to return to Delaware to live with the daughter she is accused of abducting until her trial this year. Dodd said the development would not change his game plan of taking things slowly.
Recently, he mailed Marilyn a cellphone and asked her in a note to let him know when she had received it. When she called to thank him, he considered it a small but important victory.
Now they talk on the phone once or twice a week, no big-deal topics, nothing much more than pleasantries. She is seeing a counselor, but they do not talk about that.
"The conversations are getting better," he said. "They're still like, 'Hi, how you doin'?' 'Fine.' And, 'Call me if you need anything.' But she says a couple of more words each time."
He is thinking about another face-to-face meeting. But he knows he might have to wait a little longer. "I'm still being patient," he said.
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