parental alienation
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I remember the birth because it was winter. I remember the smell of disinfectant, and Peter’s hands, warm and steady, holding mine. I remember feeling nothing and thinking that must be what peace was. They said she was small, fragile. He called her perfect. I told myself I’d given him a gift. I said it
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She was born beneath a silence, her first breath woven through with forgetting. They pressed a story into her skin, but the ink dissolved before it dried. She drank Lethe in her mother’s arms, unwitting, unknowing, learning the taste of absence as nourishment. Her lullabies were pauses, her cradle padded with omissions. Two fathers circled
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Every divorce spawns three stories: his, hers, and the child’s. Each is stitched together from fragments of memory, grievance, and hope. And each claims the mantle of truth. The father’s voice speaks of betrayal. He sees manipulation in every delay, every “maybe later” whispered down the line of a phone that never rings. He feels
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I didn’t expect him to say thank you. But I thought he might see what I was trying to do. I arrived early. Always do. Old habit from court. Always be early, always observe the room before you’re observed. The café was sterile, unmodern, one of those places that pretends to be warm but smells
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There is a silence that precedes distortion…an eerie stillness, not unlike the hush before the hunter’s arrow finds its mark. In cases of psychological alienation, especially those born from maternal betrayal, the silence is never benign. It is structured. Operative. A veil drawn across the soul’s eyes. It is in that silence that memory begins
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He is no longer just a man. He is a diagram. An intersection of roles: Husband, Father, Stepfather, part-time Custodian, full-time Protector. (Son?) Keeper of calm, absorber of blame, receiver of news after the fact. He exists in margins— between court orders and weekend bag zips, between birthday cake and utility bills, between the memory
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He does not cry when the door closes. He has trained himself not to. That training began when he was six, when he wasn’t allowed to bring his Easter egg home. Now, at eight, he sits up straight in the back seat of Mum’s car, a Tesco bag rustling near his feet, a hand-drawn Sonic
Reade Saunders 