Let's suppose any of us found ourselves in this situation.
One day, your child is gone. I mean...can"t all of us have the empathy to try to "feel" what that would be like? You are crazed with grief and worry. Now the police tell you that your spouse has tried to hire someone to kill you...and probably is the one who did harm to your child.
Let that sink in. Don't think of Kaine. Think it's you...or your son and daughter-in-law.
People you love.
Would you then...do what?
Stay in the marriage? Sleep in that bed? Just leave your ONLY OTHER child alone with the spouse that LE says is involved?
If you can say for sure, you would do that...then you can cast stones at Kaine.
If you can say for sure...that, having left on advice of LE... you would hand over gladly and without fear, your only other child...then you can advocate Kaine doing so to Terri.
I think about Kaine's situation so much. The thought of handing his only surviving child into the arms of the woman LE told him tried to kill him and hurt Kyron...however would he bring himself to do that?
Are there really people who would just whistle a tune, hand over Baby K...and drive away smiling...never having the slightest worry?
BBM
This was almost exactly the situation my husband faced with his ex-wife. She abducted their son (he had primary custody), disappeared him for over six months and then had to take him to an ER when he was non-responsive and in respiratory arrest from abuse he suffered in her custody.
In other words, he was about as close to dead as a child can be. If she had been delayed by even three minutes in getting him there, the doctors told my husband his son would have been dead.
As it was, his son had a major skull fracture plus bruises and third degree burns all over his body. Little round burns, exactly the size of a cigarette. His mother said that it was her second husband.
She was charged and plea bargained down the charges to custodial interference and neglect, served time in prison and was then released. When she was released, this woman
convicted of custodial interference went back to court to try to get joint custody!
The judge did not grant her joint custody but ruled that it was in her son's best interests that she have X hours of supervised visitation per week, at a certain agency. That agency had armed guards and a social worker who stayed in the room with mother and son for the duration of every visit and who had the authority to stop her or remove her from the premises if she did anything that might be harmful to her son.
This was not someone my husband merely "believed" had hurt his son. This was a woman who had been convicted in a court of law and served time in prison for doing so.
The child therapist that was treating his son told my husband that in her opinion, having a limited and carefully supervised relationship with his mother would be good for his son. That children suffer when their relationship with one parent is cut off, even if that parent never had primary custody in the child's entire life. Sometimes the severing of the relationship is inevitably permanent (death of parent, for instance) but if it does not have to be permanent, why put the child through unnecessary pain?
So my husband did what I believe a good parent does: sucked it up, set aside his personal feelings of betrayal and distrust, made sure to deliver his son on time for visitation as ordered.
All went well for several months. His mother would have had to get away from a social worker, make her way through an airlock entrance past armed guards to get away with her son. So her next attempt to abduct him came when she showed up at my husband's home (which violated her RO and conditions of parole) to try to talk him into allowing her to take their son to MacDonalds for a special treat. My husband adamantly refused and threatened to call the police.
She disappeared. Her family has not heard from her in the 30+ years since then, despite hiring several PIs.
Last Mother's Day, I talked to my stepson on the phone. He made me cry because he told me that all his life he has been convinced that his mother disappeared because there was something so bad about him that she could not love him. And that discovering I loved him made him feel better, like maybe there was some hope for him after all.
I believe that is one of the kinds of pain that his therapist was trying to warn my husband about so many years ago. That his son was at risk for feeling unlovable, like a bad kid, if his mother just disappeared out of his life.
Sadly, that's exactly what she chose to do.
To answer your question then: my husband chose to put his son's best interests ahead of his own feelings once he had been assured that to do so would not expose his son to any danger from his mother.
Isn't that what good parents do? A good parent watches the pediatrician put a needle THAT BIG into their baby's tender flesh in order to protect them from diseases. That first day of preschool or kindergarten, a good parent shows up and acts happy and excited for their child, then goes back to the car and weeps a bit at that first passage to eventual adulthood.
A good parent understands that their child's emotional well being has to come before their own desires to wrap them up in cotton wool and keep them in a bubble until age forty... or so.
Hope that helps
