Me, Alice, Soren, and Melanie Mikell in Eugene Oregon, celebrating Alice’s 10th birthday
Hi and welcome.
We are so grateful that many of you have expressed your support for Alice Mikell, who was abandoned by her Mama, and has many cool half-siblings, but hasn’t seen her real sister in 3 years.
The first part of our family story doesn’t get told too often, so we’d like to tell it here.
The Story of Our First Family
Easy primer: Jessica birthed Alice (the big one). Melanie birthed Soren (the little one). Melanie adopted Alice. Jessica’s “rights” to Soren stem from her marriage to Melanie at the time they had both girls as their state didn’t offer second parent adoption at the time. Got it? Great.
After 8 years of co-parenting after we broke up, Melanie Mikell abandoned Alice Mikell when she was 11 years old and is currently withholding Soren Mikell.
Nothing happened. I know what you’re thinking — surely, something precipitated this. Surely I went after Melanie with a meat cleaver or something — but there’s no story behind the story here.
Actually, Alice and I were house-hunting at the time and we’d put everything in storage. Soren preferred to stay with Melanie back in Eugene and attend school. Jessica and Melanie jointly agreed to let her. After all, Alice hated that school but Soren adored her friends and wanted to continue attending. It was the first time the girls would be apart.
For Melanie, we think it was just a good time to take one child and ditch the other one. She stopped texting her eldest daughter back — more and more, until there was silence.
We often wonder what snapped in Mama to make her leave Alice. Alice wonders this often.
We also wonder what Melanie could have said to Soren — then 9 1/2 — about why she couldn’t even speak to mommy or sister again?
That’s when the horrible thoughts started. What is this child being told? What is she beginning to internalize, to see as true?
What was Soren’s reaction to that?
What would yours be? How would you treat Melanie Mikell if you were this 9-year-old child who had only ever known truth and love? She’d probably be more likely to cling to her Mama and to be grateful for the perceived protection.
Further, if Soren trusted a tale about how dangerous and bad her mommy was, why does my baby, Soren, think her mama cut off communication with Alice, who was left in these unsafe clutches??! Does Soren worry about Alice? Does she worry about herself, thinking we are lurking around every corner ready to snatch her?
Is that what it feels like to be snatched? Constant fear, forever?
…but shouldn’t we show her we’d never leave her? And always be right there?
Which of these would scare a frightened child more?
The other thing I think about every day is that Soren lives 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, with a mama who she has literally seen walk away from her child.
Let that sink into your 9-year-old mind.
How would you act around your mama?
How would you perform in school?
What would you tell your friends?
If you’re a parent or friend, please think about how you perceive Soren or other children in abusive situations like extreme withholding/kidnapping because perhaps they seem too happy or high-performing or devoted to the abusive parent. And be clear: even mild withholding is abusive.
There are reasons children like this look happy and treat their withholding parents as nicely as possible, with exuberant love and devotion. This is more concerning. Under-performance is reassuring. That kid feels safe to fail, to yell, to act indifferently.
Melanie Mikell’s Side
Melanie’s said in one court statement that after 11 years of parenting Alice that she was never her mom, was coerced into adopting her, and that Alice was always solely Jessica’s daughter. That she doesn’t think their marriage was valid. The adoption meant noting. None of this is or was ever true.
She alleged no violence, no kidnap threats in her court statement. This is because there weren’t any.
Melanie has been a parent to her daughters. She did Alice’s insemination. She was there in triage at 4:53 a.m. to catch baby Alice. She advocated we stop using fluoridated “baby water.” She forced the kids to eat kale for their snack. She held their hair while they vomited. And she did every other daily task that goes into raising kids.
Thousands of Christmas cards and tags, birthday notes, and photographs attest to Melanie’s being a parent to her girls.
When Soren was 9 and Alice was 11, all that ended.
Our Flickr is a good place to have a glimpse into our family life over the years, and it’s where I (Mommy) write to Soren every couple of days, since Soren knows this is where her family pics and childhood memories lives.
Melanie blocked Alice’s texts and did not respond when Alice asked where she was and if she still loved her.
Sometimes Alice tries reaching out to her pappy and grandma, too — Charles Mikell and Linda Mikell.
They do not respond.
Alice has not heard from her aunts, uncles, and cousins on the Mikell side either.
“Did Mama tell them lies about me, too?” Alice used to ask me.
Abandonment by extended family doesn’t seem to exist in any research. Even when families of divorce drift apart, the grandparents don’t tend to wash their hands of the kids, so we’d love to talk to others in this situation.
I believe that if your response to your 11-year-old granddaughter asking for love is silence, that’s really all I need to know about you. If your response to the woman you once called a daughter-in-law (these people still have my PhD, probably took it off the wall by now, though) asking for answers is silence…well…I think that’s an answer to who this family is.
In this case, we suspect that a combination of extremely Southern/republican/anti-gay sentiment helped them walk away from a child that “wasn’t theirs.” Yet, they have been loving grandparents to adopted children. Surely, they understand that it all feels the same to the 11-year-old you’re ghosting.
Please reach out to us if this has happened in your family. We’d love to communicate.
The story gets some drama
We do know that Melanie Mikell told Soren Mikell there was a restraining order against her non-bio mom (tldr:there never was).
This story was repeated by 4J school district teachers in Eugene, Oregon, at Charlemagne Elementary School to multiple parents who were told to not let Soren’s non-bio mom near her.
Yet the teachers decided to hold an emergency meeting on a field trip with parent chaperones to announce that Jessica was “a flight risk” and a court had said she was to have no contact with Soren.
If you’re heard this, please go make a call or two and verify. I won’t be offended. I wish everyone charged with protecting my child had ever done so or might do so now.
The principal was Eric Anderson, who has since moved with Soren Mikell to Roosevelt Middle School in Eugene to take up his new post there. Please urge the school district to protect children who are in abusive situations by doing their due diligence in custody situations. If you are in a position to teach this info to schools and help do advocacy, please know our family will do anything to help that we can.
We believe this is an important story to share with your school district! We wish all parents would work with school districts everywhere to deal with child withholding with:
1. honesty
2. clear policies that put children first and
3. foreground due diligence in circumstances of child abuse.
The school did not respond when called out.
Would this be your district? Your principal?
Are you sure?
Soren may still believe we threatened to take her from her mama or that teachers, courts, or police have helped keep her safe because she is being kept isolated from accurate information. If you care about children, tell Soren the truth. Loudly. Tell every child the truth. Many many many times.
A lawyer pal in another state told me it was totally fine to send Alice to the door one day when Melanie isn’t home. She came back crying, “She saw me. She recognized me; I know she did. She wouldn’t look up at me or talk to me. She’s afraid of me.”
All because no one thought correcting this lie was worth it.
But I hope that you understand more deeply now that ending child abuse isn’t really the domain of the abuser. It’s in all our hands, and we’re all counting on you, stranger readers. You have so much power.
Liars count on your silence and social graces.
This is a horrific situation. But if anyone in the community had just…said it…broken into the cage of lies in which these children live…think of what you could have planted for the mental health of my child.
Of any child you know in a similar situation.
How do People Become This?
Many have asked. We still have no idea.
Melanie was a loving partner until she left the relationship suddenly when the girls were 1 and 3, but she co-parented the girls for many years on Sundays and Mondays when she was off work.
She displayed no signs that she was not able to parent the girls or treat them equally until the very end.
One nice aunt suggested that Melanie might have Huntington’s disease — which seems unlikely, but shows how perplexing this behavior has been (as well as how sad and life-altering for Melanie as well as the girls).
Yet now, we can only presume there are many, many more tales behind Soren’s understanding of why she cannot speak to her sister, great-grandparents, mom, and extended family.
We don’t know what this means for Soren’s future or how to best lessen the damage so that she can be an adult without the many adverse long-term effects of alienation and extreme withholding.
We welcome talking to anyone who has been through something similar. If there are right or wrong ways to learn the truth and heal, please contact us.
If you’re been through this and have an ok relationship with either parent, please tell me how. I don’t want my child to lose both her parents. Seeing my eldest daughter lose a parent to an unusually difficult abandonment has taught me a lot more than most parents know about love, hate, and the meaning of family than any sperm donor story could have.
Our Goal
This page is for Alice and Soren.
But it’s also for all children who live on the spectrum of alienation, withholding, and kidnap — as well as children whose parents have abandoned them.
Please understand that these are two sides of the same coin. These aren’t opposites.
Parents who abandon aren’t strictly apathetic toward their children and parents who kidnap aren’t strictly loving. Both harm their children with these oh-so-similar acts.
Let Melanie’s lesson to the world be that parents who abandon ARE parents who withhold (kidnap is a legal term often reserved for kids of straight parents — I avoid it here for legal reasons, not because it feels any different to Soren or other children who are taken from a primary parent and held without contact).
We need to treat both cases more similarly, as they grow from the same seed. Abandonment and withholding are mirror twins.
Also, let Melanie’s story help you understand that parents alone don’t do these things to children — they do it because communities and authorities help them.
Any act of truth-telling you can take in your own community is a blessing to Soren and we appreciate you.
If you don’t know Soren personally, you can help by working with an alienation or abandonment organization or the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. A gay organization.
You can send pictures of Soren from school events to Alice, who appreciates as many as she can get (which is not very often) (I appreciate them, too, but fewer people have sympathy for a left-behind adult — please think of Alice first).
If you do know Soren personally, you can help by investigating the truth and then telling it.
Sometimes your voice is the only one a child gets to hear.
Our Call to Action
Soren has not seen her mommy or sister in three years.
If it was you who had been ripped from your mom and sibling at the age of 9 (from whom you’d never been separated) what would you have wanted someone to do for you?
Our entire family asks that you do just that for Soren.
