My daughter is a Northern Lights (Philip Pullman) fanatic and was desparate to see the new film so we all traipsed along to the movies to watch it. She was fascinated with the whole idea of having a “daemon”: a fundamental part of each person that their daemon’s shape changes according to the mood that the person is in, often giving away that person’s mood before their human can hide it from the outside world. It’s rather like wearing your soul on the outside of your body for all to see.

 In the same way that you cannot live without a soul (many would believe), these humans cannot live without their daemon other than in a kind of “half life” state, barely living. These humans are distraught without their daemons and their daemons distraught without their humans. The fact that they appear to be physically distinct from each other is not the reality; the reality is that these two forms of the human exist as one and are inseperable. Life without the other is barely living……

There is one scene where a little boy – Billy Costa – escapes from the sanatorium where these children are kept by the Magesterium (the baddies). The Magisterium have found a way of separating the human from their daemon by an operation called an “intercission”. They manage to perform this operation on Billy Costa and the result is devastating.

 Lyra (the heroin) finds Billy who has managed to escape from the sanatorium. He has hidden in a shack under a pile of blankets. When Lyra throws back the blankets she sees this kid, barely alive with hollow black eyes, ghostly white face, shaking uncontrollably and weak with the despair of being separted from his daemon.

At that point in the film, I had to look away. I couldn’t let the children see the tears filling in my eyes. Billy Costa looked and seemed to feel the same way that I feel from being separated from my children. My children are my soul, they’re my very being, they’re my reason for living, they are fundamentally a part of my flesh and blood, my soul, my thoughts, my everything. To have them removed from me so that I and they are living in this kind of half existence is excrutiatingly distressing.

I am so distressed that i have been diagnosed as suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and having to be sedated at night to help me get through the nightmares and sleepless nights. My dreams are full of having to rescue my children from collapsing buildings, trapped beneath their founations, or from a sinking ship or from a variety of horrific scenes in which my children are in severe distress and I’m trying to rescue them, find them, hear them, talk to them. Sometimes, they can hear and see me in my dreams and other times its as if I am a shadow and they can’t see me coming to rescue them….

They are also having these nightmares: witches chasing them, being shipwreaked and drowning, crashing cars, having to escape from all kinds of baddies such as vampires and monsters. They are often trying to find me in their dreams and are calling out for me to rescue them. They wake upset if they were calling out for me and I wasn’t there to rescue them.

 They are desperate to be with me, their mother. I am to them the way they are to me – inseparable. If we are separated from each other, we both pine, don’t sleep properly, have nightmares, wake up crying, can’t concentrate,feel hurt, angry, despairing, resentful and just so desperate to see each other and be with each other.

My son tells me he wakes up most morning crying as he misses me so much. He is having nightmares most nights and is suffering bouts of anger and distress.  Everytime I have to say goodby to him he sobs and sobs and clings to me begging me not to go and asking how many days it will be before he can see me again…………..He told me that this boy at school just said “are you the boy who always cries when your mummy goes?”…………………

My youngest daughter keeps asking me when she can come and tell the court that she misses her mummy too much and wants to be with her. She cries and clings to me every time I have to go. She sits in her school mass with tears running down her cheeks whilst I sit in the parents seating area; we simply have no choice but to spend the mass just looking at each other, unable to touch each other or hold each other or even talk. We just look and look and look, and she cries and I try my hardest not to cry……….

My eldest daughter is a little more stoic externally so is better able to hide how she feels. When I leave her, she clings and whispers “make sure you say goodby to me last as I want to make sure that I am the last person who touches you so that I can feel your hug around me after you’ve gone and I wont be able to forget the hug…..”.

Mothers and children are like the humans and daemons in the Golden Compass; neither feels truly able to separate from the other as they are emotionally and psychologically so intertwined. To forcibly separate from each other is cruel to the highest degree and causes the most profound heartache.

I will not be able to get the image of Billy Costa out of my mind………………………

For all of those spouses who think you should be trying to separate your children from your ex spouse – please consider the fundamental bond between parent and child which should not be ripped apart……