Neither Bro nor Mom know why I chose to estrange myself from the family. Sis may have a clue, I don’t know. But I have things to say.

(The next day)  Bro’ and Sis’ letters are written.  Not detailed, and actually quite short, less than a page each.  But I believe they say what I need to say.  Mom’s is going to be a lot harder.

I will do the letters, then let them sit for a while, and see if they are still what I want to say.  That will allow me time to be sure of the content, and this whole process.  I am hoping that this final exercise will let me ‘turn the page’ and be done with all this crap.

Typical of abused kids, we were all over-achievers. Sis got her CA first time ’round, as if there was ever any doubt. She’s the one who caught me smoking first, on the train, and raked me over the coals for it. I later learned she was smoking at the time herself. Hypocrite. She had a serious beau in university, and they lived together for a while afterwards, both doing well financially and career-wise. They bought themselves matching raccoon coats. She looked okay, he looked really goofy. His dad was a raging alcoholic and I suspect he was on his way. He left her. I’m not sure she ever really knew why, as she went to lunch with him for ‘closure’ years later, but apparently didn’t get it. She didn’t date anyone after that, not for years, until she met S.

As I have said, I am as certain as I can be that she was abused by Dad as well. She was the first girl, though, and let herself be molded by Mom. She became the accountant Mom could have been had her father not pulled her out of school. She became Mom’s confidante later, I’m sure. I’m certain she knows a good deal more of the history than I do. Sis was the first to have a meltdown. She was off for six months, leaving a lucrative job with a major accounting firm. She was in therapy, and wouldn’t talk to Mom for months. But she was savvy, and manipulative, a user of people. She realized she could get a lot of mileage out of it, and turned the tables. From then on, she had the upper hand in that relationship, and Mom cow-towed to her. Sis did just enough to keep Mom eternally grateful to her, and milked it for all it was worth.

She rarely took my side, and did so only when she thought it could be worth something to her. More often than not, she played Mom and I off each other like puppets. True, during my meltdown, when I needed money, she loaned it to me. I repaid her promptly, with the interest she had paid on her line of credit. That loan came back to haunt me a few years later, but by then I was much more aware.

When I first went off work for my major depression in December of 1995, I didn’t tell either of them at first.  I was ashamed at not having been able to deal with this on my own.  Over Christmas, we were at Sis’ place.  She was with S (Beau #2) by this time, and they had one of his diving buddies and his wife over for Christmas Dinner.  I think Bro’ was there, too.  I was totally bewildered by the dynamic of that meal.  Sis was talking about going to Stratford Festival and wanted me to come…say what?  I reacted flippantly:  this was out of the blue and totally foreign to the relationship we had.  She was making like she considered me a friend, and I couldn’t figure out what was up.  After Christmas, in a phone conversation, I told her I was off work and had been since early December.  I can’t remember exactly her response, except that it inferred that diving buddy’s wife, who was a psychologist, had confirmed I had ‘issues.’  Ahhh, that explained the nicey-nice Sis had made at that dinner!  I had the clarity to recognize the whole thing as pathetic, but it was still surprising to see how low Sis would stoop.

When I came out a few weeks later and decided to tell my family, Sis was out of town on business. I left a few messages, letting her know it was important, wanting to talk to her before I went to visit Mom. I wanted her to be prepared to be there for Mom, because I knew Mom was not going to take my being gay well. She never bothered to call me back. She didn’t give a crap about Mom, unless it was convenient or served her need to do so.  Oh, and Mom’s reaction?  “Did I ever tell you that you were adopted?”  Thankfully I had had enough therapy by this time to recognize it as a desperate attempt to distance herself from the homosexuality.

By spring of 1999, Sis was talking about breaking up with S, but she wanted to do some renovations on her house, too.  She knew my spouse was skilled in construction.  She began this speech about how family helped each other out, and that help was not always repaid in the same manner as it was originally given.  I knew exactly what she was referring to, and recognized she was trying to make me feel obliged to her, because she had loaned me money in the spring of ’96.  I told her that Spouse and I would gladly come and do the renovations for her, but that it would have to be on our schedule, because summer was spouse’s busy time and she had to work when she could.  Sis was miffed but said nothing.  The next time I spoke with her was August, I think.  So, how had the breakup gone?  “Oh, I realized I was making a mountain out of a mole hill.   We’re still together.”  He was doing the renovations.  Watch this, I thought.  As soon as the renos are done, S will be a goner.  I was tempted to warn him, because Mom had done exactly the same thing.  Sure enough, S. was gone by the end of September!

It was about this time that I decided enough was enough.  In early October I wrote my mother and sister to tell them to leave me the heck alone, that I wanted nothing to do with them.

Graduating honors in one of the most difficult science disciplines a year younger than most wasn’t enough. Bro’ followed in Dad’s footsteps, becoming a pilot. Then a Colonel and a General, moving up those ranks until he became ultimately, CO of a whole section. But, his personal life is a mess. He also married Mom the first time around, right down to the accounting aspirations and the alcoholism, the sewing and the mood swings. And the wandering eye, but then again, they were birds of a feather in that respect. Wife #2 was a more watered down version. He has raised his two kids the way we were raised, barking his orders.

His daughter is not doing well, that I know. I feel for her. Mom is an alcoholic, Dad is a General, and behaves as such. I once tried to get him to see her side of things, but nothing doing. She was about 14, and as far as he was concerned, she ought to be making efforts to keep in touch with him.

I was viewed as an embarrassment. Certainly, there was lots of drama in my life, and I didn’t always handle it well. I did some ‘out there’ things, and behaved badly sometimes. Neither Sis nor Bro ever did. They toed the line. So, I can understand that in his line of work, security being what it is, he kept me at a distance. Bro’ did not share things with me. I never heard from him. We lived in the same city, but I saw him only rarely, and only when I made the overtures.

He did things like inviting Spouse and I to a full-formal dress New Year’s ‘do’ at the base where he was CO. He knew full well I would not attend an event like that. He invited us for Thanksgiving Dinner one year. We always visited Spouse’s family for holidays, but we decided to make an exception this time, to be able to accept my brother’s invitation. A few days before Turkey Day, I call to ask what day, when, what can we bring. “Huh? We’re having Thanksgiving Dinner at S’s parent’s place. You’re welcome to join us, but all her aunts and uncles will be there too.” He claimed to have no recollection of having invited us. I remember the conversation, it’s not something I would make up, you know?

One time, SIL calls me to ask if it’s possible she saw my Bro’ on the news. She knew he was high up in the Forces. Under what circumstances? Appointed as co-Chair for that friendly fire incident by the US that happened in Afghanistan. I don’t know anything about it but call Mom and sure enough, it’s true. This is about the time I’m corresponding with a retired journalist living in the midwest US, someone I met on a dog group forum.

I had cut all ties with Mom in the fall of ’99. In Aug of ’01 she left me a cryptic “It’s Mom, call me” voicemail message, early in the morning. That time was sort of a family code for something important. If it was a social call, it was always evening or weekend afternoons. This was purposeful, of course. She wanted to be sure I would call back. I did, thinking there was some family emergency. Nope. She just ‘missed me’ she said. She talked about my coming out, how she had ‘accepted it’, but had been dismayed when I contacted an aunt and told her. I told Mom that if she had truly accepted my being gay, she wouldn’t care if the relatives knew. She wanted to see me. I planned a visit for Remembrance Day, thinking that would give me time to work up to it, or call it off if I didn’t think it would work. I started getting headaches, and feeling stressed. Ultimately, I told her I wasn’t ready, and would let her know when I was, and not to push.

Anyway, during one of our chats, I told her about having sent a link to an article about Bro’ from the Globe & Mail to my penpal in the US. She was not pleased with this, and thought Bro’ should know. I viewed it as no big deal, seen as how it was a public webpage. Mom, of course, told Bro’. One day, the phone was ringing long distance. We had been getting a lot of calls from out-of-area numbers. I generally do not answer if I don’t know the number, but I did this time. It was Bro’, calling from the airport in Toronto. He tore a strip off me down one side and up the other about having sent that article. I was dumbfounded. He barked at me as if I was a child, or one of his low-ranked staff. No reasonable discussion occurred. My argument that it was a public webpage held no water. It was one of his family members who had sent the webpage, and that was, apparently, unforgiveable. I guess it came up on some radar, and he got embarrassed.

I was rattled. Spouse heard my end of the conversation, and couldn’t figure out what all the hubbub was about. I burst into tears when I got off the phone. I had always looked up to my brother, and had retained him as my last familial connection when I cut ties with Mom and Sis, because he hadn’t done anything up to that point to warrant not doing so. This had begun to change, though. I later called him at home, got his voicemail and left a message apologizing, saying that if I had known it would be a problem for him, I would not have done it. Which was true, and still is. But I was pissed, too. He had cut me out of his life. He didn’t talk to me about what he was doing, the sensitivity or security of what he was doing, so how the fuck was I supposed to know it would be a problem for him? And he had some nerve, talking to me like that.

Later that summer, I got an invite to attend the ceremony for his taking over command of another base. I wouldn’t have bothered to waste the time or money getting there. And I am sure that is exactly what he hoped for.

I didn’t hear from him for months after that. The next time he called, his tone was as if nothing had ever happened. Mine was clipped, and he asked what was up. I let him know that I had not liked the way I had been spoken to the last time we spoke, and I was not sure what I wanted to do about it, so could I have his number and I would get in touch with him if and when I felt like it? I didn’t even know that that was what I was going to say until the words came out of my mouth. He was surprised. He gave me the number; I never called. Enough was enough.

Where we are now:

From time to time, Sis has communicated with my daughter.  I have been open about my relationship with my family, things that have been said, etc. and why I chose to estrange myself.  Daughter has always been free to pursue her relationship with them.  Sis wrote daughter again in December, mentioning Mom was living with her, getting older;  she had taken six months off work and when she had come back, had been fired.  She had another job and was suing.  Daughter was going to write back, so I took the opportunity to use the grapevine, so to speak.

So, round about January this year, an envelope comes in the mail, addressed to me. I recognize the handwriting as Bro’s. It’s a notecard, with a letter inside saying lots of time has passed and we should try to reconnect. Mom is getting older. He will be retiring this coming summer, they bought S’ parent’s cottage, did we build a house on the land we bought? Clearly, he’d been talking to Sis. Bla, bla, bla. He includes his e-mail addy. After mulling it over for a bit, I realize that these overtures will continue unless I put a stop to them, because Mom’s 80th is this May.

I set up a hotmail addy, and send him an e-mail explaining that I simply do not wish to have any relationship with my family, and that’s it’s thought-out decision, not a coup de tete. And that they’ll be fine celebrating Mom’s 80th without me, and they can both say they tried. I tell him not to bother responding, but I figure he will anyway, and I am right. He thinks I am still angry, and his wording tells me he thinks its about that chewing out he gave me. He doesn’t get it.

I called Doc’s office (shrink) and he said he would see me. Tomorrow. I have a hearing, but we’ll just have to wrap up early. I am now faced with breaking in a whole new manager. The assignment is for 12 to 18 months. She is going to need to know something, but I don’t want to go into all the gory details. How do I phrase it? What do I say? How much is enough? Questions for tomorrow, I guess. Doc was always pretty good about that stuff.

Okay, heard back from tomorrow’s rep and the early wrap-up should not be a problem. So that’s one logistic dealt with. The other is the dog, and his ability to escape the yard because of the snow, but we’re going to shovel along the fence later. I already did by the front gate, so he is now limited from that side. However, since I just got back from retrieving him from the street (retrieving my retriever, again with the irony!) clearly he can still get out via the neighbour’s yard.

I do seem to be beating around the bush today. The topic of Mom is obviously a sore one. When did she begin to reject me? Based on my limited knowledge of her history, it could easily have been before I was born. Mom (and Dad) grew up poor, in Pointe-St-Charles and St. Henri respectively. Mom always aspired to the Westmount life.

Things I know: her mother would take her walking in NDG and Westmount on Sundays, and they would admire the doors of the houses where the ‘rich people’ lived. She had a sister who died when she was young. She had to help her mother ‘do’ for her four brothers, ie, make the beds and such. One brother kept bread under his pillow. She liked school, was good in math, and the nuns said she could do well, go to college. But, her father came and got her out of class when she was 14, saying she was a girl, didn’t need the education, and the family needed the money. Her parents were separated at some point. I never knew my maternal grandfather until my grandmother died when I was 11. Grandmaman was either Ukranian or Polish, having come over with her family in the early 1900′s. Swederski or Sudeski, something like that was the family name.

Mom is an excellent seamstress. She made matching clothes for Sis and I when we were younger. For herself, she always chose the high-end Vogue patterns. She was able to have the family look better than our means as a result. There is a picture I remember from the 60′s, Mom and Dad dressed up for a New Year’s Eve Mess Dinner. Mom looks like Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. She knew it, too. We were catholic, and it was the time of JFK’s presidency. They were the epitome of success in the early 60′s and she tried to raise us like the Kennedys in some ways. We had some Time-Life books at home, to which we had easy access. Science, the Earth, Early and Classical History. Sis and I took dance classes, she ballet, I, tap. Brownies/Guides/Scouts. Bro’ was an altar boy. Manners, not just regular stuff, but more detailed ‘high-class’ things. We had a copy of that Etiquette book, for pete’s sake! Scholastics was primary.

Because of her poor beginnings, I guess, Mom had definite ‘class’ goals. She has told us she never loved our father and should never have had kids. Oh, and that I was a mistake. Despite this, Dad’s career as a pilot in the military was her ticket out to the world, and was a better living than many. He was, after all, an officer. Not having to stay in any one place more than 4 years was perfect for her, alcoholic that she is. She could always blame whatever on the changing environment, telling herself she would be happier when we moved. But Dad’s career didn’t go far enough for either of them, I guess, and Bro’ had to take that one on. Sis became a CA, mom’s dream obviously. Sometimes I feel sorry for the sibs, feeling obliged to live their lives for the ‘rents unfulfilled desires. Doesn’t excuse their behaviours as adults, though.

I know that university for the two eldest, one boy, one girl, was mandatory. I was the odd man out. They had the kids they needed to fulfill their own unfulfilled life’s ambitions, there was no mission for me. Good in a way, but detrimental, too, because I was often forgotten, and I had no value in that regard. But maybe that was because of the damage they’d already done, too. Who knows? I do know that of the three of us, I am the brightest. We’re DND kids, and IQ’s were tested early on. We were all above average, but I was beyond the other two. In many ways, tho’, I have done the most with the least, so chew on that, folks.

I remember Mom telling me that I always wanted to follow the other two to school, even tho’ there was a 4-year difference. I would have had breakfast, but she would make herself bacon and eggs and would sit me on the table and let me have some bacon. That would make me forget that I had to stay behind, until one day, it wasn’t enough compensation. She said that was when she knew she had ‘lost me’ or words to that effect. I was about 3. So maybe that’s when I fell into her bad graces.

Could have been before, tho’. With her class aspirations, and Dad’s income, one boy and one girl would have made the ‘perfect’ family. Then I came along, and she didn’t want me. I was an accident. Certainly, having one more mouth to feed, clothe, raise, was going to put a dent in the finances. Dad was posted to a recruiting unit at the University in Quebec City and they couldn’t afford a big enough place in town, so she lived in St. Elzear with the two kids, increasingly pregnant, and he came back on weekends. She hated it. She told us many times in later years. There was a baby boom and when the time came, she couldn’t get a ‘reservation’ for me to be born at the regular hospital, so I was born at the hospital for unwed mothers, run by nuns. She talked about how she thought the nuns never believed she and Dad were married, that they judged her for having three kids out of wedlock. She would have been ashamed. All in all, I arrived under less than auspicious circumstances. Since Sis was by now 4 years old, Dad probably started ‘doing his thing’ with Sis right about that time. If she became aware of the abuse before I was born, she must have prayed mightily for a boy. But, I was a girl. More problems down the road.

Under analysis, I really believe that’s when it started. Before I was even born. I never had a chance, not from the get-go. And me being who I was didn’t help matters at all.

My earliest memory is of life in PEI, in the winter. PMQ’s were trailers. One storm so bad, the neighbour had to dig us out. Dad was gone a lot, on flight trips. I’ve been told I liked to wipe my nose on my sleeve, so mom cut ‘em all short. I learned to wipe my nose on my upper arm. I don’t remember that. I remember a party or festival of some sort at the one house at the mouth of the drive to the trailer park. I remember a ‘fish’ game where you had a pole and tossed the string over a sheet, and you ‘caught’ a prize. I remember thinking it was neat, and Mom saying it was junk. I seem to remember something about ‘charity’, too. That would have been a huge thing.

Next memory is when we go to visit the next house in NS. We’re all in our sock feet ’cause the floors have been freshly finished. I have to pee. I’m in the bathroom upstairs and I hear the whole family heading out the door, right below the bathroom, in fact. I hear car doors. I am panicking, because I think they are going to leave me. I am belittled for crying and thinking so. And so begins the pattern.

I have long hair, because girls have long hair. I have lots of it, but it’s fine. Mom gives me home body perms. I hate the process. I have to sit still, the curlers have little prickys on them that hurt, the curlers are on so tight it pulls my hair, and the stuff stinks. But I have to sit through it because my looks don’t quite measure up. I am a bed wetter, causing untold hassles for mom. Sis and I share a double bed, but we quickly end up with twins, because of this. I am told the added expense is my fault, by Sis. Already, she gets the game plan. She’s what, 7? 8?

I go off to play, often outside the permitted boundaries. We are not permitted to go into other people’s houses. I get involved in play, and don’t leave when I need to pee, and refuse the offered access to the bathroom at the premises. I have a few accidents, walking home bawling my eyes out with wet pants. Mom must have been horrified. Even then, I hated to go home. And of course, the running out of the bathroom, the house, stark naked.

I am a tomboy, independant, and don’t always do exactly as I’m told. I play in the woods, in the creek, with tadpoles and frogs. I prefer Bro’s Meccano to Sis’ Barbie, but that’s discouraged. Although, I do recall liking Barbie’s well-endowed chest, once sticking round-headed pins into her breasts to make them anatomically correct. And I get more independant as time goes on, and I’m not girly. I am rambunctious. One of the best toys I ever got was the pedal-push blue jeep a family down the road left me when they moved because their kids had all grown out of it. “My very first car! Independance!” I remember thinking.

I am a slob with my clothes and my toys. The others are tidy. I get into all sorts of minor scrapes. And I am often injured. because I am clumsy. I swear I spent my whole childhood wearing a Bandaid. Mom’s reaction to my injuries is anger. I never got that; I don’t get it, even now. And I am always sick. I get colds, the flu, earaches. It’s not appreciated by Mom, that much I know. I do know it is their own stupid fault. They both smoked, and I have allergies.

We get a trailer, and spend most of the summer at Lake Pleasant, where I am in heaven. Nature, water, sunshine. Parental supervision is a little more lax there. Dad stays in town during the week, coming up on weekends, except for his vacation. Maybe Mom is doing a little more drinking, maybe she’s fooling around. Maybe they both are. Who cares? Life is good when we’re there, except I am always sunburned, and injured somehow. Certainly, the messages that I don’t measure up have already started to have an effect. The clumsiness comes from lack of confidence, I know that now. After all, while I’m not an athlete, I am a perfectly capable hockey player, kayaker, jogger. Never injured during sports, in fact, except for two minor sprains.

The ‘not telling me’ has already started. It’s a DND school. At the end of the school year, we’re asked who has been posted. We’re due, and teacher knows this. Are you moving? I don’t know. I haven’t been told we are. Transcript is therefore not prepared for the move. I had earned a bunch of Brownie badges, but didn’t get them because we up and left without notice.

LaMacaza, QC, a Bomarc missile base. We have to live off-base at first because there is no PMQ for us in the Officer’s Loop. Dad goes to Florida for training, Mom accompanies him. Grandmaman comes to look after us, and she is there when school starts. We’re sent to the school in town, not on the base. French school. With nuns. Fine for the older kids, who are both on the high school side, and are both bilingual. Me, I have lost all my French. I am told don’t worry, the teacher will speak English. You’ll be fine. Not true. I understand NOTHING. The first few months are hell as I learn; I cry every day for a month. By Christmas, I have the best written French grades in the class. Grades 3 and 4. We are learning the organ, and I pick it up quick. Bro’ is playing competitive volleyball, and is doing very well. He’s a natural athlete, but I don’t recall any family support for the athletic side of things.

We move on to the base. It’s 68/69, and Bro’ and Sis are early/mid teens. Bro’ starts a Friday night hop for the teens, names it Greenwich Village. He and Sis both attend. Dad goes to beer call at the mess, every Friday. I don’t remember him doing this in NS, so something must have changed in their relationship. Mom’s having gyne problems and ends up with a hysterectomy while we’re there, so she likely was more hell to live with than usual. I remember yelling starts about then. The post-op protocol at the time is for HRP and Valium. Likely when Mom gets hooked. Anyway, Mom feels sorry for herself stuck at home on Friday nights, so she sends me across the street to the snack bar for french fries and chocolate bars. I learn to console myself with food. We get Vachon cakes in our lunches every day, money to buy soft drinks on Fridays.

We are again close to nature, and I spend a lot of time exploring the woods around the base, and fending off blackflies. They love me. I hate them. Still true today. We learn to ski, the whole family gets equipped as gifts our first Christmas up there. I compete, and win a second place, but don’t get to stay for the ceremony to collect my trophy. I’m too young and it’s too late. You’d think they could have made an exception, but no. I begin to serve as altar girl at early Mass. My prime motivation is the nice white flowing outfits the guys get to wear. I am deeply disappointed to learn I don’t get to wear one because I’m a girl. I stay after Mass and talk to the priest. I am 9/10. I ask questions about the tenets of the faith that just don’t make sense to me. He does his best, but by the time we leave, I am a non-believer. I follow, because we are supposed to, but I’m never convinced after that.

Supervision is more lax here, too. Maybe because Mom and Dad are getting more heavily into the booze, and Mom’s got her Valium. And Grandmaman begins her battle with cancer. She has a mastectomy and comes to stay for a while afterwards. The next move is to be our last, Dad’s getting close to his retirement.

We move to Pte-Claire, and I get to do Grade 4 over again. I am devastated. Apparently, I have to ‘prove myself’ in the English Catholic School system. I already have pubic hair, underarm odor, hairy legs, facial hair. And a big nose. I have become the ugly duckling of the family. I take up smoking, trying to fit in, but I don’t. These kids have all been together since kindergarten, I’m an outsider, a year older, and I have the vocabulary of a high school kid. And I dress funny. Grade 5 is the era of hot pants. Mom makes me a pair and insists that I wear them. No one else is and I don’t feel comfortable exposing that much skin, but that doesn’t matter. My feelings are never respected, and I have to wear them. I wear them as little as possible.

I get my period at 11 1/2, accompanied by severe cramping, every month. Oh joy. Mom makes me tell Dad when he walks in the door. I am embarrassed, I want her to tell him, if he must know. No, she makes me do it. As I write this I wonder for the first time, is it because she thought he might still be abusing me and she wanted to be sure he knew I could now get pregnant? I want to vomit.

I become a ‘latch-key kid’ when Mom goes back to work. She goes to one job and leaves at noon because the other women were not nice to her. She quickly gets hired permanent/full-time, though, and moves up because she’s no slouch. The rule is I can have friends over after school, but they have to be gone by the time she gets home. She doesn’t like my choice of friends in the neighbourhood, the daughters of a single mother up the street who has boyfriends. She likes my choice of friends at school, the snotty spoiled figure-skating daughter of a Bank Manager who treats me like crap. That friendship does not last long. She doesn’t like letting me sleep over at R’s place, because then she will have to reciprocate. Life there is more easy-going, and I am there a lot. I have extra chores at home, more than the other two, because they’re in high school and need to study. Later, it’s “they’re in college and they need to study” even though I am now in the high school they needed to study for. I am a second class citizen in my own family.

The constant criticism begins in earnest now. I am never home, like my brother and sister always were at my age. I am not ladylike enough. “Why can’t you be more like your sister?” She had an issue with how I tilted my head back to empty my milk glass at the table. It wasn’t esthetically pleasing. She gives me an empty glass to make me practice and realizes that it is the bump on my nose that causes the unsightly aberrational behaviour. She begins to save money for a nose job for me. She has one herself, first. She stops taking the Valium cold turkey and things get really interesting until Sis finds out and tells her to smarten up. I think she eventually weans off them. Looking back, I honestly think she is close to insanity much of that time. No wonder I never stayed home.

I have a favorite pair of pants. One of my brother’s old pairs, that I have taken in on the sewing machine as much as I am permitted to, to meet the style of the day. Brushed cotton, brown. I live for Fridays when I am allowed to wear them to school. I feel good in those pants. They are neither too short nor too baggy. They get confiscated by Herr Mudder as a punshiment for something, for three weeks. The three weeks are finally up, and I ask for my pants back. “I threw them out” is the answer. I didn’t like how you looked in them. Here’s money, go buy another pair of pants. I felt violated.

One of my household duties is to put out the garbage over the summer. I think Bro is in the militia and is gone for the summer. I am given no specific instructions. In the garage is an impressive collection of empty rum, gin and wine bottles that has accumulated. I don’t know why, then, that they haven’t been going out to the curb every week. I trudge back and forth, toting them all to the curb. They stand like little witnesses to Mom’s and Dad’s drinking problem, but I don’t know that. Mom is furious when she comes home and sees them all. I can’t figure out why. I offer to bring them back in, but am told it’s too late, everyone has seen them now. That’s the first time it crosses my mind that maybe not everybody drinks like Mom and Dad do.

In this era, in an effort to cause me to be more feminine, Mom buys me these skimpy, shortie nylon nighties. I think they’re slips when she gives them to me. I wear them around the house, but can’t figure out if I’m supposed to wear panties or not. We’re not supposed to wear panties to bed, “it’s not healthy”. I opt for no panties as often as not and my genitals are fully exposed given the way I sit. I am, after all, 11/12. I figure someone will say something if I am supposed to be wearing panties. But no one says anything. It’s Dad’s house, clearly. It’s about this time that the house goes up for sale, without me being told. In fact, I think one of the kids on the street see the sign before I do and asks me about it. Imagine how I felt, knowing nothing about it. Turns out, Mom wants to sell the house and move us to an apartment. Four people in an apartment. Yeah, right. In retrospect, she probably wants a separation at this point and it will be she and sis and I. I guess Dad talks her out of it because the sign comes down after a week or so. But, her season of discontent has begun.

Grade 7, I have hairy legs, really hairy legs, dark, long, enough to make any 14-year old boy jealous and I’m getting teased for it. I am given a razor we get free in the mail, but am told I am not permitted to use it. How warped is that? No, I have to use Neet. It takes a whole bottle to do my legs, top to bottom, which I must do because the backs of my thighs look like an ape’s. They bitch because it costs so much money. Two days later, I have stubble and feel like crap. I am required to wear a skirt to school twice a week, and may wear dress pants the other days, except on Fridays when I may wear my jeans. Everyone else just wears their jeans. At the beginning of Grade 8, mom comes home with a pile of clothes for me that she and Sis went shopping for. Dresses, skirts, all that crap. None of it fits. I have outgrown ‘Young Women’s’ sizes, and it’s going to cost a fortune to keep dressing me for school. Money works in my favour, and I am allowed to wear jeans all the time. I am ecstatic. I think money was tight right about then because Dad had retired from the Forces and still hadn’t gotten a job elsewhere. I didn’t care.

Sis and I have upper lip hair. Jolen is too expensive, we get liquid peroxide and ammonia from the pharmacist to mix our own. Cheaper, yes. Not effective, though. Sis eventually pays for the Jolen with her own money, and shares. Sis and I must wear our hair long. Dad likes it like that. But, we use shampoo too quickly. We are permitted to wash our hair only twice a week, using a dollop of shampoo the size of a quarter. They get us dry shampoo, a powder that you sprinkle in and brush out and that removes the oil like magic. Theoretically. In practice, it leaves us looking powdery and our hair all full of static.

Meanwhile, my hormones are getting the best of me and I get teary often. I am constantly told I am too sensitive. I need to toughen up. Stand up straight, don’t hunch your shoulders. Project confidence. Yeah, right. Sure, I feel really confident with you criticizing me all the time, and the kids all making fun of me over the hairy legs and face and big nose. I get huge wet spots under my arms and have to sew dress shields into my tops every day. I am self-conscious about everything, and Mom’s treatment of me only adds to it all. Eventually, Mitchum comes out and I try it. It actually works and at least I have one less problem to worry about.

Grade 11, winter. I am going to a class-mate’s party with a boy I really like. It’s a couple weeks away. Mom wants me to diet, so I can lose a few pounds before the date. The thought never crossed my mind that I needed to. And of course, I didn’t. I weighed 118 lbs and I was 5’5″ tall. Absolutely nothing wrong with those proportions. But, I am small-busted and wide-hipped and well, Mom has issues. And the yo-yo weight begins. By this time, Mom and Dad are on the outs. It’s all Mom-driven. She is dissatisfied. Knowing what I know now, she is ‘pas bien dans sa peau’, not happy in her own skin, and is projecting on me. But I don’t know this at the time, and my fragile adolescent ego is utterly destroyed by this bitch of a woman. Any remaining vestiges of self are erased, and everything I do for the next 20 or so years is an attempt to please her, the Unhappy One.

She does things like sewing long matching velvet skirts for Christmas for her and Sis, with accompanying long prairie-style aprons, all the rage that year. I get a package under the tree: the material and ribbons for my own apron, but it will never be made in time for the Christmas gatherings, and so when will I be able to wear it? In fact, it never gets made.

She asks Dad to move out in the summer of 1977, and he does. She cries herself to sleep that night, bawling loud enough for the neighbours to hear. Sis, who has moved out, is back for a visit and her boyfriend is over. She tries to calm Mom down and it doesn’t work. Finally, I go up. I am pissed, ’cause she asked for it. She told him to move out, and he has and she made my Dad cry and now she’s devastated? She’s crying “I want my mother”, so I give her a mother. I tell her sternly, you made your bed, you lie in it. Shut up and go to sleep. And she does. All I wanted was relief. I’m fairly certain she still remembers this, and she has held it against me all these years, because these words are thrown back in my face when I split up from my husband and I am devastated. What did I know? I was 16.

But at the same time, I am trying to escape her. I sought counselling for the first time later that same year, after a horrific fight before I left for school one morning. I recognized that Mom had no basis for chewing me out, and I went for help. That woman was the first time I ever entertained the possibility that maybe Mom was the problem. I ended up moving to Ottawa with Dad a few months later. Mom was hurt and insulted that I would choose him over her. All things considered, I would have been better joining the army. That was, in fact, my ‘Plan B’ had Dad not agreed I could go live with him.

Our relationship did not get any better over the next years. I tried to do the dressing well and made up thing, but it didn’t get me the maternal approval I sought. I married a young, good-looking French Canadian guy at barely 21. I picked a dress I liked, she picked another. She gave me $1,000 ‘mad money’ the day before my wedding and told me not to spend it, to keep it, ‘in case I needed it’ — for a divorce. I gave her a grand-daughter, and for a while that was okay, until she started to assert her personality and it didn’t fit what Mom expected of her. Shortly thereafter, Bro’ and Wife #1 gave her another grand-daughter and we were forgotten.
I visited her regularly, but always got messages, some subtle, some not so much, that I was less, that I didn’t measure up. I got new gifts at my birthday or Christmas, and hand-me-down clothes and discarded stuff from her apartment she didn’t need anymore the rest of the time. I got the seconds. This was hammered home when I went to visit at Sis’ one year and saw, professionally framed and matted on her kitchen wall, the family turkey recipe. When I asked about it, Mom said that Sis liked it so much she had it framed for her. No occasion.

When Mom decided to change all the furnishings in her apartment, the good stuff went to Sis. I got the crap. Never mind that Sis was a CA and could easily afford to buy her own. But then again, Sis had bought a condo in Westmount, and had lived in it for a few years. Then, she moved out and rented it to my mother. Mom paid her mortgage, Sis paid the condo fees. Mom got to live in Westmount, Sis got a tax write-off and built equity at the same time. Mom was beholden to her. Sis bought a house back in Pte Claire. Mom worked like a dog cleaning it before Sis moved in. When she’d travel for work, Mom would drive, once a day, from Westmount and back to care for her cat, because she didn’t do well at the kennel.

I got things like this: once, while visiting her, we were sitting in her kitchen. I had my legs curled up under me in the chair. She criticized how I was sitting. Why can’t you sit more lady-like, with your feet on the floor? Because, Mom, my legs are short and my feet don’t touch the floor. It’s a common problem for me. See? Now, that places the responsibility for my unacceptable posture on her, because it’s the way I’m made. And that just will not do. Are you sure it isn’t because your thighs are so fat that you are higher up off the seat when you sit? Bang. Back in my court. No, Mom, it’s not. I have a 28-inch inseam. My legs are short. But it was a futile response, the blow had been dealt and had hit its target, right below the belt. I thought nothing of it. I was used to comments like that, I got them all the time. And Mom knows best, right? If she’s always criticizing, it’s because I’m flawed, right?

And by now I am getting the same stuff from my husband, because I married my mother in a man’s body. Right down to the alcoholism, and the early childhood abuse. And I am, increasingly, a mess. I am starting to fall apart. Migraines. Allergies big time, for which the pills no longer work. We’re yelling all the time and I am living my mother’s life all over again. We try counselling, and she tries to make me see the alcoholism, and I do.

Dad becomes ill just after Labour Day and has open-and-shut-we-can’t do-anything surgery days before my birthday. Hubby is fooling around and I’m close to it when this happens. I know what Hubby is doing and I do something absolutely enlightened, all things considered and given my dearth of emotional resources. I recognize that I have enough energy to deal with only one of these things, and Dad takes priority. Hubby’s indiscretions are going to have to wait. He is not there for me during this time, and I know it. I take mental notes, and plan to address it once all is said and done. Dad is dead by the end of February.

The day he dies, Hubby is SO not there for me. I want to go and be with my father, and I want my Hubby to stay with me. MIL can take our daughter. “But we have a dog, he says, who has spent 10 hours in a crate. It’s not fair to her to crate her again for another several hours, maybe overnight. I will drive you and drop you off, but I am coming back home.” I realize then and there that he will never be there for me and that it’s over. I am Daddy’s Little Girl and I am devastated by Daddy’s death. But I had always told myself that the second hardest thing I would ever have to deal with was the death of my parents. I have faced it, and I have survived. Better than survived, I managed it. I helped him plan for his death, made enquiries, visited, dealt with doctors, took care of him. It’s a turning point for me. I realize I have strength. I start rocking the boat with Hubby and we separate, at my insistance.

And that is my turning point. I hit rock-bottom not long after this, and the black period happens. One day I sit down and tally my ‘stress points’, at the suggestion of a friend/co-worker. I am nearly off the chart. No wonder I have a meltdown. From then to now, it has been 14 years. There were lots of ups and downs, two steps forward, one, one and half, sometimes even 1.9 steps back. But there was always progress. It took 3 or 4 years for me to accept that my therapist was right when he said my mother and husband were abusive towards me. I asked him at the time about sexual abuse by my father. I described the memory and asked, “Could it be?” He asked a few more questions, assessed my current frailty and lied. No, he said, I don’t think you were abused by your father. He knew I had been, but he also knew that I was not ready to face it, and might never be. I needed to have a hero then, and he knew that.

I understand that now, and accept that he was right. ‘The teacher appears when the student is ready’ is a saying I very much like. Through therapy, off and on, I have made great strides. I eventually got to the point where I was strong enough to face the knowledge of the sexual abuse by my father. But, there remains the one thing I am not sure about: do I confront Mom, or not?

I was abused sexually by my father when I was young, about 4 or 5 I guess, but I’m not certain. Mom abused me psychologically/emotionally, for the most part, but sometimes physically, from as early on as I can remember. Dad died in 1992, before I realized what he had done. Mom will be 80 this May. I haven’t seen her since ’99, we last spoke in the summer of ’02, at which time the psychological abuse was ongoing.

Today’s trigger was an episode of Gray’s Anatomy. A patient was going in for lung cancer surgery, with only a 25% chance at survival. He videotaped all these angry messages for people who had wronged him, ever since his early teens. Meredith was supposed to mail them, but didn’t. He survived the surgery and she asked if he wanted the tapes thrown out. No. He wanted them mailed. He didn’t want to die with all those feeling bottled up inside of him, without those people knowing how he felt. Which, of course, is my dilemma.

My brother, with whom I cut ties about 4 years ago, wrote me a note not too long ago, ‘reaching out.’ I e-mailed him back and said plainly that I chose not to have a relationship with any of my family. He responded that obviously I was still very angry. I laughed when I read it, because it is clear he doesn’t get it. He thinks I am pissed about how he treated me over a news article I e-mailed to a then-penpal. That was just the last straw, the final event that led me to write him off, too.

Today, my mind is a jumbled up mess of thoughts that follow a logical sequence for a while, then fly off on a tangent. I am sad, angry, confused and uncertain. I hate feeling like this. My mind is my finest tool. With a near-genius IQ, an eye for detail, and significantly above-average verbal and analytical skills, it is my rock. When I start to feel squidgy near the edges mentally, it leaves me feeling very vulnerable and very insecure.

This is the wrong time of year for a mental down-turn. They usually come in the fall, or late Jan/Feb. I upped my anti-depressant dose the first week of January and have been taking it religiously. My allergies have been much better than usual. I am eating well, and have been since the first week of Feb, and have lost 16 lbs. I am working out on the treadmill every day that we are here, and snowshoeing about an hour daily when we’re at the cottage. We just finished 10 days at the cottage. We just had a 4-day weekend. We got outdoors for at least a half-hour every day, and it was sunny, so my SAD should be waning. I haven’t been short on sleep, so that’s not it either.

The only negative I can think of is my boss just left to take another job in another department. It had taken 14 months, but we had developed a really good working relationship. I had finally come to trust him. Just before him, I had a temp manager for a few months, after my manager of 10+ years had retired. I’d had an excellent relationship with her, also. I hate to think that this is all it takes, at my age, to leave me open to feeling this way.

I am SO tired of this crap coming back to haunt me time and again. I know I haven’t forgiven either of them. I keep reading how one must forgive to be able to move on, how the person who can’t forgive is the one who suffers. I get it, I really do. But how, exactly, am I supposed to do that? How am I to forgive my parents, the people who were supposed to love and nurture me, to help me develop into my full potential as a human being, for being monsters who left me a socially awkward, insecure, suspicious mess? How do I forgive them for leaving me with baggage that I get to deal with every day of my adult life?

I am a survivor. I have done remarkably well despite it all. Yes, my early adulthood was all about pleasing others, trying to for once get that approval from Mom I now know I will never get, no matter what. I married a male version of my mother and lived through hell for years. The only good that came of it was my wonderful daughter. As my first marriage was ending, my father was dying. Not yet having understood my childhood memories, I was very close with him. I was devastated, and ended up in a serious depression. That period of my life was so black. I seriously and for-honest contemplated suicide twice. But as the saying goes, that which does not kill me makes me stronger. And it did. Like a Phoenix, I arose from the ashes a changed person. Literally.

I no longer had the strength to fight my own true self (a good thing) and came out of the closet. I spent years in therapy, on and off. I managed to hold on to my career, and came to accept that I was, in fact, exceptionally good at what I do. I met a wonderful woman and we have slowly forged a strong, healthy, loving, nurturing relationship. 12 years now. My daughter is grown. Yes, I made some mistakes, and yes she has some baggage of her own, but I never hid anything from her, and shared my learning with her. Life is good.

Spouse and I managed our finances well enough that when a superb once-in-a-lifetime property came up, we were able to purchase it for our retirement with the equity from our principal home. And I am doing fine on 80% salary, saving for a sabbatical year in 3 years. I was recently able to gift my daughter $22,000 cash for a downpayment on a condo. That was the clincher, the thing that made me realize that regardless of what my family might have thought, I have met their standard of ‘success’. It pissed me off that it still mattered to me, though.

As I said, Mom will be 80 in a few months. Sister ‘reached out’ to my daughter, wanting to ‘open the lines of communication again.’ Yeah, right. Daughter has always been very open with me, and I have always encouraged her to do what she wants with her relationship with my family. So we talked about the e-mail. We agreed it was quite likely it was an attempt to try to recruit both daughter and I for the party. Usually, I ask daughter not to provide any info about me to them, and was in the process of repeating this request when it dawned on me that this was a golden opportunity. I asked daughter to let them know about the condo and the retirement property in detail, and that spouse and I are doing fabulously, as is my career. I explained to my daughter why, and she totally got it. It was my opportunity to ‘thumb my nose’ at them. To let them know that little me, the one they assumed would amount to nothing, was doing well financially. It’s their yardstick, money and appearances. But like I said, it pissed me off that it still mattered to me. The kid still needed to blow that raspberry, you know?

Like coming out, that little bit of personal disclosure was like a weight off, literally. I have felt better since then. My resolution for 2008 is to take better care of myself, and I am doing that. So, how did I end up here? Blogging about my family at midnight because I am not able to sleep with all this clatter in my head?

The human psyche is a powerful thing. I had memories of the sexual abuse I experienced at my father’s hands, but I didn’t understand that that’s what they were. All I remembered was that he would give me my bath, and it would burn when he washed my genitals. I remembered that I used to wet the bed. I remembered that when my mother would undress me for my bath, she had to lock the bathroom door, or I would run out, down the stairs and out the door, into the neighbourhood buck naked. And that she was embarrassed by this. I remembered that once, my father’s boss had come for dinner. While everyone was sitting in the living room, chatting politely, I had gone upstairs, taken off my tights and panties and had come back downstairs. I performed a nice curtsy, lifting up my skirt so the men could see my naked bottom. I would think about this, and wonder why I had done such a thing? And I would be embarrassed. But these were all just unrelated vignettes of childhood.

Fast forward to the fall of ?2005. Sister-in-law is visiting, and we’re out for breakfast. A woman comes in with some family and sits at the next table, waiting for more to arrive (they never do…I noticed this, and she seemed disappointed about it.)  Her physical resemblance to my mother is uncanny, and very unsettling for me. I find myself totally unnerved, swept back in time to a much less secure me, spilling food on myself, coffee on the table. I point her out to spouse, who agrees the resemblance is striking, and to SIL, as she has never me my mother. My brain wanders off into childhood memories, and the above vignettes reappear as they have dozens of times over the years. Only this time it’s different. I connect the dots. The realization dawns on me, the question magically appears, “Did Daddy abuse me while he would bathe me???  Is this what this is all about???” This question, this hypothesis, rattles ’round and ’round in my brain as we finish breakfast and drive SIL to her train.

Spouse knows something is wrong, because I have gone quiet. She knows all about the issues I have with my mother, ’cause she’s been there and seen how my mother speaks to me, and how I would end up when we spoke on the phone.  She’s got a notion, sort of, of what’s up. I’m not able to talk about what is going through my head, but I am getting more and more upset, and the tears are rolling down my cheeks. Spouse also knows that my silence is a signal that whatever is wrong, it’s huge. It takes a lot to put me at a loss for words. The only other time I reacted to something like this was when her father made sexual advances to me (yeah, the irony is not lost on me) She is great. She holds me while I cry, and tells me she will listen when I am ready to talk. I have no way of proving that what I have pieced together is true. But I know, I know it is, by my reaction. And the pieces all fit.

All of a sudden, I am a child again, facing the knowledge that both of my parents abused me. How could they? How could they? I had always seen my mother as the abuser and my father as the one who did the best he could to rebuild my self-esteem, my hero. The reality is harsh: I had no hero, no one watching out for me. I was on my own. It takes hours before I can process this information enough to tell spouse. She listens, not questioning, not prompting, just listening. We lie on the bed, in the semi-dark until I am ready to move around again. Later that night, when I can’t sleep, I do an internet search and find some sites.  I read through the typical presentations of adult survivors of child abuse.  It all fits.  Right down to the later-in-life meltdown, the bedwetting, everything.  Slowly, over the next few days, life resumes it’s normality, altered, but still the same routine.

It’s a consciousness shift, at the same time a huge one, and then again not. The reality is that despite this horrible beginning, I am still who I am, who I was before I understood. I’m doing okay. In fact, given what I now know, I conclude that I am doing very okay. I gave up believing in coincidences long ago. At this crucial time, it so happens that I am once again in therapy. My therapist is a thoughtful old Jewish man (irony again!) and he helps me work through this. The explanation I had always given myself for the burning was that it was the soap in my urethra.  He asks me quite simply, ina ll the years I have been washing myself, has it ever burned?  No, of course not.  Instantly, the burning reminds me of how it felt when my daughter’s head crowned.  The burning is the skin of the vagina being stretched significantly beyond it’s usual opening.  And there it is, the final confirmation that I am right, and that this is what happened.  No wonder I was Daddy’s favorite!  The heavy blow, maybe a week or two off work I expect will happen, doesn’t materialize. But I know that it’s not over, not by a long shot, and that I will process and re-process this many more times in the future.

This knowledge helps me understand a good many things from my family history. I never realized I had been abused. Sister had been. Because I didn’t talk about it, and was close with Dad, she assumed I wasn’t. Partly, she’s pissed because why her and not me? It explains her “we grew up in the same family but had different fathers” statement made to me years back. It explains her and my brothers distance when my father was dying. They were not as emotionally involved as I was.

But none of this explains the way Mom treated me. Mom had to have known. I know I told her I did not like it when Daddy bathed me, because it burned. She had to have figured something was up when I would run to escape the bath like I did. Or did she just ‘splain it away to herself? Like I said, appearances and finances are the family yardsticks. You keep your mouth shut and don’t tell anyone what goes on in the family. Except I had a knack for talking. Got to the point where they wouldn’t tell me anything. I came home from school one day and there was a ‘For Sale’ sign on the lawn of our house. I had no idea until I saw that sign. I was 12 or 13.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure Mom suspected something was up. In fact, I suspect she had been abused herself, by a family member. Sis probably knows, she and Mom were great friends. But no one ever said anything to me. Mom’s an alcoholic. You don’t drink like a fish for no reason, that much I know.  Genetics gives you a propensity for becoming an alcoholic, but those who abuse substances  (alcohol, drugs, food) are generally running from something inside of them.

So, back to my dilemma. Dad is dead. I can’t confront him. A part of me believes that I can’t move forward, get past this, without confronting my abuser, and only Mom is left. I still don’t feel able to handle her mean-spirited cut-downs, so actual contact is out. If, in fact, I need to do this to move forward, what happens if I haven’t done this and she dies? I don’t want to add to the baggage I already have. I want to write a letter, but I don’t know if I should. In fact, I want to write all three of them, so they get it. From a note Mom sent me a year after she and I last spoke, I know she doesn’t get it. Sis might, I don’t know. She is the only one I haven’t heard from after I severed ties. So this is how Gray’s Anatomy triggered all of this: I don’t want her/them to die without knowing how I feel about what they did.

And I’m guessing it’s time to head back into therapy.