Raiding the Archives

I decided to do a bit of digging into my parents' past. Upon checking with the provincial archives, I discovered two things; divorce records are public domain, and secondly, anyone can order a copy. So I did. I received 123 pages of legal documents (some duplicates, so about 115 unique pages), including a hand-written letter my mother (the narc) wrote, which was entered into the record as an affidavit, and which became the basis of questions in a later deposition.

Nothing in that letter surprised me necessarily; she has harped on about her divorce for more than 50 years.... However, what DID come as completely new information was that it was SHE who brought the divorce action. She has always claimed my father "abandoned" us. Completely false. I also didn't know she had threatened several times both in the letter and the deposition to leave the city with us to prevent our dad from seeing us. This was at odds with the fact she wouldn't acknowledge she was divorced and continued for years to call my dad her husband, even after he had remarried. It was so, so weird. It wasn't "I am divorced, and my former spouse is remarried," it was "My husband is living with another woman, and they don't have a real marriage."

It should be noted here while she was carrying on about my dad and "his women," (the only woman being someone who became my stepmother and was for 33 years), my mother was herself dating someone - she the Sunday school teacher and he the deacon - and this resulted in her falling pregnant and them having to marry very quickly. She will have become pregnant slightly before she got her decree absolute, I believe. I have to revisit the dates in those documents. She's a very skilled hypocrite....

The other revelation, which makes sense of her relationship with me and with my two sibs, is the clarification of our roles to her, and the clarification - like crystal clear - she at no point saw us as humans separate from her, but as the means of expression and means to whatever ends. We were pawns.

She has always scapegoated me, but these documents confirmed she has done so at least since I was seven (when all the custody proceedings were in full swing), and likely before that. I don't have any particular memories but a younger-than-seven-year-old child wouldn't recognize scapegoating or gaslighting.

The hand-written letter and the later deposition are fascinating with respect to scapegoating, though; my mother put words in my mouth: she made claims - numerous times - about what I was saying to her or telling her. For instance, she claimed I told her, and I quote, "Daddy says you're sick, sick, sick in the head and we don't have to listen to you." This. Never. Happened. She makes this statement three times in the deposition as something I allegedly told her, and curiously, it is always in exactly the same format: three "sicks" followed by "in the head, and "we don't have to listen to you." It's weird. She claimed I told her my dad said this to us. I know this is a full lie. Anytime - up to and including when we were married adults with children of our own - we'd ask our dad what went on, his reply was always "It's a long story." He never said anything more than that.

My mother makes several statements about things I supposedly said to her, including that I (specifically me) wish to see less of my dad - absolutely false - and that I (again, specifically me, not my sibling and I) am disturbed by my father's "lovemaking in the front seat of the car and in the pool." This specificity is so, so weird. My dad was a preacher's kid who struggled very much to find a path to remarriage, as he'd been told since birth he'd burn in hell if he committed adultery - and in Baptist world, a marriage after divorce is adultery. The idea he'd engage in "lovemaking" in front of his children is ridiculous. None of what she claims happened, and she contradicts herself several times between the letter and the deposition.

The short form is she has always used me to voice what she will not say herself. Where it concerned my dad and my stepmother, my mother would claim I said terrible things about them, when it was she doing it. She put words in my mouth to my teachers, to a couple pastors, to people we knew. I spent most of my pre-teen and teen years being utterly confused about what was going on, because people would confront me about what I'd "said," when I hadn't said. It took me ages to understand she was lying to everyone. For the record, I haven't seen her in years, but until at least 7 years ago, she still claims I'm somehow wrecking her computer... or her life. It varies.

My next-youngest sibling is mentioned but once by name in the entirety of those documents, and not at all in the hand-written letter. I'm not sure whether this was due to her being invisible to my mother, or because she was the "golden child" so my mother protected her. Predictably, though, as I have anything to do with our mother, the golden child is now the unfortunate recipient of our mother's wrath and abuse.

I'm after my mother's counselling records now. I'm almost certain I won't be able to find any records of her therapy sessions with my dad prior to their divorce, but I know I will find family counselling records and can access them because I was there. I've read some of them. I'm going to get copies so I can re-read.

Fascinating shit.

UPDATE, November 2025
I have discovered our province requires psychologists, psychiatrists, counsellors, therapists keep documents for 10 years, after which they can be destroyed. As such, although I have read the records of our family "counselling," those documents no longer exist. I think I took notes at the time, but it was before cell phones (1986), so no photos of the pages. Obviously, any counselling records that might have existed in the late 60s are long gone. 

I went looking for other documents which would date from 1945 - 46, but the facility, the Ideal Maternity Home in Chester NS, where they would have been housed, or where they could have been acquired from, burned down. Nothing remained; no furniture, photos, or documents. 

The dogs of hell. #unleashed

.... you narcissistic, conceited, self-centred old boot! In almost 80 years what have you done? What have you contributed besides three girls who never had a mother but who suffered through your endless, ridiculous fits and tantrums; who lost their fathers - yes, two of them - due to your fucked up world view; whose childhoods..... never mind: what childhoods?

And now that you've achieved (yet again on the backs of others, having done little to contribute and nothing to deserve) living quarters in a place you can show off from, you're still making every one's life a living fucking hell! Are you never ever satisfied? And for the record; nobody cares a damn about where you live, how big 'your' house is, how 'expensive all these horses are' or about your 'rich clients.' Nothing. Not one bit do we care about any of that. Nobody does. Only you. And no, none of that has anything to do with you. You're still a fucked up, mean, old woman.

You're stupid beyond comprehension to believe that any of that has anything to do with you or any reflection on you. You are nothing to anyone beyond being the crazy, bitch of an old lady who lives in that house. Yeah, the house that most people have begun avoiding just to stay away from you.

Here's the truth you old bitch. You are a joke. Full on. There's barely a soul whose spent more than a day with you who doesn't know you're as fake as a wooden nickel and measurably less useful. There isn't a soul who doesn't know you're a poser and a liar and a conceited idiot.

Are you three years old? Are you still that spoiled bratty little kid? Fuck! Grow up already! Isn't it time you made some steps toward being a human rather than the most disgusting, painful, stinking putrid boil on all our asses? Is this your legacy? You're going to go down in history as one of the most despised people there ever was?

What did you ever do for anyone?

Your kids? You spent years and years and years poisoning them against others - their dad! Their grandparents; their aunts and uncles; their cousins and even them against themselves, and you spent years poisoning others against them! Who does that to their own children? You could write a book on how to abuse, isolate and ruin a child.

We never learned to love. Oh sure, we heard all about it - you stuffed your stupid false pack of religious lies down out throats hard enough to choke the life and spirit out of us but we never saw anything even remotely close to 'love' from you. You have always been to busy making everything, every event about you. You are the 100% pur laine version of a narcissistic asshole.

You taught us how to never trust, never believe -even in ourselves: oh never mind; you never gave us any reason there was anything about us to believe in. We were the shite that trailed about your house making a wreck of your life. Yeah. Forgot.

Everything's about you. Everything that goes 'wrong' is about you; everything that anyone does is to 'make you look bad.' Let me tell you this: you do a fine, fine job all by yourself; you have not for one second needed anyone else to make you look bad.

And now you've resorted to 11 p.m. temper tantrums forcing your daughter, who's been working 6 a.m to 11 p.m. for weeks, to come chasing after you so you don't get your idiotic ass killed on the highway because you're such a fucking attention-seeking baby! And then you take two or three hours of another daughter's time having yet another poor-me tantrum? Fuck you. You know why they didn't call me??? Because I will tell you the truth.

You're the worst of the worst. We put up with you. Tolerate. That is it. We do NOT like you and there's no way we've even thought about loving you. You're less lovable than a ton of squashed maggots.

Here's the reality that you choose to blind yourself to.
You've been married to TWO pretty decent, hard-working men, both of whom provided everything for you and your children. You haven't worked a full day since something like the spring of 1961. Busy work does not count and neither does the copious time you've spend meddling in other people's lives and trash bins! What the hell is up with that!?

You have three children who are all blessed with great minds and health and strength but whose spirits you stomped and killed over and over again because you are incapable of tolerating anything you perceive as competition, even from a two year old baby.

You have lived in a wonderful home - that someone else paid for; you now live in another wonderful home - that someone else is paying for; yet, you have never been happy because neither home has been big enough or rich enough for full of enough costly things THINGS! that you could show off, as if those THINGS somehow make you a decent person in any respect.

You have an excellent education that you've squandered.

You've had friends, all of whom you've alienated at best and many of whom you've caused to hate you, despise you, distrust you and laugh at you.

The one thing that saves me from hating you entirely is that I'm sure you know, somewhere in your fucked up, denial-bound mind that you've created this hell and now you have to maintain it. Anything else would require you to be honest to yourself and about yourself and you are far too self-centred and false to even consider that option, so hell for all concerned it is.

I'm sure you wish, as much as I do, that you were dead. That is the one thing that saves you and - you can take some of your weird brand of comfort in this - keeps us bound in the hell you seems so determined to keep burning.