I found something that I had started writing over four years ago, that I thought better belonged here, rather than hiding in my Dropbox.

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The month of May is known as mental health awareness month, but I think that we should be discussing mental illness year-round. I have struggled with depression for the majority of my adult life, and I take a large amount of medication to try to help me combat the depression. These medications have side effects, not all of which am I aware. Through it all, I keep trying to follow the Cub motto and do my best.

Since I left Agassiz in 1998, my employment situation, for the most part, has not been enjoyable. I have had two of the companies I worked for close down, which left me out of work for a while. I have had bosses that:

• Threatened to commit suicide at least once a week, sometimes suggesting it should be a group suicide of the staff.
• Would scream obscenities at the staff.
• Threw a microwave oven across the room, which flew past employees, because he was angry.
• Nobody respected, and whose instructions were ignored, which caused massive disrespect amongst all of the staff.
• When I was returning to work after my doctor put me on LTD for severe migraines, the boss thought it was a great idea to have me test all of the audio equipment.
• Was unconcerned about staff safety when there were bears wandering the property.
• Fired me (not officially) for not being a millennial

In the past 20 years, I have had one job that I truly enjoyed, but I kept working and stuffing down my emotions because that was what my family needed. Through sicknesses, deaths, depression, financial struggles, and everything else that comes with a marriage, I stayed strong, and I kept stuffing down my emotions, because that was what was needed of me. All the while, my depression deepened, and my stress levels rose. On the outside, people saw me as happy, but on the inside, I felt like I was dying. Nobody around me noticed my struggles, and I became very good at hiding my pain. When I did try to talk to people, I would typically get platitudes, and often simple derision. I allowed the negativity I was receiving to worsen my depression. It is the classic trap of the depressed, to allow other people to make you feel worse. You feel powerless to fight back.

After my last work contract ended, almost two years ago now, I became very depressed. As the months passed, and I could not find work, my depression grew. My medication levels were raised over recommended maximums, as my doctors struggled to combat my negative emotions. At this point, I had been trying for many years to get my partner to notice me and my struggles, but she had her attention elsewhere, and I felt alone, trapped in misery of my own creation. As the year progressed, I realized what I needed to do. My partner and I had been fighting constantly for years. Everything that either of us could find to criticize, we seized upon, and I realized that my children’s’ emotional health was suffering as a result. I made a difficult decision, which surprisingly gave me some comfort. It was time to end the marriage. I needed to accept responsibility for the mistakes that I had made, and try to end things gracefully. Shortly before Christmas, I went to speak with a lawyer to try and determine my options. Her biggest piece of advice was to wait until the new year, so I did not ruin my kids’ Christmas. I heeded her advice.

In January, as I was getting ready to head back to the lawyer, the idea of me going to school presented itself. It made logical sense for me to be living downtown while I was in school, as the commute on transit would have been exhausting. Because while I could take the train in the morning, in the evenings when I would be returning, the train would not be running, and I would be using transit. When I was in school for 12 – 14 hour days, another 3 – 4 hours of commute each day, would not leave any time for me to do homework, or to get enough sleep to be able to function well the following day. With FaceTime every night, I could still say goodnight to my children each night, and I would be able to walk to and from school each day.

At the beginning of February, I began my first course. It was a 10 week bootcamp teaching web development. 10 weeks, 6 days per week, 12 hour days. It was exhausting, and I would be headed home to my partner and the kids every Saturday night, and back to the condo Sunday night. I tried my best to stay positive. It was very challenging, but I made it through. Of the 10 people that started the course with me, only 7 people made it to the end. While I was at school, I discovered things about myself and about my partner, that made me question the truth about our relationship, and I made suggestions to her about how I thought our relationship would need to evolve, if we were to have any hope of the relationship working.

May 1^st, I started my second course. This was the big one. 12 months of 12 hour days, 5 days a week. It was the course I had dreamed about taking. It was the course that would teach me the skills that I have always wanted. My partner and I had been talking about me taking this course for the entirety of our marriage. I started the course excited to finally be attending. The program is divided into six eight week terms. The first term was tough. The hours were growing longer, and the deadlines we were being given seemed inadequate. I was putting in more than 12 hour days, and dealing with several stereotypical millennial classmates. There were a couple of great classmates, that I got along with quite well, but the stress levels were very high. I found myself getting extremely stressed during the week of class, and then I would come home to my partner and children, and the stress in the house was also super high. I found myself some weekends, just hiding in bed, unable to function because my stress levels were unmanageable, and I could not find a way to release my stress. Combine that with my depression, and you get a very toxic combination. My temper was getting shorter, and my kids were sometimes wondering why I even came home on the weekend, when all I would do is hide in bed. I was not dealing with my own issues, and this is my fault. I own that.

By this time, my partner and I had started seeing a marriage councillor. I started therapy hopeful that she could help us, but not very optimistic at the chances of success. My partner openly acknowledged that she had not noticed any problems in the relationship, until I was leaving for school. In my mind I was angry that she had not noticed me desperately trying for many years prior to that. So with my stress levels rising at school, at home, and at therapy, I found myself unsure where my true place lay. My mind started crumbling. As term two was coming to an end, towards the end of August, my mind finally broke. I suffered a nervous breakdown, also known as an emotional breakdown. I literally lay in bed for three days crying. I only got up to go to the bathroom.

After three days, I finally crawled out of the bedroom in my condo, to take stock of my life. I knew that there was no way for me to continue school in my current mental state, but after all of the sacrifices that my family had made to allow me to be there, how could I even think about quitting? My partner had told me several times per week, for 7 months, that our family’s entire future rested upon my being successful at school. If I quit school, I destroyed my family, but if I did not quit school, I doomed myself. In desperation, I attempted suicide. In one night, I took a week’s worth of insulin, and went to bed, hoping to never wake up. (I would learn later, that overdosing on insulin will not kill you, it will more likely just cause permanent physical damage and disabilities, but I did not know that at the time.) I awoke the next morning feeling very dizzy and disoriented. It took a while for me to figure out what was happening. I was still alive, and my blood sugar was dangerously low. I made the decision that quitting school, and facing the consequences would be better than being dead. I sent the emails to the school, letting them know that I was withdrawing from the program. I then let my partner know what I had decided, and tried to explain why this was happening.

After her first, very understandable, negative reaction, I tried to explain my mental state, my breakdown, and my attempted suicide. Her reaction was still extremely negative. I did not detect any understanding or compassion coming from her. This went on for several more days, as I packed my apartment getting ready to move out. Every time that I would speak with her, I would hear what a failure and a letdown I was to her. I moved back to the house, and tried to let my mind heal. I asked her to give me one week free of her complaints of my failure, she agreed, but was unable to follow through. I found myself attempting suicide again. Same method and same result. Talking with my sister helped, and my sister, knowing the marital problems I was having, told me that what I needed to do, was move out of the shared bedroom, and into a different room. It was clear to both her and me that the marriage was over, and could not be recovered. Wanting to try and keep what peace in the house I could, I told my sister that I could not do that to my family. Because I had told her what I had done, she told me that suicide by insulin overdose does not work. Her doctor had told her, when she had mused to her doctor about the same method. My sister, looking out for the welfare of her baby brother, did not accept my refusal to move rooms, and quietly started making the arrangements for a team of friends to come in and help make it happen, over my objections.

A week after she had first suggested it, she told me that it was happening, less than 24 hours before it was going to happen. By this point, I agreed that it had to happen. Since insulin was not going to work, I was trying to determine whether jumping out my second story window, onto the cement patio below would do the trick, or whether I would only sustain injuries. So, when my sister told me it was going to happen, I decided, for my health and sanity, that I would let her do what was necessary. I also decided that it would be easier to get forgiveness than permission, and that I was no longer worried about getting forgiveness, so I chose not to inform my partner that it was happening. It was known she was going to be out all day, which is why my sister had chosen that date. My sister arrived, and we sat the kids down, and explained to them that daddy was sick, and he needs his own room to get better. So we moved all of the 2 year old’s stuff out of her room, and moved me into that room. We then moved the 2 year old into the room out of which I had just moved. And I prepared to face the consequences of my actions.

I explained to my partner what had happened, and why. She was shocked and angry. She felt that she had been so supportive of my recovery. I told her then about my attempts at suicide, and my continued thoughts on that subject. She was shocked, as she had no idea, and she promised to try and give me space. Starting that very same night, she made certain to give me guilt because the 2 year old was having trouble going to sleep. That first night, I brought the 2 year old, and her mattress back into my room for the night, because I agreed that making the 2 year suffer was not what I had intended. The next night, we tried again, having the 2 year old in her mother’s bedroom. We kept trying for many days, with varied success, until I relented, and just moved my little one back into my room, her old room. So I wound up in the smallest bedroom in the house, sharing with a two year old, while my partner continued to sleep in the largest bedroom, by herself. It was my choice, and I was happy with my choice.

As the weeks passed, I made many attempts to try and discuss with my partner the situation. She kept saying that my living in the other bedroom was temporary, but I tried explaining that this was our new normal. Every day, she would make a point of reminding me that I had failed the family, and wasted all of our money. After a month, she finally agreed that separation and divorce was what was best for us. At this point, her complaints about me expanded to include how I had let her down specifically, and that she wanted to replace me with someone that could actually support her. Her accusations hurt, but I tried not to complain back at her. I often failed, and I would tell her all of the supposed slights that I felt. She would accuse me of acting like a victim, and walk away. The next step, I knew, would be to break the news to our children.

The children are smart. I knew that our secret would leak out to them at some point, and I wanted to just sit them down and tell them what was happening. The news would be devastating to them, but at least then they could start the healing process. My partner wanted to wait on telling the children until we could afford therapy for them. Neither of us had any idea when that might occur. One evening, while I was talking to my son, the topic strayed into a logical segue into the topic of his mother and my relationship. It had not been my intention to send the conversation there, but here we were. I could have changed the subject at that moment, but I decided that I did not want to wait anymore. So he and I discussed his mother and I separating, with the intention of divorce. He handled it amazingly well. Even saying that he was not surprised. He had seen this coming for a long time. I told him to make certain that he did not let it slip to his older sister, but I promised him that I would not make him keep that secret for long. As soon as my partner came home, I told her what I had done. She accused me of many things, and complained that she had wanted to be there when the kids were told. Her complaints were fair. I had taken an action regarding our kids, without her agreement. I had been making several decisions that affected the family without her agreement. It was my decision to leave school, my decision to move out of her room, my decision that we should separate, and now my decision that the kids be told.

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That’s as far as I had gotten when I first started writing it. I re-read this now, and so many of those feelings come back to me, and some have never truly left me.

What ultimately broke me, was a two similar incidents that happened a day apart. My ex-wife and I were seeing a marriage counsellor, who had insisted that we needed to do the private, in addition to the couples therapy for her to be able to help us. Even during the therapy, I frequently felt that she was clearly siding with my wife, and was not remaining neutral. Since giving up on that therapist, I have learned that her entire technique is completely flawed. She would focus on everything that we had done wrong in the past, and not actually try to help us find common ground, or find ways to heal and strengthen our relationship. Towards the end of August, my marriage counsellor, during a private session, told me that I am an asshole. No suggestion of how to change, she just straight up told me that I am an asshole.

That was a Sunday. The following day, at school, I was called into the school counsellor’s office to be chewed out for mistreating the absolutely god-awful teacher they had given us. When I say god-awful, this is a professional programmer, teaching computer programmer, who taught us that there is no need to ever do any indenting when coding. That is a meaningless phrase to any non-programmers, but ask any programmer and you will be receive looks of absolute shock and horror at the idea of not indenting when coding. Not indenting when coding is akin to never using any punctuation when writing. So I am called into the school counsellor’s office, and during her chewing me out, she tells me that I am an asshole. Two different, unrelated, counsellors in two days both told me that I was an asshole. That was the moment that I broke. I left her office, went home, and stopped being able to function.

There are days that are harder than others. There are days that I want the end to come soon, and some days when I am able to dream about the future. Most days are somewhere in between. Today is a day where I don’t really know where on the scale it lands. As the day progresses, my mood, and my migraine get worse.

My daughter is in the school play, and I am excited to go see the performance tonight, but at the same time I know that going to the performance will require a confrontation with my daughter’s mother. There is a Reddit commonly referred to as AITA, in this case I don’t even need to ask the question. The real question is how big of an asshole will I need to be. The cast will come out after the performance for the required meet and greet, and if I allow my daughter’s mother to have time to socialize, eventually I will have to step in and stop it, as I will need to get her home. The more time I allow, the bigger the asshole I will have to be. It comes back to my favourite Trolley Problem, there are no good options, just the game of trying to find the least bad option. Everything with my ex-wife comes back to the Trolley Problem. This is a woman who, literally, told a Supreme Court Judge, that she felt she was being “blackmailed” into taking the deal I was offering. The deal that even her own lawyer felt was generous. When dealing with a narcissist, there is no way to compromise, you are either an asshole, or you are a victim. Because for the narcissist everything is win or lose. There is no middle ground.

To stick with a theme that has run through my last few posts, here is a recent addition to the songs that have some deep emotional feelings for me. P!nk described the feeling of losing a parent like “a suitcase you will be unpacking for the rest of your life”. Her new song “When I Get There” from her Trustfall album is about the pain of losing a parent, and while I have yet to lose a parent, my partner recently lost one of her parents, and while I have lost many friends, I cannot relate to the pain of losing a parent. With my father turning 81 this year, I suspect that I may be experiencing that pain sooner rather than later, but there is no real way of predicting whether he has six months or 20 more years left in him. My mother is only 29, which is really weird considering my age, but with her it is the same thing, there is no real way of knowing when the end will come.

As relationships grow, evolve, and change, they can go through many changes. I remember when we decided that we were ready to expand our family, and that we wanted to have children. We were able to get pregnant very easily, and she had a very easy pregnancy. Creed wrote a song called “With Arms Wide Open” on their Human Clay album that accurately tells of the emotions a father goes through when learning that his partner is pregnant, and he is going to become a father.

With lyrics including:

“Well, I just heard the news today
It seems my life is going to change”…

“Well, I don’t know if I’m ready
To be the man I have to be”…

“I’ll show you love, I’ll show you everything”

It speaks to the complete life altering event that is taking place. I have told people many times, that being a father is harder than I ever imagined it would be, but also more rewarding than I ever dreamed it could be. My kids come first. Everything I do, I try to keep a basic thought in the forefront of my mind, and that is the question of what is in my children’s best interest. I allowed myself to suffer abuse and torment, because I thought that staying with their mother, was what was best for them.

Eventually I realized that staying with their mother, was only best for the kids, if their mother and I were happy. The constant fighting, was more damaging to the kids, than their mother and I separating. My daughter’s stress and anxiety manifested as Functional Abdominal Pain, and that constant stomach pain stopped her from attending school for almost three years. This lack of attendance was supported by her mother, and my concerns and objections were ignored. Her brother’s stress and anxiety manifested as anger, and rage. He developed a mistrust and hatred of women. I got phone calls from the school because of how he would disrespect the teacher, or the mother’s volunteering during field trips. When I started to see signs in the next youngest, of stress and anxiety, I knew that I had failed as a father and as a parent. Coupled with some other issues in my life, I decided that what was best for everyone, is if I was no longer around, and I attempted suicide.

My attempt was unsuccessful, but nobody even noticed that I had tried, which reinforced to me that nobody would miss me when I was gone, so I tried again. Again I was unsuccessful. I tried talking to my wife, and all she did was berate me for being such a selfish piece of shit, which again reinforced my belief that the world would be better without me in it. Fortunately, as my life was crumbling around me, I called my sister, essentially to say goodbye. She begged me to come live with her, but I did not want to be a burden on her, and I wanted to be able to say goodbye to my kids, so I made up a reason and declined. My sister knew that my next suicide attempt was only a few days away, and that I had a plan for attempt three, that would likely work, so she worked as fast as she could to come to my rescue.

My sister made arrangements with some friends, both hers and mine, and then tricked my wife into being out of the house for the day. She then descended upon the house, and moved me out of the master bedroom, into the baby’s room, and moved the baby into the master bedroom. She put a key lock on my new bedroom door, and made me promise that I would not make any attempt to kill myself for at least another week. She then everyone, except my mother and my best friend, off to a friend’s house, so that the remaining three of us could confront my wife upon her return home.

That confrontation went about as well as I expected. To their faces, my wife assured my mother and my friend of how concerned she was about me, and how she had not realized how serious the situation with my mental health had become. She said all the right things, and made all of the right promises. And she is such a gifted liar, that I could see the calm reassurance spreading over my mother and my friend’s faces as they believed that perhaps things would be okay.

Then my wife asked if she could have a private conversation with me. Believing that things would be okay, my mother and my friend agreed, so my wife and I went to a different room, where my wife proceeded to verbally tear me apart for embarrassing her. I took the verbal abuse, as I was fairly used to it, and we came back into the room. One look at the expressions on my mother and friend’s faces and I knew that they had heard everything she had just said to me, and it was at that moment that I finally realized that I am not a piece of worthless shit, but perhaps, just perhaps, I might have value.

I realized that as painful as it would be for the kids, the only way any of us could start to heal, was to “rip off the bandage” and declare the marriage over. P!nk’s song “Family Portrait” from her Missundaztood album tells the story of the family breaking up, with the parents’ brutal fighting, from the perspective of the child.

With lyrics including:

“It ain’t easy growing up in World War III” …

“In our family portrait
We look pretty happy
Let’s play pretend, let’s act like it comes naturally”

The lyrics are gut-wrenching. Especially knowing that I was part of doing that very thing to my own children. The very people that I had promised myself that I would do anything to protect, I was actively hurting. The realization that my decision to stay together “for the kids” was the very thing that was hurting the kids, very nearly sent me to attempt number three, even though I had promised my sister that I would not.

When we choose an action, we choose all the consequences that go with that action. I have made a lot of bad choices, and taken a lot of bad actions during my life, and I get to live with that. Knowing some of the pain that I have caused my children, is some of the hardest issues with which I get to live.

Over the years, my kids have come to me with some hard questions, and I have tried to respond to those questions honestly, whilst trying to remember that they will have to understand and live with the answers. When my son, who was maybe seven at the time, asked me “why does mommy love grandma more than she loves me?” and before I could even start to respond, his nine year old sister followed up with “yeah, why is that?”¹, it was quite the gut-punch. I had known for years where everyone landed on their mother’s importance hierarchy, with her mother being at the top of the list, the four kids were roughly tied for second place, and I ranked after the kids, and was considered more of an interchangeable part. She wanted someone in the role of husband and father, but did not really care whether that someone was me. But trying to find the words to explain to a couple of kids that their mother loves them, and while it might appear that their grandmother was more important, they were mistaken in their impression was extremely challenging, especially when I knew that what I was telling them was a complete lie. They were completely correct, their mother really did care more about their grandmother than she did about them.

Since then, the questions that they have come to me with have gotten harder, as they are getting older and understanding more. Lately, that seven year old, who is by now a teenager, and I have been discussing the Trolley Problem, and how so much of life can wind up being about trying to pick the least objectionable option. When he came to me a couple of weeks ago, asking ‘Why don’t you just settle with Mommy? Why are you taking her to court?”¹, even though the words were coming out of his mouth, I knew who was asking me the question. Trying to find the right words to explain things to him, in a way that he can understand, but also knowing that everything will likely be repeated, the best he can remember, back to his mother. I tried to explain to him, that I have tried settling with his mother, and that she ignores the terms of the settlements, every chance she gets, and that the only way I can make the terms stick, is if they are legally binding. I got to revisit this very issue, about two weeks later, when I discovered that his mother, according to his younger brother, regularly comes to visit the younger two children at school, on my parenting days, which is in direct violation to the terms of a settlement we reached a year ago.

Every time that one of my kids comes to me with a question, I know that they are struggling with an issue of their own, and regardless of how big or small the issue might appear to me, the issue is big to them. I have so many emotional and psychological issues of my own, that I see the same issues in my kids. Whether these issues are truly there, or whether I am projecting my fears onto normal childhood issues causes me to spiral. Is my child a cry-baby who needs to grow up, or is it signs of C-PTSD?

Slowly I have been working on finding myself again. My favourite empowerment song is “Fight Song” by Rachel Platten from her album Fight Song. Rachel wrote the song about her struggle in the music industry, and her personal search for a decision whether to continue to struggle or whether to give up and try a different path. Multiple lyrics ring out to me:

“Starting right now I’ll be strong” …

“And I don’t really care if nobody else believes
‘Cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me” …

“Losing friends and I’m chasing sleep”

Doing what I believed to be the right thing, even though it cost me money, time, friends, and almost everything else, but I’m continuing down a path, with an end goal even I cannot see.

I created a family, and then I got to rip that family apart, because I knew that as brutal as it was, it what was best for the children. Every day remains a struggle, but I have the love and support of the people that truly care about me. One of the hardest parts was the discovery of which of my friends, truly were my friends. The people that will stand beside me through thick and thin. There have been some incredibly hard and painful lessons along the way, But I keep fighting.

¹ I do not remember the exact phrasing, but this is as close as I can recall