As part of my ongoing path to healing, there are some people to whom I wish to address. They may never read this, but I still want to say some things to them. I am going to avoid using last names, but to those of you who know, you will know to whom I am addressing.

Tammy – We met in grade 8, and we had adventures throughout high school. You were always loud, and brash. There are so many memories that I have from the 32 years of friendship that we shared. I remember you getting Raphael to apologize because the women’s bathroom was closed, and you had to use the men’s room, even though it had nothing to do with Raph. I can remember the teacher quietly requesting to give you a neck massage, during English 12, because it was the only way to keep you quiet. He thought it better to have two people not working, rather than the 8 people that you would engage in conversation. After high school, I drifted away, but I never lost track of you. When the 10 year reunion came up, I knew exactly how to contact you, and you seemed excited for us to be back in touch. When I discussed the idea of moving to England, you conspired with Cathie, and set me up on a blind date. During the blind date, you and Cathie even had me change your daughter’s diaper, on the floor in Cathie’s living room, to demonstrate to Christina that I was good husband and father material. For 32 years, we were friends. You were someone that I could turn to when things were getting tough. You were someone that I could trust to help me see the path through the forest, when I was getting lost. You were the one that then stabbed me in the back, and used my secrets against me, the moment that I needed you the most. I was at the lowest point in my entire life. My world was crumbling and falling around me. I had just attempted suicide, twice, and was planning my third attempt, and you turned on me, and made it clear that you were a ‘fair weather friend’. 32 years of friendship, flushed down the toilet. What is worse, is that you continued to pretend to be my friend, and then told my secrets to the enemy. I was hurting, and in pain, and you kicked me hard to keep me down. The only explanation that makes sense, is that you wanted my next suicide attempt to succeed. You wished me dead.

Cathie – We met in Grade 9. You met Christina in college. We lost touch after high school graduation, as I drifted away. Like so many of my high school friends, we reconnected at the 10 year reunion and the years that followed. When I was looking at moving to England, you and Tammy conspired to find me a girlfriend, as you felt that would be a great way to keep me in the Country. Ultimately, Chris and Tammy, you and Mike, Christina, and I met for a dinner as a way for Christina and I to meet. That meeting went well, and the six of us returned to your and Mike’s condo. You and Tammy convinced me to change Morgan’s diaper right there on your living room floor, because you were trying to ‘sell’ me to Christina as a great prospective boyfriend. One detail you forgot to double check upon, is that Christina had not yet broken up with her previous boyfriend when this date occurred. That became something of a pattern for her ultimately. Start up with the new guy, before being broken up with the previous guy, but more on that later. Although perhaps you did know, and did not care. Newsflash, Mike has been cheating on you for the entire time that I have known him. But as is the case with that sort of information, I could never tell you. The most common outcome when someone tells you that your partner is cheating, is that you ‘kill the messenger’. Mike would brag to Pete and I about his conquests. When (different) Tammy’s life was falling apart and she moved in with you for a while, she would comment to me about the frequent hints, suggestions, and innuendos that Mike would offer to her. When he and I were alone, he would tell me all about what he wanted to do with Christina. The guy is scum, but I guess that the two of you deserve each other.

Amanda – You are a tough one for me to truly know how to feel. You might be one of the people that I could forgive. But at the same time, you are smart enough to have been able to make your own choices, and choose your own actions. I keep hoping that you were brought into a conversation with Tammy, Cathie, and Christina, and you simply believed that what they were saying about me was true, but you never actually cared enough to find out. After 32 years of friendship, how were you able to believe the lies that were being told about me? I think that is what hurt the most, the fact that you were able to believe the lies, and never thought to ask me about what is happening. That you could just easily accept that I was cheating on and physically abusing Christina.

Diane – We met in the mid nineties, introduced by your brother, who was friends with my late brother-in-law. You fell into the category of people I just don’t think that I can trust anymore. At best, you were trying to be neutral in the situation between Christina and myself, and at worst, you were actively spying on me for her, and the sad reality is that I truly do not know. After she and I separated, you would make positive and encouraging comments to Christina, but not to me. When I was emotionally destroyed, you were not there. Your children have slowly abandoned me, and I don’t know if you even noticed when I cut you off. At one time, your family was my second family, and now we are nothing, and I don’t know if you even care.

Jonoh – Where do I even start? You were one of my best friends, my business partner, and god-father to my children. I overlooked so many problems, because that’s what one does for a friend. When we were business partners, you gave me one of your clients, because you had more work than you could handle, and I had the time. However, you insisted on keeping the pay for that job, because it was your client. I accepted that. We were both struggling, and I was trying to be supportive. When I had to hand you my client because of a family emergency, you insisted on keeping the pay for that job, because you had done all of the work, even though that was contrary to the policy you had set just a couple of months earlier. Then when it was realized that the website that you had created for my client, was so full of bugs and bad code, that I had to tear the entire thing down, and rewrite it from scratch, you refused to help, because it was my client. You still kept the money though. When your wife made a comment on Facebook insulting you, I had thought in jest, and I agreed with her, you ‘unfriended’ me. When I realized, I apologized and we moved forward. When Christina and I broke up, you ‘unfriended’ me again, you claim to try and get my attention. I reached out and tried reconciling with you once again, but your agenda seemed to be more about trying to get information out of me, and try to get me to reconcile with Christina. Even after I was telling you some of the things that she had done to me, you seemed to think that I was the one who needed to apologize and crawl back to her. Did you notice when I ‘unfriended’ you? You are the epitome of ‘fair weather friend’. Anytime I truly needed you, you were nowhere to be found. Also, you are god-father to my four children. For a Christian, isn’t that a covenant with God? When was the last time you spoke with any of them, or even checked on their well-being? I lose track regarding your beliefs, but the last time we spoke, you were back to being devout. I am god-father to two kids. I may not be Christian, but I know where both of those kids are, and how they are doing. That was a sacred promise that I made to those children, even if they were too young to remember. Half of my kids have no idea who you are, and the other half say that they cannot remember the last time that they heard from you. What I do know, is that my life is better without you in it.

Jennifer – You were more friends with Christina than you were with me, but I still thought of you as a friend. I understand why you picked Christina’s side. You are a loyal friend. You are someone that truly deserves better than the wolf in sheep’s clothing that is Christina. She is using you. That is all she does. That is all that she is capable of doing. She has no loyalty to anyone but herself, and you deserve so much better. She is preying on your naivety. I am curious whether she ever told you about her affair. I suspect she has never mentioned it. I am certain she told you that I cheated on her. She knows that I cheated, because her crack-head brother, who by his own acknowledgement was stoned on crack at the time, ‘heard’ me cheating. Apparently I then confessed the entire thing to him. It was quite the shock to me when those accusations started. All so he could regain control of his tanning salons, so he could return to draining them for money to buy more crack.

Shane – You are one of the shittiest people that I have ever had the misfortune to meet. Even your own father was telling me about the illegal things you were doing, like trying to turn his back shed into a marijuana grow op. Since marijuana was illegal, at the time, at all you managed to do was destroy his shed, which you never tried to repair, that says something about your character. You weren’t planning on growing just for your personal use either, and this was, at least, your second attempt at getting into a growing and distribution operation. When I was between jobs, you suggested that I take a gig trafficking drugs. I hope that you have been honest with Tanya about just how much you cheated on Barb. After Barb could no longer ignore your cheating any longer and dumped you, you were boasting to me about all of the women with whom you had been cheating. You were proud of your conquest list. You were proud that half the women were already married. You tried to convince me that cheating on Christina, your sister, would be a good thing. Like most drug addicts, you believed that your addiction was not as bad as other people, and that you were in control. Your own dealer approached me to try and hold an intervention for you! How many addicts have an addiction so out of control, that their dealer is worried. When your addiction got so out of control that you were about to lose your tanning salon business, your sister asked me to come to Calgary and help. I dropped everything, and I came. That cost me the consulting business that I was starting. I had just landed my first client a couple of days before I got the call requesting help. I had to pass the client to Jonoh, who bungled the job so badly that my consulting business was DOA. I then got fly to Calgary, live in a hotel for the next two months, and try to salvage what I could of your business. My daughter got to celebrate her third birthday in a strange town, with no friends, because of you. You were a self-centred asshole then, and from what I hear from the kids today, you have not changed. I don’t think you have any concept of how much I did for you during those two months. I managed your tanning salons for two months, and during that time, I had to hire all new staff, and an on-site manager, and I had to train them all myself. I wasn’t given any training on the tanning equipment myself, but I learned fast, and trained others. I had my vehicle vandalized by angry staff and customers when I had to make the hard decisions, resulting from your actions. Through it all, I managed to line up a buyer for your salon, for far more than it was worth, to try and salvage some of your mother’s money. Or did you forget that you had borrowed $200,000 from your mother to buy two salons. One of the salons I couldn’t save. The lease was ending, and there was no new location lined up, and I was in a foreign city with no time to site visit. I was too busy working open to close, seven days a week, running the salon that was still operational. I was even interviewed by the News, trying to salvage what I could from the ruins that I had been handed. I had a buyer lined up. I’d talked her from $100,000 to $120,000 in a desperate attempt to regain some of your mother’s money. You convinced your mother to turn down the offer, and over the next several years, you got your mother to invest an additional $400,000 into the one salon, and ultimately sold it for $15,000 (I think). Hindsight is wonderful. Instead of your mother accepting the offer I’d lined up, and only losing $80,000, she listened to you, and lost $585,000. Yet you claim to be the better businessman. During my time in Calgary, my instructions from your mother were to do whatever was necessary to keep you happy, until you legally transferred ownership to her. You took great advantage of that. In order to try and keep you happy, I got to buy you drugs, become an accessory to felony robbery, you took me to a strip club, and tried to ‘buy’ me a lap dance. I put the word buy in quotes, because you were going to buy me the lap dance using my money. I got to listen to you brag and boast about all of the women with whom you cheated on your fiancée. You were proud of how much you had cheated on her. You encouraged me to smoke crack with you. I watched you get kicked out of hotels, for which I then had to pay to clean up the mess. Your dealer approached me expressing concern about you, because, according to him, you were the worst addict with whom he had dealt. You cost me over $20,000 cash, and my consulting business, but you were family, so I did my best. To thank me, you attempted to destroy my marriage. Even after that, I still tried to help you. You stole from your mother, and from me, to fund your crack habit, and the closest I ever got to an apology, was your comment of “That was in the past. Get over it.” Throughout my life, I have had several friends that wound up addicted to drugs. Heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, those that survived, came out the other side ashamed and embarrassed for their actions and sought forgiveness from those they had wronged. I can forgive those who are remorseful. Your arrogance refused to allow you to admit that perhaps you’d made any mistakes. Your actions cost your mother hundreds of thousands of dollars, her house, and ultimately her life. I truly believe that you disappointed her to death. She saw the failure that you had become, and she simply gave up. But not before extracting a promise from Christina that the two of you would make peace with each other. She did not bother to ask my opinion on that, because to her, I was irrelevant. Recognizing and atoning for the mistakes you made during addiction is such a significant part of the healing process, that it is 3 of the 12 steps in the 12-step program:

8. Making a list of wrongs done to others and being willing to make amends for those wrongs
9. Contacting those who have been hurt, unless doing so would harm the person
10. Continuing to take personal inventory and admitting when one is wrong

3 steps in a 12-step process is 1/4 the total steps. With me, you decided to skip those steps. With me, you showed me how much I actually mattered to you. Your sister supported your treatment of me, which showed me how much I mattered to her also. The one that I truly feel sorry for, is your current wife.

Christina – My ex-wife. I am so happy that I am finally divorced from you. Words cannot truly express how wonderful it feels to know that, in this one tiny area, I won. We dated for one year, and we were married for 15 years, and it wasn’t until that very last year of marriage that I discovered the real you. Looking back, there were lots of signs, but love is blind. I justified, and made excuses for your poor behaviour. Did you know that at one point or another, all four of our kids have questioned whether you love them? Selena is able to point out actions that do, that demonstrate to her that I love her, yet she genuinely does not know whether you love her. The reality, is that you do not love her. Not in the conventional meaning of the word. To you, she is an object that can be used to make yourself look good. If that makes her happy, great, but it does not actually matter whether she enjoys herself, as long as you are perceived as being a good mother. You used to make elaborately decorated cakes for the kids, for their birthdays, but only if there was a party where other parents would be in attendance. You were not making the cake for the kid, but to look good to the other mothers. You wanted them to envy your cakes. That is why you never made a cake for me, for any of my birthdays. I never got to have a party, so there was nobody to show off your cake decorating skills. An elaborately decorated cake, made just for my enjoyment, was pointless, as you would not get the glory that you crave. You never actually cared about me, all you cared about was me making you look good. Which is why every time we had a rough patch, you made certain that I heard about how upset you were, and you were certain to remind me about how useless I was. You slowly eroded my sense of self-worth, until all that was left, was an utter dependency on you to make me feel better about myself. When you were happy with me, I was happy, but if you were upset with me, I was scum. Over the years, you spent more and more time being upset with me, until happy no longer occurred. I was miserable and dying, and too mixed up to realize that you were the problem. That is the amazing power of a narcissist. You gaslit me into believing that all of our problems were my fault. Any problem that I had with you, was all in my head. Only your problems mattered. Only what you wanted mattered. You are simply evil. Worse, now I get to watch as you mentally and emotionally abuse the children, and there is nothing that I can do about it. Sydney suffered from functional abdominal pain for 4 years, because of the stress and anxiety she had dealing with your and my relationship. Spencer suffered from rage issues, misogyny, and self-hatred, and you did not notice. Sawyer and Selena currently struggle with self-hatred, and self doubt. At least they are all starting to see you for who you truly are. You will always be their mother, but as they become adults, they are going to start reducing the frequency that they contact you, and they are going to avoid you when you contact them. I doubt that any will ever go ‘no contact’, but I do know that you are going to wind up miserable and alone, and you will blame me for what is entirely your own fault. That’s okay. I can handle your hatred.

When I first started writing this post, I thought that I was going to talk about that last year we were together. How, in a desperate attempt to salvage something, I suggested an open marriage, and how eagerly you embraced that concept. How you would send me pictures of you with other men. You sleeping with multiple men in the same night. You having threesomes in our trailer in the driveway, while the kids were asleep in their beds. Or perhaps your revelation to me of the affair that you had several years earlier, and that you genuinely did not know the father of one of the kids. You can deny that all you want, but heard the fear in your voice, when you begged me to know the results of the DNA test. It was definitely a Maury moment. Did I make mistakes? Absolutely. I have never denied the mistakes that I have made. I made some massive mistakes. I made mistakes that cost us a huge amount of money. But I was not the only one who got scammed for money, but despite what you claim now, you were in full support of my ‘investment’ at the time. You were dreaming of the money we were going to receive. You were looking at new houses, new furniture, and new cars. Of course when it all turned out to be bullshit, you changed your tune, and laid the blame entirely at my feet, and claim that you were against it from the start. I do recall you sending money to multiple of your ‘boyfriends’, to help them out. Guys that you had never met, and only communicated with online. My favourite is still the guy that faked a car accident and amnesia to get out of having to meet with you, and you believed every word of it. But now I am just getting petty. This was not supposed to be about me being petty. I wanted to try and tell some of my side, from my point of view. You and your brother, Shane, just bring out the worst parts of me. I wish that I could just be done with you, and never have to think about you again, but we share four kids, and as such, we are connected for the rest of our lives. There will be graduations, weddings, and grand-children. Although, when they look at the toxicity of our relationship, the kids often say that they have no interest in having relationships or children of their own, so perhaps there won’t be that many reasons for us to interact in the decades to come.