“Family” Used to Mean No One Got Left Behind…

This is something that I’m not supposed to write.

Normally I would only discuss my writing, here, and not really anything personal. But I can’t talk about writing They Came in Peace without mentioning the personal struggles that I survived during the process. Among those struggles, was surviving alienation from my children for the last two years, and four years in total of fighting for my parental rights, with Quebec’s Department of Youth Protection.

The Direction de Protection de la Jeunesse, the DPJ, motivated by some fabrication of my abusive ex-wife, have gone out of their way to make sure I don’t have a relationship with my children.

Now every time I go out and see kids around their age I search their faces for anything I recognize; I haven’t seen my children in so long I can only imagine how they look, now.

I lie awake at night rebuking myself for every stupid, impudent act that led to this, hating myself for things I did, and hating the DPJ all the more because of what they’ve done to me.

I was admonished by the DPJ to not discuss this case, but the fact is, they so abused their authority in what they did that I feel the greater injustice would be letting them get away with it all without reproach. This organization is as corrupt and as authoritarian as everyone has ever told you. And here in Quebec, there is a hatred towards men, especially Anglophone men, that is built into the cultural subconscious: The DPJ was called originally to investigate my ex-wife. After they found she did little to nothing wrong and falling all over themselves while trying to offer her support and services, they turned their eye to me and took every aspect of my life apart to find fault with everything.

I know what my failings are; but they wouldn’t recognize anything that I’d achieved, and once again this week they reminded me of that fact again, when they told me they were going to extend their blockade against me until the fall, when they will divest themselves of the case and my ex-wife will be given full parental authority.

I may never see my children again; in my fight against the DYP they drove me into a nervous breakdown, and I lashed out at the social worker and it cost me the love and trust of my sons, and the presence of my daughter. They’ve stolen my fatherhood from me. The last time I hugged my children was the last time I hugged my children; they’re all young adults, now…the Direction de Protection de la Jeunesse stole the last years of my children’s childhood from me.

And they expect me to smile and say nothing as they continue fucking me, and thousands of others, over for petty reasons and minor issues. They act in bad faith and are never to be trusted.

For two years I’ve stayed awake at night, trying to sleep, trying not to cry…I miss my children, and they won’t be children if and when I ever see them again.

I dove headlong into the re-edit and minor cosmetic rewrite of They Came in Peace two years ago, when they cut me off from my kids. It was a story that grew out of apocalyptic and violent nightmares I had, over the course of a decade following my escape from an abusive ex-partner. How such a person can be such a wonderful mother is beyond me; but she is. She treated me like dogshit, made me feel like her employee instead of her partner. But, this isn’t about her.

This story is an exploration of so many different themes…I wouldn’t know where to start in unpacking what goes where in relation to what I was living through when I started the very first draft of TCiP. I don’t think I’d have survived, if I didn’t have this story to write, and now, to share.