Tag: Susan Zwolle

It should be obvious that my family wasn’t close or tight knit.

But there is one person that I know absolutely nothing about, and that is Sue, my stepmother.

I’m pretty sure that Sue and her two brothers Henry and Peter were born in Canada.

Sue’s parents had immigrated from the Netherlands after WWII.

They lived in a small house in Oshawa.

Richard must have started going out with Sue sometime around the late summer of 1979 as my father had been involved with Vicki from Wetaskwin up until the summer of 1979. Or maybe there was somewhat of an overlap. We are talking about Richard.

At the time that Richard started going out with Sue, Sue was rooming with her friend Karen at an apartment building out by Londonderry Mall in east Edmonton.

Sue work for the Alberta Government Telephone system, or AGT for short.

To this date I have no idea of what her date of birth was or how old she was.

She was young enough that the female military police officer that lived next door to us in PMQ #69 on CFB Griesbach referred to Sue as my older sister and Richard as our father.

I did learn in the last few years that Sue was born in either 1958 or 1959, which would place her as being twelve or thirteen years older than me.

She was young when she came to live with us. When I say that I often referred to her as the old sister that I never wanted, I wasn’t being facetious.

I would also learn that Richard more than likely knew Sue long before Edmonton.

My father’s father, Arthur Herman Gill had started a new family in Oshawa, Ontario after he broke up with my father’s mother, Margret Mary Waniandy.

Arthur married a woman named Ladean and had two daughters. These were Richard’s step-sisters. Sue and the two step daughters went to the same high school.

Apparently Richard met Sue via his two step-sisters when he had visited his father in Oshawa sometime in the ’70s.

This is apparently what drove a wedge between Richard and his father and why even though we’d go visit Sue’s parents periodically in Oshawa, we never went to see Arthur Herman Gill after xmas of 1982.

I have no idea if Sue knew what she was getting herself into when she started dating my father. I don’t think that there is anyway she could have.

As I have said before, Richard was an accomplished liar and a master manipulator.

I have no doubt that Richard regaled Sue with tales of how his wife just up and abandoned him and his children for a guy name Gus from the PPCLI.

Richard probably also regaled Sue with tales of how the Canadian Armed Forces awarded him sole custody of his children because Marie had abandoned him and her children.

I also have no doubt that he forgot to mention to Sue that his mother was an emotionally disturbed Residential School survivor with a massive alcohol problem.

I have no doubt that Richard didn’t tell Sue that his kids were emotional basket cases due to the then current sexual abuse, emotional neglect, and physical child abuse they were enduring.

And I have no doubt that due to Sue’s young age, she had a certain naivety with men like Richard, she didn’t realize that she was falling into Richard’s trap.

I also have no doubt that she was pretty sure that she could fix whatever was wrong with Richard.

Ladies, here’s some advice. You can’t fix men like Richard. They’re fucking broken. Don’t waste your time. You’re not the misogynistic douchebag whisperer. You see a man like Richard coming, run the other way. You wanna fix something, get a cat and get it fixed.

Sue moved in to the PMQ on CFB Namao in August of 1979 just after the Captain Father Angus McRae child sexual abuse scandal exploded on Canadian Forces Base Namao. Seeing as how the Canadian Forces moved heaven and hell to keep the scandal out of the media she probably had no idea about what had transpired on the base and what had happened to my brother and I.

But one thing became apparent right from the start. Sue despised my grandmother. Sue blamed grandma’s alcoholism for Richard’s alcoholism. So, it became a routine that when Sue came home from work grandma would lock herself in her bedroom and only come out for the bathroom.

And seeing as how Richard told Alberta Social Services in 1981 that the reason my brother and I were having trouble was due to grandma’s cruelty and her alcoholism this was probably something that he had told Sue numerous times to that point.

Richard always needed someone else to take the blame and to take the fall.

When Sue first moved in she promised my brother and I that she would get Richard to stop beating Scott and I. But it wasn’t long until she was hitting the two of us as well. Scott told Alberta Social Services in 1982 that when Sue first moved in she promised that she would never hit us, but that she hits us all the time now.

It really must have pissed her off, hooking up with Richard, and then watching Richard disappear for 6 to 8 weeks at a time for training exercises while leaving her at home with his two mentally fucked up, emotionally disturbed, feral children.

It must have been soul destroying the first time that Richard would come home bouncing off the walls after getting fucking wasted at the Junior Ranks mess and realizing that it was the Canadian Forces enabling Richard’s drinking and not his mother’s alcoholism.

Richard would call her a cunt freely and with reckless abandon. I knew at the time that cunt was a bad word that you never called a woman. But Richard did. He’d use the word to describe my teachers and my counsellors. But he’d also use the word to Sue’s face.

Why she put up with that I’ll never know.

When I went to Morinville in 2003 to see my father, I actually spent more time hanging out with Sue. She apologized for the way things had been and the way she had treated me.

Although I forgave her, the bad things are still experiences that I lived through.

She would frequently call me a girl as if that was some sort of an insult. I never did understand as a kid why a woman would think that being a girl was a bad thing.

She would use dresses like a threat. Which was confusing as fuck for me as a kid. I had worn my friend’s dresses on CFB Shearwater. I had also worn one girl’s dresses on CFB Griesbach on a couple of occasions. I loved dresses, and I still love dresses, hence why I own close to 75 dresses now and I only have one pair of pants to my name.

But yeah, Sue would use “girl” and “dresses” like they were demeaning threats.

I was so envious of girls at the time that I often wished that I would grow my own breasts, or even better yet wake up a girl the next morning.

She called me a “retard” on a couple of occasions, no doubt fuelled by my involvement with the military social workers, the civilian social workers, and the Westfield Program.

There was one time in fact that always sticks out in my mind. Sue was going to take Scott for ice cream at Dairy Queen. I’m not sure if she was rewarding Scott for something, or if she was just taking him in order to rub my face in it. But I asked Sue if I could come for ice cream, she said no explaining that “retards” don’t get ice cream. So, I started to cry. She told me that if I didn’t stop crying like a little girl that she was going to treat me like a little girl and she’d buy me a dress.

Fuck was I ever conflicted. I was angry at her for calling me a retard and for not allowing me to get ice cream, but I was also picturing myself in a nice little blue dress, maybe a petticoat underneath. Some nice and shiny Mary Janes. White stockings…….

To cure me of my bed wetting she decided that it would be best if I wasn’t allowed to change my sheets and wasn’t allowed to shower the smell of my own piss off my body. Fuck did I get teased a lot at school.

She was the one who decided that seeing as how sleeping in my own piss and stinking like my own piss wasn’t enough to stop me from wetting the bed she would rub my face in my own piss stained sheets until I stopped.

She also insisted that the food be locked up. I used to eat our dog’s Gainsburgers.

She was the driving force behind my brother and I always having to “go outside and play” no matter how dark or how cold it was.

Richard had bought me an electronics kit to build a simple AM radio. Sue was pissed off that I wouldn’t go outside and get out of the house so she threw it in the garbage. When Richard found the radio he said that I never appreciated or respected anything that he did for me.

Sometime in early 1982 Sue was getting sick and tired of Richard going on training exercises and leaving her at home to raise his two dysfunctional spawn. I guess she threatened to leave Richard because in the spring of 1982 Richard sat both my brother and I down and said that if Sue left him that Scott’s and my bodies would go into a duffle bag and that nobody would ever find us and that he’d simply go live in the barracks.

This low point in the relationship between Richard and Sue is documented in my Social Service records as during a couple of family counselling sessions Richard and Sue would not address each other or acknowledge each other during the meeting, instead Richard would have me address Sue on his behalf, and Sue would use Scott to address Richard.

A round this time I asked my uncle Doug two questions and my young mind didn’t truly understand the given answers.

I asked uncle Doug why my father always believed Sue over me. Uncle Doug replied “Richard sleeps with Sue, he doesn’t sleep with you”.

I also asked my uncle Doug why Sue was so mean to me. Uncle Doug replied that “Sue wants her own children but Richard has told her that as long as you and Scott live in the house she’s not having kids”

Shortly after that Richard and Sue got “married” in the PMQ on CFB Griesbach in the spring of 1982. I use the quotes as Richard was still legally married to my mother and they didn’t get divorced until 1985.

My brother and I weren’t allowed to be at the ceremony. We were given $50 each and told to fuck off for the day.

I don’t think that Richard ever told Sue that due to Marie’s status as a military dependent that Marie was just a civilian and that Marie was only on base at Richard’s pleasure and that Richard had the full authority to have Marie thrown off the base. This was a documented flaw that still technically exists to this day. Back in the day the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Forces would actively fight any custody order in which the courts awarded the non-serving spouse the right to live in the PMQ after the divorce as military housing can only be rented to service members.

Richard would never have gone through the courts to get real custody of my brother and I as that would have exposed the fact that Marie didn’t “abandon” the family but that he had her booted off the base and out of military housing.

Richard would have also been very reluctant to go through the courts and get a finalized divorce as the matter of child custody would have been raised as would the matter of Richard’s land that Richard purchased in Nova Scotia while married to my mother.

But again, I don’t think Sue realized any of this.

Richard the Master Manipulator would have told her what his version of reality was.

When we moved to Canadian Forces Base Downsview in Ontario in April of 1983 no doubt Richard told Sue that it was my fault that we had to move.

Things never improved between Sue and I on CFB Downsview.

Same shit as on CFB Griesbach. The food was locked up and I had to be out of the house no matter how fucking shitty it was outside.

Same thing as CFB Griesbach, not allowed to touch her stereo system, not allowed to sit in the living room on her furniture.

In the spring of 1985 my friend John had come over to see if I had wanted to go do something with him. John and I were in the same Sea Cadet corp and we were in the same program for “special kids”. Sue had me cleaning the bathroom upstairs. When the door bell rang I stopped cleaning and went downstairs to the answer the door. As I was talking to John, Sue came over grabbed my right hand and bit my finger. I looked at her shocked and then kicked her square between the legs. I thought for sure that Richard was going to fucking kill me when he got home as Sue was pregnant with William at the time. But she obviously never said anything to Richard as she’d have to explain biting my finger.

Things changed a little bit between Sue and I after the infamous domestic in the summer of 1985. She wasn’t suddenly nice to me, but she no longer had the daggers out for me.

In the summer of 1985, while my brother and I were in Edmonton for the summer with grandma, there was a massive domestic dispute in our PMQ on Canadian Forces Base Downsview.

There was lots of damage to the PMQ and it apparently took three military police officers to bring my father under control. And yes, he nearly got tossed from the Canadian Forces over this.

Richard would never speak of it, and Sue never spoke of it.

I wouldn’t learn until about 30 years later what caused this.

My mother Marie had met a new man in 1984. They dated over the year and decided in 1985 to get married. One problem. Richard had never granted Marie a divorce. Marie demanded the divorce in the summer of 1985. No doubt Richard forgot to tell Sue that he was still legally married to Marie and therefore his marriage to Sue was fake. Being pregnant with Richard’s sex trophy but not being legally married to the father of her sex trophy probably lit the powder keg. But I think it also made Sue realize that Richard was a fucking liar that would bend the truth to suit the reality that he wanted to portray.

I haven’t spoken to Sue since 2003.

There really isn’t anything to talk about.

Each of us in our own way got fucked over and manipulated by Richard.

I have absolutely no doubt that Richard shared with her the contents of the letter I sent to Richard in May of 2008 explaining why I legally changed my name.

I also have no doubt that when the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service contacted Richard in June of 2011 for his statement that he told Sue that he had “no fucking idea” what this “fucking bullshit” was all about, that Scott and I were never sexually abused, and that I was just making this up to score quick money.

I also have no doubt that when I subpoenaed Richard in 2013 with a written examination for Federal Court that he would have bullshitted her with his version of truth all the while filling out the examination with statements that he knew were the real truth or as close to the real truth as he was willing to get.

So in the end, do I bear any hatred towards Sue?

No.

Her parents were both Dutch immigrants to Canada after WWII, so no doubt they held Canadian soldiers in almost godlike revere. After all, it was the Canadians that liberated Holland from the Nazis.

Richard could do no wrong in her eyes.

And as I said, Richard was the master manipulator.

Was I a sexually traumatized child suffering from major depression, severe anxiety, haphephobia, and all sorts of other mental health issues?

Nope, I was just a spoilt rotten brat that had been spoilt by Marie and I was just acting up to get attention.

Even when Richard’s faults started percolating to the surface, like most young women, she probably thought that she could fix him.

But, I can’t pretend that what happened didn’t happen.