Forget about it and simply move on.

People tell me to move on as if this story ended decades ago. It didn’t. It is still active, still administrative, still written into records that continue to shape my life.

And that sounds great and magic and all, but that’s not how it works.

What happened in 1980 didn’t stay in 1980. It malingered from 1980 until it was revived in 2011, reinforced in 2018, and made permanent.

In 2011 the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service called me a “societal malcontent with an axe to grind against the military”.

I wasn’t someone who endured a year and a half of sexual abuse, from age seven to age eight, at the hands of a fourteen-year-old babysitter.

That was obviously just a story that I made up.

A lie that was told so that I could juice some easy money from the Canadian Armed Forces.

My father was interviewed by the CFNIS and claimed that he “never” hired a babysitter to look after my brother and me. And he was right. He never hired the babysitter, except for on one occasion. It was my grandmother that hired the babysitter every second weekend or so.

During our involvement with Alberta Social Service my father was noted as telling people that he perceived to be in a position of authority what they wanted to hear. My father was also found to tell conflicting stories from one interview to the next. And my father also claimed to be the victim, that everyone was attacking him, and that people were intentionally keeping information from him.

When I gave a copy of my Alberta Social Service paperwork to the CFNIS in September of 2011, did the CFNIS contact my father again to ask about the discrepancies between my Alberta Social Services records and his August 2011 statement?

Nope.

What he told the CFNIS in August of 2011 was more than enough to help the CFNIS shape the narrative of the story they wanted to ship to the Alberta Crown in October of 2011.

Growing up in Richard’s house on CFB Shearwater, CFB Summerside, CFB Namao, CFB Griesbach, and CFB Downsview was anything but pleasant.

On CFB Shearwater my mother made use of the “battered wives club” frequently. I was often “boarded” at the IWK Children’s Hospital due to instability and conflict in the household. My father was noted as being returned to port early due to “emotional issues” while at sea. And the doctors were beginning to put plans in place to put Child Protective Services in contact with my family just before we were posted to CFB Summerside.

When my father was posted to CFB Namao he asked his mother to come and raise my brother and I. Richard really didn’t like his mother. There was no closeness between the two. But without grandma there was no way that he’d be able to go on training exercises while leaving his 7 year old and 4 year old home alone for two or three weeks.

When my family became involved with Alberta Social Services in November of 1981, my father blamed the issues my brother and I were having on his mother. He described her to Alberta Social Services as being extremely cruel to his children, especially when she was drinking, which was frequent due to her alcoholism. He also said that she refused to seek treatment for her alcoholism. Now, this is rich coming from Richard and both he and grandma were alcoholics, and the two of them would often get stumble down drunk when they drank together. Sometimes they’d even trade blows if they got hammered enough.

When my father was asked by his buddy Jacques Choquette sometime around 1985, why Richard didn’t give us back to our mother to raise if he was getting sick and tired of us, Richard told Jacques that as long as we lived under his roof, he controlled the costs, and that if he sent us to live with that “bitch” that he would have to sign his whole fucking paycheque over to her and that wasn’t going to happen.

Around the spring of 1982, Richard called my brother and I into the living room of the PMQ on CFB Griesbach. Richard told us that he and Sue might be splitting up. Both Scott and I cheered as Sue was quite the asshole. She had gone from promising to get Richard’s drinking and temper under control to being just as angry as abusive as he was. It was almost like she had Stockholm syndrome and thought that if she punished us enough that Richard would be happy and approve of her. Richard told us to both shut up. He explained that if Sue left him, Scott and I were going into a duffel bag, buried where nobody would ever find us, and he would simply move back into the barracks.

This wasn’t a picturesque childhood.

This was a fucking horror show.

After the abuse on CFB Namao, I would frequently wet my bed.

Grandma would get angry and accuse me of attention-seeking.

My father was fine with me sleeping in the piss as he wasn’t going to waste his time on changing sheets.

Sue had decided that the best way to stop me from pissing the bed was to rub my face in it like a dog.

I actually stopped wetting the bed the day I moved out of the house just after my 16th birthday.

After Captain Terry Totzke declared me a homosexual because the abuse had gone on for so long, my father’s attitude toward me soured completely. He wanted sweet bugger fuck all to do with me.

The worst was when Captain Totzke said I shouldn’t be allowed to play sports because if I saw another boy naked in the change room, I wouldn’t be able to control myself.

No matter how clean I kept my nose, or how well I tried to do in school with absolutely no support from home, this wasn’t good enough.

My brother Scott was in and out of group homes and juvie while we lived on CFB Downsview, and Scott could do absolutely no wrong.

The difference?

Scott was a victim of the babysitter and me.

See, in 1980 Captain Totzke declared me to have a mental illness called homosexuality. My brother didn’t have that same illness apparently.

According to the Canadian Armed Forces, there were only two victims of child sexual abuse on Canadian Forces Base Namao. One person was the babysitter. The other person was my younger brother.

The funny thing is the babysitter went on to have a prolific career of molesting children. I ended up disgusted with sex believing that sex was only something that somebdy else made you do to them to make them feel good.

Because I allowed the babysitter to abuse Scott, Scott was no longer to blame for anything that he did. Me? Well, that’s a different story. Anything that Scott did was my fault because I let the babysitter touch him.

It was sometime around the summer of 1987 when my brother stole Sue’s Pontiac Acadian and took it for a joyride off the base and into the city. I was 15 he was 13. When Richard and Sue came home from shopping in Oshawa and Richard found the Acadian missing, he laid one fuck of a beating on me. As he’s wailing away demanding to know why I can’t look after my brother, why I’m not raising my brother, he blurts out that Scott wouldn’t be doing these things if I hadn’t let the fucking babysitter touch him.

By the time the fall of 1987 rolled around things were getting pretty tense in Richard’s houshold on CFB Downsview. Richard was his same old angry self. His drinking was picking up again. Sue had sent me over to the Sgt. & W.O. mess a few times to pick him up and bring him home. His insomnia was going off the rails. My bedroom had been moved into the basement a few months after Sue’s son William was born in August of 1985. Richard had his work area set up in the basement with his desk, his computers, and his television. He would frequenly come downstairs after midnight, turn his computers on, turn his TV on, spark up some smokes, and maybe have a night cap, or two, or three.

As I was young at the time, my hearing was top notch. I didn’t listen to loud music. Fuck, I didn’t even have a radio in my room, let alone a stereo that I could hook up headphones to. So when he turned his TV or computers on, the whine of the horizontal deflection circuitry would wake me up. Kids these days have it lucky with LCD and OLED monitors, but back in the day when I was kid TVs and monchrome computer monitors had a scan frequency of 15.734 kHz. And this was audible and annoying to any kid with decent ears.

When Richard discovered that his insomnia was waking me up every night and making it hard for me to sleep, especially considering that my room didn’t have a door, his solution was that I could get the fuck out of his house anytime that I wanted to.

I moved out in late 1987, just after I turned 16.

I had stopped going to school a few months earlier.

I was already paying Richard $150.00 a month in rent for my bedroom.

So when the company that I was working for found out the trouble that I was having at home, they set me up with a room to rent. It was only $50.00 more than what my father was charging.

Richard didn’t care. In facte he borrowed a pickup truck from one of his buddies and helped me to move.

I wish that I knew that my family had been under the supervison of the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto. I could hve applied for emergency aid which would have gotten me shelter and the ability to continue going to school.

But such was not the case.

Without school, I never had the opportunity to enter the trades. But then again, my father was adamant that he joined the RCN with grade 9 and that’s all anyone really needed to get a job.

So there was no trade school.

There was no college.

There was no university.

There was nothing.

And even if by some fluke I had been able to scrape the money to go to school, there was the untreated depression and severe anxiety that I had to deal with.

Remember, I wouldn’t find out that I had been diagnosed with major depression and severe anxiety until August of 2011 when I received my Alberta Social Services paperwork.

From literally October of 1980 when Captain Totzke sent me to see a psychiatrist until I received my paperwork in 2011, I had no fucking idea whatsoever that I had been diagnosed with major depression, severe anxiety, and haphephobia.

Growing up under Richard’s roof on Canadian Forces Base Griesbach, and Canadian Forces Base Downsview, both Richard and Sue treated my depression as me just be a lazy fucking asshole that didn’t want to do anything and who just whined about everything like a little bitch.

My anxiety was often treated by my father with a good backhand and an order to calm the fuck down.

My haphephobia wasn’t my fear of being touched. No, that was apparently me being to good to play with other kids.

So no, even if I had the money, the depression, the anxiety, and the haphephobia would have ruined everything.

Why didn’t you seek treatment?

Treatment for what?

Grinding my teeth all night long?

Sleeping in all the time?

Not wanting to get out of bed?

Not getting pleasure or joy out of anything?

Constantly wishing that I’d be dead?

No desire for sex as sex was a deviancy that only perverts and the mentally ill engaged in?

Trying to figure out whether it was worth continuing to exist at all?

No, see, my father had told me, I was just a lazy fucking crybaby.

I wasn’t depressed.

There was no depression in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Base brats had no fucking reason to be depressed.

So no, there was never going to be anything meaningful in my life.

Sure, I can do things.

But because I don’t have the qualifications on paper, I’m told I can’t officially do these things, even though I do them anyway.

I often find myself being attacked by people with certificates and Red Seals because I’m not supposed to know those things or work on those things. Doesn’t matter what my back ground is, or why I was prevented in life from getting the qualifications that they have.

I get yelled at by people with more qualification than I have because apparently I’m not teaching them what to do because I want to make them look bad. Yet they don’t seem to understand that they’re the ones getting paid a higher pay grade than I am because they’re supposed to be more qualified than me.

As I said, if I had gotten into the trades back in the late ’80s, and my depression and anxiety didn’t fuck things up, the absolute lack of support from home would have.

University? I don’t know of a single fucking university student that doesn’t receive assiatnce from home.

So no, there is no moving on.

There is no “getting over it”.

Every day of my existence is a reminder of what was taken away from me, because I live through it every day.

Every day is a reminder of how much of a joke my life actually is and how meaningless my life actually is considering how easily the Canadian Armed Forces decided that I was expendable not only in 1980, but again in 2011, and 2018.

No, there is no moving on from this.

This whole fucking mess is nothing but a fucking albatross around my neck slowly pulling me under the waves. And I am still expected to pretend it isn’t there.