I need to interject a bit of exposition into the recount of last Autumn’s drama. My wife has given her permission to post the following letter. Throughout her life she has slowly come to terms with all of the issues within it. Life makes us who we are by twisting our path through it and seeing how we fare. She has fared well and I love her for it.

I know that these same situations presented to others of us would have produced much different, and nastier, outcomes.

The letter is to the Canadian consulate in Romania. It was written and submitted with the request for visas for Troublemaker and Victim to visit us here in Canada. Obtaining visitor visas for them was quite difficult and took about 2 years. The letter is a little toned down for government consumption, but I think you’ll get the implications well enough.

The whole letter is posted to shed some light on a sentence, or maybe a paragraph, that is yet to be written in this replay of events past.

To Whom It May Concern:

My wife, The Girl, and I have re-issued invitations for travel visas to allow her great-aunt and friend to visit us in Canada. I feel an obligation to provide some details regarding the relationship between the parties involved in this potential visit in the hopes that this information will allow Troublemaker and Victim to visit and spend time with us in Canada.

The Girl, my wife, was born in Romania. Her father was a recent immigrant to Canada and was on his honeymoon in Romania when he chose to engage in some extramarital activity with an ex-girlfriend.

Once The Girl was born, her biological mother dropped her off on her paternal grandmother’s doorstep. Her grandmother was one of only three remaining paternal relatives (her father, her grandmother, and her grandmother’s sister). The Girl never got to know her biological mother or any relatives on her biological mother’s side.

The Girl’s father and stepmother decided to bring her over to Canada and therein ensued a bizarre custody battle. For the next twelve years, The Girl’s great aunt and grandmother took care of her while the legal issues were settled. Romanian law required both biological parents to consent in order for a child to be allowed to leave the country. The Girl’s biological mother didn’t want custody of her and yet she also refused to allow her to leave for Canada.

After years of legal wrangling, The Girl was eventually allowed to leave Romania and Canada provided landed immigrant status to both her grandmother and herself. Once The Girl and her grandmother arrived here it started to become clear that her father had fought for her custody, not out of love, but for selfish reasons. The Girl’s father quickly put her to work on their farm while he promptly disinvolved himself from many paternal responsibilities.

The Girl tolerated various degrees of mistreatment over a period of years. She shared much of this with her stepmother and her grandmother with no choice and no idea that her father’s behaviour was unacceptable. To this day, The Girl experiences nightmares about her father. As time carries on, the wounds that he has inflicted upon her are slowly receding but there is still much healing and counselling required.

A few years after The Girl and her grandmother arrived in Canada, The Girl’s father had her great aunt come over on a visitor’s visa. He promptly put her to work on the farm. He extended her visa for six months so that he could benefit more from her presence in Canada. Once her visa expired Troublemaker returned to Romania. As sad as she was to leave her sister and The Girl stuck on the farm, Troublemaker was also very happy to head back home.

Approximately eight and a half years after The Girl and her grandmother arrived in Canada, The Girl’s father decided that he had had enough of his mother interfering with his control of The Girl and decided to ship his mother back to Romania. The Girl’s grandmother moved in with her sister in a small apartment and The Girl’s father supported both of them with a barely adequate allowance.

The Girl and I met by chance six years ago through a mutual friend while we were students. We split up soon after we met because The Girl’s father felt threatened that I would take her away from the farm and all the work that she did for him. He belittled me and my ethnicity as part of his argument to achieve that goal.

Although we had fallen in love with each other, the fear that The Girl had developed for her father over the years was stronger than the bond that she and I were forging. We separated and were not to see one another for two years.

Life carried both of us away within its depths for those two years, but both of us thought of the other every so often. The Girl finished her education and we happened to make contact with each other again. This time, because she was in a position to be more self-sufficient, and because we had lost two years together, we quickly picked up where we had left off without regard for The Girl’s father.

The Girl’s father quickly realized that he was losing his control over The Girl. She was now able to earn an income that could support her if she were on her own. It was also obvious that she held her father in no high regard. Without The Girl, he would have to work the farm mostly by himself (The Girl’s step mother’s health precluded her from much of the physical labour).

With a limited set of options available to force The Girl to stay on the farm, her father kicked her out of the house with the expectation that she would beg to return when she realized that she had nowhere to stay.

Fortunately for The Girl, she was able to move in with me. As The Girl recounts this story, the last time that she spoke to her father was five years ago when he barged into her bedroom at 5am one morning, forced her to pack her things and then dropped her off in Toronto at one of her friend’s doorsteps. The pleading phone call that he expected from her has never come.

The Girl and I grew closer and through the grapevine, her father found out that we were together. It does not take much to see that this was an aggravating revelation for him. Because he could not do anything to The Girl, he took his anger out on The Girl’s stepmother and his own mother. Because The Girl’s grandmother had supported her and had been the only real mother to her for her entire life and actually supported our relationship, The Girl’s father cut her and her sister off from any financial support.

The Girl’s father hoped that if he cut his own mother off, The Girl would be forced to support her and would not have enough money to support herself. Fortunately, The Girl and I were able to send money back to Romania and foil her father’s idiotic scheme.

It was at the beginning of 2003 when Troublemaker called us to say that The Girl’s grandmother was losing her battle with age and so The Girl and I decided to pay a visit that year.

My first interaction with any of The Girl’s relatives happened in Romania. The Girl’s grandmother and aunt offered their hospitality and generosity. We spent a week over there and were sad to leave because we could see that The Girl’s grandmother’s health was rapidly degenerating. She died a few months after we returned to Canada.

The Girl’s grandmother died from a broken leg. She fractured her leg one day while in the bathroom and her physician there refused to cast or splint it. She ended up bedridden for weeks and eventually suffered a stroke, fell into a coma, and died. Throughout the whole situation, Troublemaker and her neighbour, Victim, provided palliative care for The Girl’s grandmother.

We were saddened that we were not able to make the funeral, but we were even more saddened to find out (again through the grapevine) that The Girl’s father didn’t find out about his own mother’s death for months afterwards. His hard heart that had prevented him from supporting his own blood relatives had also stopped him from remaining in contact with them. Of course, it turned out to be “The Girl’s fault” that he was not informed about his mother passing away.

The Girl’s great aunt now remains the only relative that she is in contact with. She has no other family in the world besides her father and her stepmother here in Canada. In fact, she considers her grandmother and her aunt her de facto parents since they are really the people that brought her up and treated her as the child that she was rather than as an indentured servant.

The Girl’s aunt is comfortable living in Romania because of the help that we send her. She is saddened, however, that she missed our wedding and she would like to see our new house. Although she is currently much healthier than her sister was back in 2003, she is aging.

For this reason, we have invited both her and Victim to have them visit with us in Canada. Victim has devoted much of her time to care for Troublemaker when Troublemaker was depressed over the passing of The Girl’s grandmother. Victim was also there for The Girl’s grandmother when she was needed the most and when we could not be there.

This visit must be, out of necessity, temporary. Victim has a retired husband and a son in Romania so she would need to go back to them, and Troublemaker owns her apartment so she is maintaining equity back there.

The Girl and I thank you for taking the time to peruse this lengthy correspondence.

Yours sincerely,

The Boy

Things were so bad for The Girl that about a year after we got back together, she ended up going for counselling at York University. She was a part-time student there at the time. The psychologist asked her how she felt about her father.

The Girl said, “When I think of him, I think of taking a big butcher knife and twisting it through his chest into his heart.”

The counsellor paused, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Uh, we’re going to need to spend a lot of time with you.”

The Girl has not spoken to her parents in years. Which is probably a good thing for them.