A walk across Canada -IntroductionPart 1

Welcome – Part 1

The past little while I feel that I have just been swimming in weeds, trying to keep my head above all the water, weeds, and muck. All the while holding onto Dave so he doesn’t drown. Literally. Everyone has a story; and almost everyone has had a battle or two with some form of depression. Our story may be long and complicated, and the decision to share ours and walk across Canada did not come lightly. Did we even have a choice? I’m not sure we did. The last two years especially have been difficult, with one horrible experience after another. We almost didn’t survive.

Hello, and welcome to my blog. I am Wendy, AKA DeeJ, the writer, the artist, and the support. Alongside me on this journey, is my best friend Dave. He is the muse, definitely the educator, and the explorer. Walking across Canada was originally Dave’s idea, the last two years have nearly torn him in two, and the need for solitude and clarity was immense. My need for this walk and the promising solitude of the “wild” has been on my mind for a while. Though the idea of walking a really great distance sparked a while ago while watching the movie Wild with Reese Witherspoon, seeing my own country in depth fueled the interest in walking across Canada.

I, like so many of you, have had my own battles with depression. Way back in early 2010 was when I first met Dave and Colette, his girlfriend at the time, I was newly married and just starting a photography business. I needed a model, so Colette answered my ad I had placed on Kijiji. I remember the first day I met them, they pulled up behind me in a white hearse decaled up with Kreepy Kritterz Pest Control all over it. Interesting! We all hit it off, and slowly became friends.

I photographed the various stages of their relationship, and a couple of years later when she became pregnant, I took her pregnancy photos as well as newborn photos when their little girl Mackenzie was born. The three of us became close, and hung out all the time. I would often watch Mackenzie if they wanted to go out on a date, or have some alone time. Everything seemed so put together, and good with them. Dave had a pest control business that flourished, and through the years he became well known for successful pest control in the Saskatoon area.

Throughout this time, my relationship was on it’s own rollercoaster. About a year after getting married, we decided we wanted to try for a baby! I have been dreaming of this moment forever, it was the sure thing in life I knew I was going to be, I was going to be a mom. My office and photography studio was in a Pregnancy and birthing center right downtown Saskatoon, my whole life was surrounded by babies. When I miscarried my first baby at 3 months, my doctor told me it’s common, and normal, that most women experience it. I was heartbroken, but I believed her. We waited a couple of months for my body and mind to heal then we tried again, and again. Getting pregnant was certainly not the problem, but keeping the baby was. I miscarried all 5 of my pregnancies at various stages. Through tests and observations, we could not figure out why it was happening. The first two babies I didn’t name, but the three after I did. The first two I thought were normal, as being something that most women go through. As hard as it was it was seemingly easy to let go of them. I got pregnant for the third time, and decided to do an ultra sound, something I wanted to avoid so early in the pregnancy, but I wanted to see this one, I wanted to hear a heartbeat. And I did! The first imaging was spectacular! My hopes were high, and I was so excited. The doctor came in and told me to come back in two weeks, as the heartbeat wasn’t as strong as it should be, but not to worry, just come back so we can monitor. On the monitor, that tiny fetus looked like just like a little alien, so I called him Ailey. I actually remember the day, exactly a week after the ultra sound, when my Aily’s heart stopped beating. The last two weeks I had craved regular Lay’s chips, every morning I had to have a small bag, and this morning when I woke up, I had no cravings. No nausea and no pain, I felt nothing. I remember praying that it was my body going through another stage, and that everything was normal, but the ultra sound the following week confirmed what my heart already already new. There was no way I was going through a D&C (basically they suck everything out), so the doctor was ok with giving me a pill so I wouldn’t have to wait for the miscarriage to start. I went home and went through the process once again.

Through tests, we didn’t ever find anything wrong, so I gave up coffee, gave up chocolate, changed my diet, and was super careful. When I got pregnant again with Jewel, everything changed. I felt great. I didn’t want to risk an ultra sound, so I avoided that and everything else bad, and carried myself around with care. I managed to get through 3 months of constantly trying to ease the stress of losing this one, and with one week into the second trimester I felt I could breath a sigh of release. I made it through the first trimester! The major risk is over, and I should be ok, but I was wrong.

I miscarried Jewel the first week of the second trimester. I could do nothing but listen to my body and delivered this tiny 3-month fetus, so I sat in bathtub at home, alone all night as Nathan, my husband, was at work. She had toes and fingers starting to develop, and I could tell where the spine was starting. She was my little angel - she was my jewel. I have a butterfly tattoo on my wrist in honor of her. I spend the whole night in the bathtub, grieving my loss. It was a moment I didn’t think I would ever get out of.

I got pregnant one more time after that, although this one was not planned. I was exhausted, and our relationship was a mess. I miscarried Grace only a short month later. My marriage crumbled, and I ended up moving to a friend’s house for a while, I couldn’t handle myself, much less someone who had no idea what to do with me. We did try to salvage the marriage, but with the lack of support that I felt, I didn’t want to continue with it.

My business also suffered. Going to the office everyday was especially difficult as pregnant women and babies surrounded me every day. I couldn’t keep working there, so Dave offered me a job. He owned a pest control company, and wanted to open a retail location for DIY pest control products. It ended up being perfect, I answered the phones, helped identify bugs, and ran the retail store. Yes, I am still scared of spiders, and bugs still make me squeal! This is where our story really starts. When I first started working at the store, I really leaned on Dave and Colette to get through my depression. Colette got pregnant when I was pregnant with Ailey, so we shared that in common for a bit. I would hang out at their place or we would go out and do something, it was during this time that we became inseparable.

However, when Mackenzie was three years old, Colette and Dave’s relationship started to fall apart. One night, a suspicious text came in on Colette’s phone, and the truth started to be unravel. Colette had been cheating. They had rented a small bachelor suite a couple of months ago so they had somewhere to hang out individually if needed, so Dave asked her to move there and Mackenzie would stay at the house with him while they worked through their relationship issues. It was then, after she moved out, that more truth became known. She had been cheating throughout their entire relationship.

Shared custody worked for a couple of weeks, but things went from bad to worse as Dave found out more and more about Colette’s alternative life. She had been cheating the entire relationship, including during pregnancy, even having full relationships with a couple of guys outside her relationship with Dave. Among many, the ones that stood out was a five-year relationship with a guy named Shawn, and a relationship with her best friend Katie’s husband Kristen. She went on to tell lies about Dave to these guys, her family, and all her friends. Telling them he was mean, abusive, and treated her poorly. We did later get a chance to talk to Katie, and she informed Dave that she was so scared of him, so scared to tell him what Colette was doing behind his back, she thought he was going to break in the door and harm her. Everyone around Colette thought she was in a bad relationship. When in reality, she had it pretty good at home. I remember being very jealous of her that she had such wonderful guy. He worked and worked so that she could stay at home with Mackenzie. Her position in life was exactly what I had dreamed of, and from my point of view, she was screwing it all up. She didn’t have to work; she was able to hang out with her daughter all day, taking care of her family.

With his job being a high customer service demand job, Dave was unable to continue with his Pest Control business, so in November, a month before our Jamaica trip I took over and began running the business as mine. He teamed up with Jessica, the receptionist of the pest control business we hired a couple months back when I went out to the field, to start another business selling men’s underwear. “Genthouse Chonies and Accessories”. Dave would provide the money and the training of the new business, and she was the upfront person, the face of the business doing everything from purchase ordering, to customer service, to everything in between. She was perfect for the job, chatty and outgoing, she learned so fast and proved she could handle the business. Her and Dave worked hard on getting the business set up; I did the graphics and helped behind the scenes whenever I could.

With a deep depression hitting Dave, he approached Colette’s lawyer to request a little time away from the situation to gather himself, but the lawyer took that as a bad sign and put it on the record that Dave was abandoning his child. With each day getting worse, he could no longer run the business, and the normal day to day activities were getting to be more difficult by the hour, something needed to be done before a breaking point was reached. We decided to take a trip to Jamaica for a month of December to allow Dave to get away and get back to solid ground. Unfortunately we discovered that Colette and her lawyer decided to take advantage of the trip and hired a private investigator to follow us. He was not very discreet, pulling up behind the taxi on the morning we left for Jamaica, but at the time we didn’t put it together. Once the PI confirmed we were out of country, Colette filed an order for full custody and to be able to move to Regina (another city three hours away from Saskatoon, where we were currently living). Dave could fight it, but he had to be in court in a couple of weeks, and the date happened to be just before Christmas, while we were in Jamaica. With no way of getting back in time for Dave to be present for the court date, Colette won full custody by default. That’s not even the worst part. We arrived back in Canada in time to appeal that decision, but the lawyer told him that a day too late to actually do anything about it. With thousands and thousands of dollars sunk into lawyers fighting her and the courts, the news did not look promising. Though there were moments of complete bliss in Jamaica, the trip proved to be devastating.

The next three months, Dave focused on getting Genthouse going with Jessica, and I worked pest control, filling in and helping when I could with the underwear business. Although it appeared to be a tough industry, being the first men’s underwear store in Saskatchewan, but the business flourished, and after three months, we decided we needed a celebration.

The four of us, Jessica and her boyfriend Daniel, Dave and myself, went out to Jacks Nightclub to celebrate. We had a few drinks, and danced the night away. Dave and I played it safe and had walked to the bar so we wouldn’t drive after drinking, and Jessica and Daniel met us there. My place, Colette’s new place, and Dave’s house were all within a couple of block radius, about a 25 minute walk from the bar, so Dave dropped me off at home once the night ended, and said he’d walk the rest of the way alone. I passed out peacefully for the night, but I found out in the morning, his night went a little differently. I was off to visit my mom in Carrot River the next morning, and I got a text from him saying the cops were looking for him, and he had no idea what happened last night after I went home. He remembers stopping in at Colette’s to ask for a ride or a taxi, but doesn’t remember what happened. She claimed they fought, and Dave got angry and kicked the mirrors off her car. The police eventually found him, and he was charged with mischief under $5000.00, and a restraining order. He was no longer allowed to be within close proximity of her place. She could drop their daughter off if someone was there to supervise, but otherwise no contact. The stress increased, and Dave’s view of a happy life was diminishing, fast.

Another three months went by, and with Jessica doing so well with the new business, Dave and I decided to take a break and try something different to help him through the depression he was fighting. The beginning of June 2015, we were going on a three-month trip to Europe, starting in Ireland.

~DeeJ

Part 2, coming soon.