Heroes in My Head

by Judy Rebick

  The women’s movement of the nineties is a different colour than the women’s movement of the sixties. We are many colours, we are middle-class, working-class and poor women together, speaking French and English and many other languages. We’re young and old, able-bodied and disabled, lesbian and heterosexual, Native and non-Native. The women’s movement has changed its face and now our challenge is to change our organizations to reflect this change.

  My first act as president was to lead a march from the NAC annual general meeting in Ottawa, through the doors of Parliament, and up the stairs to the prime minister’s office. There were no security barriers then. We barged up the stairs and made it to the waiting room “with a throng of placard-carrying women and demanded that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney answer to Canadian women,” reported the Montreal Gazette.

  The three major political parties had always met with the NAC lobby. It was a tradition. Women from across the country filled a room in one of the Parliament buildings and questioned the politicians. The party in power always attended, including key cabinet ministers. In the early days, the prime minister sometimes attended as well. Over the years, the lobby got more and more raucous, with women heckling and cheering the politicians’ responses. It was an extraordinary exercise in democracy.

  The year before I was acclaimed, the Mulroney government refused to attend the lobby for the first time. A group of us proposed that we march to Parliament Hill in protest, but the more moderate women argued that it was a mistake to cancel the lobby. After a heated debate, famed feminist Doris Anderson mediated a compromise. We would have the lobby but also march to Parliament Hill, right to the PM’s door.

  According to the Gazette, “NAC has been ‘hijacked by extremists,’ charged Senator Lowell Murray. The women’s movement has returned to ‘60s-style tactics.’” It was an excellent start.

  Soon after my acclamation, the Meech Lake Accord failed, largely because of Indigenous opposition. The first Indigenous member of a provincial legislature, Elijah Harper, refused to cast the vote for the unanimous consent required to amend the constitution. Instead, on June 22, 1990, he stood up in the Manitoba Legislative Assembly, holding an eagle feather. It was a powerful moment when Indigenous peoples rose up to stop a major government project.

  Sandra Delaronde, a Métis woman who was newly elected to the NAC executive, had gotten me an invitation to speak at the rally outside the Manitoba Legislative Building. But what I remember is what Manitoba Regional Chief for the Assembly of First Nations Phil Fontaine said to the crowd: “We will pay a price for this, but it is a price we are willing to pay.” It was an observation I remembered well when NAC took a leading role in opposing the next attempt to amend the constitution.

  The fact that the first event I attended as NAC president was a First Nations rally was symbolic in some ways of my presidency. Indigenous women and women of colour had become more and more actively involved in the women’s movement at the local level, especially in anti-­violence groups but also on the International Women’s Day Committee in Toronto. Yet NAC was still primarily a white women’s organization. When I was elected president, three Indigenous women were also elected to the NAC executive: Sandra Delaronde, Priscilla Settee from Saskatchewan, and Reanna Erasmus from the Northwest Territories. Indigenous women had been members of the NAC executive before, including pioneer activist Mary Two-Axe Earley, the first woman to fight the provisions of the Indian Act that discriminated against women. But three women meant a major presence.

  At the first executive meeting, that presence was felt. One of the provincial representatives was a highly emotional and, in my view, dysfunctional person. At one point in the meeting, she burst out crying and ran out of the room. I just kept the discussion going but noticed that the Indigenous women looked uncomfortable.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked. “You seem uncomfortable.”

  After a moment of hesitation, Priscilla, the eldest of the group, responded, “Well, that’s not how we do things.”

  “What do you do?”

  “It’s okay, this is your organization. We’ll adapt.”

  “We want it to be your organization, too. What would you do?”

  “Well, we think emotions are part of the meeting. If someone is upset, we want to know why.”

  Oh, brother. If a white woman had said that I would have put it down to New Age claptrap, but I really wanted the Indigenous women to feel they could contribute and that they were being heard. So I asked Priscilla if she would chair the meeting the next day and run it the way she thought it should be run.

  Priscilla didn’t want to chair the whole meeting, but she did offer to open the meeting with the suggestion that everyone say how they were feeling. Even though the women’s movement promoted the notion that the personal is political, NAC was a fairly hierarchical and structured group. For me, keeping the personal and the political separate was a matter of survival, or so I thought.

  The next day, Priscilla led the process and it was amazing. Instead of getting angry because of a fight with someone the night before or bursting into tears, women spoke openly about their concerns. If they were feeling happy, sad, angry, or disappointed, they told the group, and everyone was empathetic and supportive. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a single action that so changed the tone of a meeting. What was famously a very fractious organization turned almost overnight into a much more cooperative one.

  I quickly learned that if I wanted Indigenous women or women of colour to provide more leadership on the executive, I had to change my own leadership style. I had learned to lead from men. In many ways I had constructed myself to be a man in the way I worked, always sure of myself, never doubting. But now I was committed to sharing leadership with Indigenous women and women of colour, so I had to make space. That meant listening more and not always saying what I thought.

  Oddly enough, my experience with the alters helped me to learn to listen. As I was learning to listen to the voices of my fragmented personality in my head, I learned to listen to the voices of other women on the executive. Three years later, when I stepped down as president, Carolann Wright-Parks, a Black anti-poverty activist who was often critical of me, paid tribute by saying, “What I love about Judy is her big ears.” Everyone laughed, thinking that a big mouth was more like it, but she was telling me that I had indeed learned to listen. It helped open up NAC to more diverse voices. It also helped me become a more whole person.

  * * *

  Being president of NAC also meant that I had lots more time with Alvin and Glenna who two years before had moved from Guelph to Ottawa. Alvin had been my primary support for many years. This was not always an easy role, given both my ideological rigidity and my increasingly fragile mental health, but disclosure to him of my father’s sexual abuse added a lot more tension. We all knew our father was difficult and sometimes violent. Alvin was more distant from him than either Leonard or I, but my disclosure of sexual abuse changed everything. My memories revealed such an enormous lie that it made everything suspect. Alvin felt as if he had lost his memory of childhood, which was now tainted by my memories.

  I knew that Alvin needed time to figure out how to handle the disclosure of my abuse, and how to maintain a relationship with my parents, especially my mother, while he was supporting me. He also had to deal with the impact of my situation on his teenage daughters. At the time, I was so intensely involved in my own experiences that I didn’t fully understand what Alvin was going through. I knew it was tough for him, but in preparing this memoir I asked him what it was like when I first told him about the abuse.

  “At first I didn’t believe anything,” Alvin said. “I thought you were having a breakdown. It was traumatic for me, too. I’m a person who copes with things. I just wanted it to go away. I’d been giving you support for many years, but this was very extreme and I didn’t know how to cope with it. I just had to accept it. In a family, when something
like this happens you can’t prove it. I either had to accept it or deny it. I didn’t want to believe it, but I had to support you. I thought to myself, If I don’t believe it, I am going to ruin my relationship with Judy, which she can’t afford. What was I to do? Was I not going to believe you and have you be all alone in this? You needed me to believe it.”

  Leonard was still estranged from the family. I did talk to him about the abuse memories, but I didn’t see or communicate with him on a regular basis. I didn’t see his children either. I used to take Lucas, his older boy, to the movies when he was little, but I hadn’t seen him in a long time.

  Alvin and Glenna were renting a lovely house in the Glebe area of Ottawa. It was a two-storey, three-bedroom house with the kitchen in the back, a very nice dining room, and a living room on the right of the entrance. Best of all, it was within walking distance of the canal. They had opened a terrific restaurant on Somerset Street that was almost instantly the haunt of bureaucrats and politicians. Thanks to my contacts, the staff of national unions also frequented the place.

  Sometime later that summer, I was in Ottawa again. I was walking through the back door of the house into the kitchen. Alvin was standing at the sink. I can’t remember what had happened to put me in the state I was in, but as soon as I closed the door I started to scream. It had happened in therapy and once in my apartment when I was alone, but it had never happened in front of other people. It came from somewhere deep inside of me and it was uncontrollable: once it started making its way out of my belly there was no way to stop it. The anguish of my wounds had become unbearable; it was as if it just exploded out of my body. I was so deep inside that pain that I couldn’t see anything, couldn’t think anything — I could only feel. So many years of holding down those feelings and now my worst nightmare was being realized: they were overwhelming me.

  “It was a release of pain like someone who’s grieving. Like someone seriously hurt,” Alvin told me later. “You were wailing. Blood-curdling screams like a horror movie and then you were crying. The word I would use is ‘anguish,’ like something someone would do on hearing that their child died. It was completely out of control. It was scary. We knew you were in trouble, but it was the first time that it hit home how serious it was and how dangerous it was for you.”

  At the time, Alvin said to me, “Think of what’s at stake. You’re doing so well as president of NAC. You don’t want to give that up, do you?” He was trying to talk me down. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

  “No, not an ambulance,” I whimpered. “It’s stopping now.” And then I just cried and cried. Afterwards I was exhausted.

  This visit was also the first time the alters showed themselves to my family. I had explained that I was a multiple personality, but it didn’t have much meaning until they saw it for themselves.

  We were walking along the canal when I started talking in a child’s voice. “Let’s play horsey.”

  “Okay,” a friend of the family replied, and I took off like a child riding a horse. She came right along with me. Alvin couldn’t believe it, but it was harmless so he just put it out of his mind. There was only so much he could deal with.

  Many years later when Svend Robinson, an NDP Member of Parliament, had a public breakdown that destroyed his political career, I realized that there but for the grace of I’m-not-sure-what I could have gone. I wouldn’t have stolen a ring as he did; more likely, one of the alters would have started screaming, or during a press conference Sophie or Trouble could have shouted out at some journalist who was attacking me: “Stop being mean to Judy, you doodie head!”

  But it never happened. I think there were two reasons. Marcia made an agreement with each alter: they would only come out in the office with her or with trusted friends. They existed to protect me. When she explained that I would get into trouble if they made themselves known publicly, they agreed to keep quiet. My ability to dissociate from my feelings served me well when I was in public. Even once I integrated the alters, I was able to dissociate from my feelings so I could calmly deal with a crisis. I had spent my life fighting every limitation that my upbringing, health, and status as a woman had imposed upon me. As Henry Morgentaler used to say when things got tough, “Ne lâche pas.” Never give up. And I never did.

  The only significant impact on my work was that I couldn’t stay at members’ homes when I was travelling. Most of the members of the NAC executive had male partners. It was on a trip to New Brunswick that I realized that strange men could make the alters nervous. I spent two days struggling with them and urging them not to show themselves. After that, I had a talk with Alice, the executive director, and we agreed that from now on I would stay in hotels. My home away from home at Alvin and Glenna’s place in Ottawa saved us a lot of money that we could spend on hotels in other cities. We explained to the other members that I needed my rest because I was travelling so much.

  That summer, I was learning more about how the alters worked to protect me from my memories. One day, Sue and Gord were driving me up to their cottage when I yelled from the back seat: “Stop driving so fast, Gord. We’ll get in an accident! Don’t drive so fast!”

  Gord answered me as if I were a child: “Don’t worry, Judy. It’s okay. I’m driving carefully, you don’t have to worry.” I immediately realized that it was one of the personalities that was scared. Later, I remembered being in a car accident when I was eleven years old. It had happened on the same highway at the same time of year. My father was driving and my zeide was sitting next to him in the front seat. Lenny and I were in the back. We were going to my grandparents’ cottage near Lake Simcoe. It was raining and my father was probably driving too fast. The car started weaving. I was afraid to say anything even though I was scared. Suddenly I was on the ground. Both Lenny and I had been thrown out of the car through the passenger-side door, which had flown open. I had locked my door but Lenny hadn’t locked his, and neither of us was wearing a seat belt. My father ran toward me, and then Lenny was standing behind him. Jack looked frightened and he was never scared. He picked me up from the ground where I had been thrown.

  “Are you okay, Judy?” he asked, touching me to see if there were any broken bones or severe injuries. I couldn’t talk for several hours.

  I wasn’t thinking about that accident while Gord was driving, but the alters were. This time, one of them decided to cry out to make sure there wouldn’t be another accident.

  * * *

  The price that Phil Fontaine had alluded to at the Winnipeg rally came very quickly. On July 11, 1990, the Quebec police attacked a peaceful blockade by the Mohawk of Kanesatake. The Mohawk objected to the plans of the town of Oka to build a golf course on their traditional lands. The Mohawk warriors had arms but they had been advised by the Elders not to use them unless they were attacked. When the police threw tear gas and flash grenades at them, a firefight broke out. It is still unclear whether the police or the Mohawk fired first — I assume that means the police shot first. Police Corporal Marcel Lemay was shot and killed. The crisis escalated when the Quebec police set up barricades while the Mohawks received increasing support from Indigenous people across North America.

  On July 30, I was invited to a rally at Oka at a peace camp set up just outside the barricades to welcome people. Hundreds of people, mostly Indigenous, came from across North America. After the rally, NAC worked hard to build support for the Mohawk. We took out a full-page ad in the Globe and Mail, co-sponsored by Greenpeace and the Canadian Peace Alliance, signed by hundreds of prominent Canadians, and organized a peace protest in Toronto in August.

  Around this time, the alters stopped coming out, even in therapy. After so little time, it was unlikely that I had already integrated them. Then one day someone emerged.

  “Who is it?” asked Marcia.

  It was Trouble.

  “Where have you all been?” It had been weeks since any of them had spoken to her or to me.
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  “We like it when Judy helps the Indians,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “’Cause they was hurt like us.”

  Seventeen

  Teetering on the Edge

  In December 1990, work slowed down and I began to feel uneasy. Just before Christmas I wrote in my journal, “Today I went to the emergency ward of the hospital with chest pain, but really I think it is the pain in my heart from losing my family. I hope this Christmas I will get at least some of them back.”

  Alvin supported me, but there was a distance between us that hadn’t been there before. On December 23, I drove to Ottawa through sleet and rain, worrying all the way there about whether the holidays would be strained. We had been celebrating Christmas ever since the girls were in daycare. Kael and Terra wanted to be like the other kids, and since neither Alvin nor Glenna was religious, they didn’t see any reason why not. We decided that wherever we were, we would get together over the holidays, usually for at least five days. We always had a great time.

  My job was to bring a new game for the family to play. Of course Alvin and Glenna, both professional cooks, did all the cooking. I worried my condition and the dramatic scenes of my last major visit would cause tension. I was relieved that it didn’t. Things seemed more or less back to normal, and the alters stayed quiet. But still, something was bothering me.

  At my request, Alvin and I went out for lunch. I asked him for advice about getting in touch with our mother. I still couldn’t contact Jack, but I could talk to my mother and tell her what was going on. My idea was to ask her to come to Toronto. It had been a year since I cut off contact with my parents. Alvin agreed and said he would support me.