Uncover - S19: "Run, Hide, Repeat" E4: Saving Mom

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Pauline is struggling with doubts — the details of her family’s secret seem outrageous. But why would Stan and her mother lie to her? Pauline sets up a sting to find out once and for all if Stan and Ruth are telling the truth. And what she discovers changes her relationship with Ruth forever. Pauline, desperate to reconcile what Ruth has done to her, turns to understanding her mom’s troubled past. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/run-hide-repeat-transcripts-listen-1.6682766

On Mother's Day 1985, Philadelphia did something unthinkable. The city had been engaged in a standoff with a radical organization called MOVE. The helicopter takes off, then... The city dropped a bomb on MOVE's headquarters, killing 11 people, 5 of them children. My daughters were taken away by this corrupt government! Why is it so many have never heard of the MOVE bombing? Black people will never get justice in America. The Africans vs. America. Available now everywhere you get your podcasts.

This is a CBC Podcast. This episode contains strong language, difficult subject matter, and references to suicidal ideation and intimate partner violence. Please take care. I don't know how many years it was before you told me the story. Do you? I went to MITV late in 1988. And I told you the story in 1991. So two and a half to three years. That's a long time.

Yep. To not tell me something. Because we were close. To not tell me something. Because we were close. I mean, we spent virtually all our free time with our husbands and each other. That's okay. I was trying to have a life.

Yeah, you were trying to have a life and you needed to be ready. You needed to be ready to do something about it. And so it took you that long to get there. MITV was a TV station in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And that's where I met Kelly Ryan. She quickly became one of my closest friends. And she still is to this day. Before meeting Kelly, the only person I told any of this to was my then-husband Kevin.

He'd accepted the story and agreed to move to Place of Hope with me, should circumstances ever actually allow for it to happen. As my own doubts became increasingly difficult to ignore, Kevin became less willing to talk about all of it. So I told Kelly about all of it, the weird world, the oh, body doubles. She became my trusted confidant. After you told me that story, about two to three months later, your car was broken into in your driveway. And you were scared. I remember you calling me quite scared. You said, I've told mom this. And she says, it's the people, these people that have been watching.

And now they know where I live. And they've broken into the car. And they're going to come into the house next. And that was the context for almost all of our conversations at that point in time was things that you were finding out. And there was the China you told me about that messages could come through. I can't quite remember all of that. Business numbers written in invisible ink on the family china. Wow. Because it was hidden.

Nobody could find it. It was how organized crime kept things secret. That's what I was told. That's what Stan said. But that was the context. The context of all our conversations was, maybe this is possible. So when your mom said, it's the people, we were like, yeah, okay. And you were very angry because you didn't know what the reality was.

I'm Pauline Dakin, and this is Run, Hide, Repeat. Episode 4, Saving Mum. July 26, 1989. Dear P, July 26th, 1989. Dear P, I just popped into PH on a quick business trip, and so I am hurrying off a line to you. It really is hot here today. Hardly a breeze. If someone offered you the chance to have a fresh start, somewhere completely new, idyllic,

what would it take for you to say yes? What if you had to give up your life, your work, your friends, most of your family? And what would you be willing to lose if you said no? What if saying no meant saying goodbye to the person who devoted her life to keeping you safe. It grieves us to see you still out there when such a lovely spot as this and your own home awaits you. This is a letter I received from my half-brother Tom from Inside Place of Hope. His letters, like many of the others from Inside, were meant to extol the virtues of life in the weird world. I was wondering the other evening about how different you will find life here from out there. Freedom to just be you.

To ride to the end of a beautiful valley. To sit on your own porch and read, write, or dream. To know you are loved and to find friends who accept you for who you are. Not having to expect hurt from those around you. Tom's letter painted a beautiful picture, but like other letters I'd received, there was always something dark around its edges.

We're all gearing up for trouble, so I'm sorry to know you and your mother are in the middle of it. I pray it will not touch any of you just now. I pray you soon will be here. Love, T.D. My brother Ted had already lost faith in the story. Being far away in BC made it easier for him to compartmentalize some aspects of his relationship with Mum. For me, living in Halifax, seeing her, seeing Stan, hearing the stories about the hidden weird world, receiving the letters, it was harder to get enough distance to gauge what was real and what wasn't.

I couldn't separate our relationship from this belief my mom held so deeply. I don't really know if I ever fully believed it, but I never spoke the words to say I didn't. But now I was reaching a breaking point. You needed to know whether it was true or not. And because I was brand new to it, and I had that anything's possible mindset, possible mindset. And we were both thinking, this is a huge story. If it's true, this is our career maker, and we're going to bring this to light. As much as I wanted to know for sure, one way or the other, I was still terrified. If it was all a lie, I wasn't sure I had the strength to confront what came next. The alternative is so awful. The alternative is reality. And reality was a bitch.

I picked a time I knew Stan was visiting Mom. I called her and told a simple lie that would cause the whole house of cards to topple. I told my mom I'd just come home and discovered someone had broken into my house. Mom was scared. She said she'd talk to Stan and call me back. I waited the longest few minutes of my life. And then the phone rang. Yes, Mom relayed. Two men had been arrested coming out of my house. Stan's men had found photos in their car that showed I'd been followed for days. And just like that, it was over. My life, my relationship with Mom,

they could never go back to how they were before that phone call. You set up the sting and called me and told me that they had fallen for it and that you now knew it was all a lie. And I can't really describe what your voice sounded like. You were such a combination of emotions. You were angry, primarily, and stunned, I think. I think a part of you wanted to believe it was true. Because even though that meant life was really, really crazy, at least the two most important people in your life hadn't lied to you At least the two most important people in your life hadn't lied to you throughout your entire childhood.

And I think that was face to face with you when you called me and said they fell for it. And that meant I had to decide whether to cut them out of my life. Right. Right. And so I asked you what you were going to do. You said, I have to confront mom. I have to go and talk to her about this. And I'm going tonight. That's right. You went right away.

As soon as the sting happened and you got your answer, you were like, I'm going now. I did confront my mother and later Stan. They were horrified, worried that if I stopped believing their story, I might put myself in danger. Mom was angry and afraid for me. Stan was sad. If I no longer believed, I could no longer be part of their secret circle.

Stan tried to explain the whole thing away as a miscommunication, a betrayal even. The O had gotten to one of his men. That agent had been compromised and had passed bad information to Stan. But it was too late. You know, I don't know if I ever really believed 100% that this situation was real. But in the back of my mind, I thought, you know what, I need to be careful regardless. If it turns out to be real, then why would I put myself in harm's way or, you know, at least take some steps to avoid possible outcomes that wouldn't be great. It was 1993, almost 20 years after our family had first become entangled with Stan.

Ted and I finally agreed his stories were just that, stories. We were angry with Mom and Stan. How could they do this? And how could Mom still believe in this bizarre fantasy that Stan had concocted? But there was also a sense of relief. It was relieving when we determined that, you know, you and I, and we had a conversation about it. And at that point, I believe that we were both 100% convinced that this was not true.

And looking at steps that we could possibly take to try and haul mom out of it. But I think we both determined at that point that would be a bad move. Because she had her whole life so invested in Stan and the story. We were desperate to understand what had driven Stan to invent the weird world and to drag my family into it. The answer to that question would come later. But the urgent thing was to help mom. We were pretty sure there was no hope of getting her out. And even if miraculously we managed to convince her that it was a lie, well, what then? How would she, always a loving mother, deal with knowing she dragged her family across the country kept us away from our real father over a

lie. So if we wanted to salvage a relationship with our mom, it meant learning to reconcile what she'd done to us, to our family, with our love for her. Accepting and forgiving. Somehow allowing the damage she'd done to live side by side with the knowledge that she cared so deeply for us, that she believed she was protecting us. That meant trying to understand her. Trying to understand why. Trying to understand her.

Trying to understand why. I think a lot about, you know, what made Stan able to kind of get her into the story? What made her so vulnerable? Have you thought about that? Yes, absolutely. And he found her at a point in time in her life where she was very vulnerable. Recently separated from our dad. Two kids. You know, I... Deeply depressed. Yeah.

I was born in a little village in southern Saskatchewan. It's called Lampman, Saskatchewan. I was born there on the 27th of February, 1939. I had never been back there. It's been many years since I lost faith in my mother's stories about the weird world. For a long time after, I was furious with her for what she put Ted and I through growing up. But now, when I hear my mother's voice, that anger is gone.

Now, in its place, I feel such love for her and such sadness. I used to love to sing, and there was nowhere you could sing because everybody could hear you all over town, you know. I used to go out in the fields in the evenings on the edge of town where no one could hear me, and I used to sing these songs that Mary Alonza sang, like he used to sing, Be my love for no one else can end this yearning.

At the top of my lungs and a few others. And sometimes the coyotes used to howl with me. It was a nice night. Ah, dear. My mother's family moved from Lampman to Summerberry, Saskatchewan, shortly after she was born. My mom loved that little village, playing baseball in the summers, figure skating and curling in the winters. It was a happy childhood that ended abruptly when she was 13. And in 1952, my mother died of cancer.

And that kind of, that really broke our family up. It was a hard life. They were poor. She had a younger sister and an older brother to take care of. She didn't get a lot of support from her dad. My grandfather, Clifford Mayne, seemed unequipped to parent a sensitive, curious daughter. Her restlessness tried her dad's patience. She told me a story about riding in Grandpa Cliff's truck with her brother Murray as a young girl. She was excited, looking around, delighted by the birds in the fields and the swooping telephone wires.

Cliff told her to stop wiggling. When she didn't, he stopped the truck, put her out on the edge of the dirt road and drove away. She was only six. She was alone and terrified. After what must have seemed like an eternity, Cliff eventually came back. He was laughing as he led her back in the truck. He said, I bet you can sit still now. When Ruth's mom died, she lost the person who understood her. Cliff wasn't able to offer much comfort to his grieving daughter. I tried to keep the family going by keeping, you know, keeping home running

and doing the cooking and the laundry and all the things that a mother does. We stayed together, but we weren't a family anymore like we had been. She had been the center of the family. Mom cooked the meals, did the household chores, and also worked the lunch counter at Cliff's garage after school every day. She graduated from high school in 1956 with few choices.

You would either have had to go away somewhere to find work or something, or you would have married a farmer. So mom left Summerberry. She moved to Regina, Saskatchewan, where she did office work, and then later to Montreal, where she trained to be what used to be called a stewardess, she trained to be what used to be called a stewardess, a flight attendant. It was a rare thing for a Summerberry girl to do. It even made the local paper. That job brought Ruth Main to Vancouver, and that's where she met my dad, Warren Dakin. It became pretty clear early on in her marriage that Dad had a drinking problem, and it worsened over time. I'm not sure when the physical and emotional abuse started, or how bad it really got, but I know it shattered Mom.

She told a story about how Grandma Cliff came for a visit when Ted and I were little. My dad, Warren, came home drunk one night. He was loud. Mom was worried he'd wake up me and Ted. She said something to him. Dad lost his temper. Warren's father had served in World War I, and his military swords were displayed on the wall in the house. Dad pulled one down and threw it at my mom. He missed. The next morning, Grandpa Cliff cut short the visit, packed his bags, and left. He told my mom that seeing Warren throw that sword was the worst

thing that had ever happened, not to my mother. My grandfather said it was the worst thing that had ever happened, not to my mother. My grandfather said it was the worst thing that had ever happened to him. Mom was alone, scared for her own safety, scared for her children. She contemplated suicide. So I became one of these young, single, working moms that you hear about, which weren't very common in those days. So if you were single with children on your own, you were suspect of not being a very good wife and mother. Oh, she was a fantastic mother.

She was always there for us. Managed to scrape by with little or no money you know you know the things that she did for us as a single mother was unreal you know took me to hockey helped me do my paper route he said to me yesterday he thought of her as really strong oh yeah and more so now than ever now that we know what she did what she went through in her life. I can't imagine constantly looking over your shoulder and being in fear for your life, your children's life,

everyone around you's life, being hauled away from your family, being separated from everybody, being alone, basically. Yeah. Except for us. Do you think that mom was so traumatized by her own childhood and her marriage

that she was just completely open to the first guy who came along who was not an asshole to her outwardly you know what he was a counselor he had training I think he just manipulated and maybe she was she was

more susceptible to it because of the trauma of the relationship because of everything you know because yeah I mean what would it have certainly what had happened to her when I think him when he saw she was a train wreck he offered her not you know way to get out of that and the way to get out of that. And the way to get out of that involved this, you know, you know, it could have been a simple affair. He could have just told his wife he was leaving. Yeah, that could have been. But of course, Stan chose differently. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. Dear Ruth, thinking of the many reasons I love you, shall I name them? Being near you is like touching heaven. To hear your laughter when it comes free and easy gives me great pleasure. Your bit of shyness when P is with us is cute and I love it. On the negative side, you use far too many cups, plates, etc. Just use paper towels and things and see how much time we

can have for each other. The touch of your lips sends fire rushing through my veins. To share life and all we have and hope to have is a gift, I believe, given by He who is the Alpha and the Omega of all things. To see you who once wished to die and even contemplated it, now extending a hand to the hurting people, makes my heart sing. Another negative one, you snore. Just gentle ones lately. Another negative one, you snore. Just gentle ones lately. To sum it all up, I love you because you are you. I believe the Great Spirit intended us to be paired long before we met. Hold fast to our love, for there is nothing greater.

Love in every way, from me to you, Stan. in every way, from me to you, Stan. That's a letter Stan wrote to my mom in the mid-90s. It's clear from letters like these how deeply he loved her, how devoted he was to her, and I know she held those same feelings for him. They never lived together and only saw each other when he'd visit or she'd meet him somewhere for a few days. And she kept his secret. She never spoke of Stan or the Weird World to anyone. It was around this time that I was pregnant with my first daughter.

She and my younger daughter, who came along two years later, would become the glue that held our relationship together, the buffer that allowed us to continue despite my anger. But it was hard, knowing she still believes Dan's story. My anger faded over time, and I made the decision that my daughters should know their grandmother. For friends like Kelly, ones who saw the effects all of this had on me, that anger has been harder to release. Were you mad at me for introducing you to it in any way? I was mad at your mother. I still am mad at your mother. And I know that's wrong. I don't think I will ever forgive your mother, and I'm sorry about that. I'm surprised at the level of anger I still have with your mother.

Every time we talk about this, I think, come on. These were your kids. It was your mom who was the active participant. It was your mom who would wake you up and say, we're on the road, let's go. Or, oh, let's go on a little trip, we're never going home again. And I didn't have kids at the time, and I just even then thought, what a terrible thing to do to a child.

But you believed it too. And you didn't get all the letters and all that stuff. I know, but yeah, no, it's true. It's true. Maybe, maybe she was doing what a good mother would do, which is take you out of danger. I think that's what she thought she was doing. Right. Yeah. I think that's what she thought she was doing. Right. Yeah. You know, I got to the point where she stopped talking to me about it.

And I would just say, I don't want to hear it. You know, if you need to believe it, believe it, mom, whatever it takes. But I don't want to hear about it. And what was her attitude about it? She was concerned. She was afraid that I would do something that would get me into trouble or, you know, especially when I started living with Dad. Both Ted and I visited our dad as teenagers, to my mother's horror, but she couldn't stop us. The thing was, the man I'd always thought of as the mean drunk who'd blown up our family seemed so benign. He tried

so hard to please me during those visits. But there were also times Ted saw the Warren our mother was so afraid of. Once when I visited 14, when I was 14, I think, 14 or 15. He was on a bender when you went out when you were 14? Yeah, he was drinking quite heavily to the point where he wouldn't drive. So he gave me the keys to the Cadillac. And off I went to Kentucky Fried Chicken or wherever we decided to have dinner that night at 14. I didn't have a driver's license. Holy shit.

Put a big crease in the side of that thing too. You did? On someone's bumper here. Oh, crap. Were you scared being out there with him drinking like that? No, no, no. He was never angry. He was never violent.

He was just happy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and yet with mom, when he was drunk, he was not happy. He was not a happy drunk around her. I don't know why that would be. I don't know. Later, when Ted left university, he moved back to Vancouver.

He stayed with dad and his third wife, Thora, for a while. I'm glad I did that. Mm-hmm. You know, for the time that I lived there, and I'm going to say it was eight months to a year, I can't remember exactly how long. He never drank once. No. It was only after I moved out. And then shortly after that, Thora moved out.

Because he was on a tear? No, no. Well, he may have been. Maybe that's what was the final straw for her. It happened so many times. Every time she went anywhere, he may have been, maybe that's what was the final straw for her. It happened so many times. Every time she went anywhere, he'd go on a bender. I don't know how often, but, you know, certainly with some regularity, at least once a year, once every eight months or so after that, Tom and I would have to come in and sober him up

and get him onto beer to wean him off. And then, you know, a few times we just shipped him off the hospital for detox and he'd spend you know a week in the hospital get back up again and then he'd be fine for a long time not have a drink and then bang but it was it was ugly when it happened it was a mess when it happened. It was a mess. Do you remember when we were really little, he was in the hospital, and they called mom and told her he was going to die?

Yeah. You remember that? I don't remember it, but I know that that happened, yeah. Yeah. Did he ever talk about that? Did he ever acknowledge to you that he had a drinking problem? No, but it was pretty obvious. Well, I know, but he never... You know, he would talk about it in... You know, he'd say,

you know, I go on a bender and it all messed up and da-da-da, and then I'm fine for six months or eight months or whatever. Yeah. He'd make light of it. Did he ever have a sense of what he'd lost as a result of his drinking? I don't think so. No. You know, like, even for me, you know, not having a father for so many years,

it was just nice to have him. And I really didn't care what happened before. What mattered more to me was where it was that day. Shortly after confronting Mom and Stan, I re-established contact with my dad. The way he'd been portrayed in Stan's story felt so unfair to me. We developed a relationship, but we were never truly close. He visited me in Nova Scotia once, and I visited him every year or so for the last decade of his life. I thought about all the time we'd lost, and there was a kind of grief, even before I knew Dad was dying. before I knew Dad was dying.

The drinking and the smoking had taken their toll. Dad developed emphysema. Toward the end of his life, I recorded some of our conversations. There's no question in this world that I'm going to die. And everybody's going to die sometime or another, so it doesn't bother me a whit. But I just accept the fact that I'm getting along pretty good now for as long as I can, and I'm enjoying myself. Visits with you, this is very important to me, but I get along, and I'm not, I live by myself, but I'm not lonely. On my last visit,

he was tethered to an oxygen tank with a plastic nosepiece to help him breathe. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day. We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when, but I know we'll meet again some sunny day. Keep smiling through. God, I'm going to get teary. My dad, Warren Dakin, died in 2006.

I never told him why Mom had taken us and run away. By then, what good would it have done to enrage a sick old man? The secrecy, I think, is the truly damaging part. This constant, I can't tell you that. It's a secret. Secrets are terrible. You didn't talk to your mom for a while after that. Well, and for years had very difficult time talking to my mom.

That's right. And so we would talk about that and trying to maintain the relationship for the sake of your kids. I knew my mom and Stan were still together in some way. He would come to visit her in Nova Scotia. I tried not to think about Stan much during those years, honestly. I knew he and Sybil had retired to BC, and I knew the story he was telling my mom, that he had left Sybil to live full-time in the weird world, was a lie.

But beyond that, I just accepted that my mom loved him and put the rest of it aside. But, so there was a certain element of excitement that disappeared, element of excitement that disappeared was replaced by the struggle of knowing how to manage the family relationships. And I remember coming to your house afterwards and Stan was there with your mom and I could barely look at him. I remember that. I remember that. And I'm not someone who stifles feelings easily. And I was really had a hard time not saying, what did you do? How could you do this?

I didn't stay very long. So it was always present. It was always present. But it shifted, right? Because you had to come to grips with reality and you had to know how to manage that. And you didn't talk to me a lot about that. You found a counselor who was helpful. Eventually.

Eventually. That took a while. Yeah. Yeah. The enormity of Stan's deception seemed impossible to grasp. It would be years before I felt ready to confront what he'd done to my family. When my mother tried to talk about it, I'd cut her off. Eventually, it just became something unspoken between us, something we'd never be able to reconcile.

Eventually, though, Mom and I did find a strange kind of equilibrium. My daughters adored their grandmother, and the three of them became close. Their presence kept my mother and I bound in a way that might not have been possible otherwise. My husband Kevin and I split up in 2001. After that, mom helped me with the girls, especially when I was traveling for my work as a health reporter with the CBC. when I was traveling for my work as a health reporter with the CBC. Then in 2009, mom was diagnosed with metastatic terminal breast cancer, the same cancer that killed her own mother. Mom moved in with me and my girls, now preteens, and I cared for her until she died nine months later. In the weeks before that, she tried to warn me to be careful of people who might want

to harm me. I said it wasn't real. She said if I didn't believe how I must hate her for how our life had unfolded. It was a recognition of the chaos. I told her I'd never hated her, I'd been angry, but I loved her. We realized time was short, and we found a kind of peace. I'm in my last few months of life, I think. Most of the time, I believe that the best is yet to come. And I know that I have friends who have experiences that confirm that, you know. So we'll see about that. Most of the time I believe that. I have to be honest and say I wonder. And we can never know.

so do you ever wonder why am i not completely fucked up why you aren't both yes i'm shocked both of us well who's to say we're not we have to ask somebody else that question i guess no but you know we're functional you know this whole thing in essence protected mom from warren in some way and she made decisions that she thought would benefit us when it came to things like Warren, you know, so she did things that were good for us as children in a divorced family with someone who was not exactly a great parent. Parallel to what she was doing to protect us from organized crime. Yeah. So moving across the country arguably could have just been so that he wouldn't have access to us.

Yeah. And not because. And that was always what we believed. And not because we were trying to escape anything or we had to move a stand because it would be easier for them to protect all of us in one city than it would be across, whatever reasons, you know what I mean? Yeah. Like it's, you know, and to be careful. You know, I've always thought this, you know, I'm not, I'm not, you know what I mean like it's you know and and to be careful you know I've always

thought this you know I'm not I'm not you know maybe that's some way I'm affected I'm a little anal when it comes to safety you know like I don't I wouldn't put myself in a bad situation yeah you know I would avoid certain things because I think this could be trouble and I might not think that way if I wasn't always so cautious for those years because I thought my life was in danger and I better be damn careful or I thought it might be so I better be careful anyway you know like how how would those things possibly you know could have affected yeah so see i think that the effect it's had on me i have a lot of really good friends i feel like i have great friends but even some of my closest friends have said to me that i am reserved they feel like they cannot fully know me and i think just a lifetime of

being told don't tell you can't tell don't tell anybody don just a lifetime of being told, don't tell. You can't tell. Don't tell anybody. Don't talk about that on the phone. Don't, you know, all that stuff. Everything's a big secret. I remember you and I talking about how everything's a big secret. And some of that got into me.

Now I think about how mom was primed for the events and the story that hijacked our lives. An emotionally abusive father who neglected her. A physically and psychologically abusive husband who terrorized her. And then she met Stan, a gentle man who supported her and her kids, who gave her love and a sense of purpose. He told her stories of a just world, one that offered a chance at redemption. And who wouldn't want to believe in that? Next time on the final episode of Run, Hide, Repeat, we dig into Stan's life to answer the biggest question of all, why?

Sooner or later, your reasoning is swamped, and you begin to accept anything that you're told. Absolutely. He was living two lives, one with Sybil, one with Mom. You know, he'd come and tell us, don't go out tonight. There's people out there that want to do us harm as a family, but there's guys watching, so everything should be okay. Just stay inside. You know, I'm so embarrassed that I actually believed him.

And you really trusted and loved him? Yeah, I did. I believed him. You've been listening to Run, Hide, Repeat from CBC Podcasts. I'm Pauline Dakin. The show was written and produced by myself and Michael Catano. Graham MacDonald is our associate producer and sound designer. Roshni Nair is our coordinating producer.

Special thanks to Eunice Kim for her help with this series. Our senior producer is Willow Smith. Our executive producers are Cecil Fernandez and Chris Oak. And Arif Noorani is the director of CBC Podcasts. You can check out home videos and photos from my childhood on Instagram, at CBC Podcasts. Give us a follow while you're there. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.