Changing My Mind Read online

  Changing My Mind

  MARGARET

  TRUDEAU

  Dedication

  To my brave daughter, Alicia Mary Rose Kemper, and all the daughters of mothers who struggle with a mental illness

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1: The Brawling Sinclairs

  CHAPTER 2: From Peasant Dress to Wedding Dress

  CHAPTER 3: Hormones to the Rescue

  CHAPTER 4: The Unravelling Begins

  CHAPTER 5: Doctor, Diagnosis, Denial

  CHAPTER 6: Reason over Passion, or Passion over Reason

  CHAPTER 7: Poor Mad Mrs. Rochester, Hidden in the Attic

  CHAPTER 8: A Plump, Happy Pigeon

  CHAPTER 9: Slipping

  CHAPTER 10: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  CHAPTER 11: No, No, No, No

  CHAPTER 12: Choosing Sanity

  CHAPTER 13: Me, at Last

  AFTERWORD

  Lessons from Changing My Mind by Dr. Colin Cameron

  The Importance of Margaret’s Message by Dr. Paul Grof

  Perinatal Psychiatric Mood Disorders by Dr. Shaila Misri

  PHOTO CREDITS

  INDEX

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  “There’s something different about Margie,” my parents would sometimes say to others as they tried to fathom my behaviour as a child. My father and mother couldn’t put their fingers on it, had no name for it, but whatever it was set me apart from my four sisters. My siblings accepted things, and I didn’t.

  There was a ferocity in young Margaret Joan Sinclair. Growing up in Vancouver in the 1950s, I was often capricious and temperamental, quick to laugh, even quicker to feel despair; prone to flailing my arms, pouting and crying when things didn’t go my way or I thought something was unfair or I was bullied by my sisters. I often felt raw and thin skinned—absurdly so. And I couldn’t bear to think of people in pain. My mother would say, “Margaret, how are you going to get through life if you take things so badly?”

  To put it mildly, I was a drama queen—but that phrase falls far short of capturing what assailed me then. I was a quicksilver girl who saw every leaf on every tree. For me, there was no middle ground between sinking and flying, and once I was into my early adult years, my roller coaster got wilder and faster: I seemed to rise and fall with the same reckless velocity. I wince at some of the things I did as the young wife of Canada’s fifteenth prime minister, Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Looking back as a mature woman, I finally forgive that twenty-something version of myself and her youthful follies—and I totally admire her spirit and how she lived on the edge.

  What “Maggie” (as the press called me) did not know is that her brain chemistry was abnormal: I suffered from manic depression, or bipolar disorder, as we more commonly call it today. Only when I was pregnant was I truly happy, and only because maternal hormones—the great biological imperative to the rescue—had given me respite from my “madness.” But even had I been properly diagnosed forty years ago, treatment options were limited.

  So much has changed, and one of my hopes for this book is that by telling my own story, that message can be delivered. If I can’t be a role model, maybe I can be a dire warning. At any given time, three million Canadians suffer serious depression and at least 1 per cent of the population—more than 330,000 males and females—suffers from bipolar disorder, a form of mental illness that inflicts a $15 billion economic burden on the nation every year. American authorities believe that the figure for bipolar sufferers in that country is at least 2 per cent. Only cardiac disease does more damage and draws more dollars from the health care budget than mental illness. Those afflicted men and women, some of them very young, should know that there is light at the end of the tunnel, that their lost lives can be regained.

  Another one of my hopes for this book is that friends and family of those suffering mental illness will learn the markers of depression and gain the confidence to intervene and help.

  The journey to get where I am today has been a long and perilous one (never mind a very public one), but that’s partly because I was in the dark about my condition for so many years, as were those trying to help me. Today I am as happy as I have ever been in my life. Only my time as a young mother comes close to matching my level of satisfaction. I am sixty-one years old as I write these words, and people laugh when I tell them that I was a teenager until quite recently.

  I now live in my lovely, bright and airy condominium—”Grandma’s house,” as my four grandchildren call it—in a grand old building near the mountain in Montreal. My contentment, you should know, is not solely drug induced. I take a mild dose of a mood stabilizer, and likely will for the rest of my days. Family, friends, meaningful work, exercise, diet, meditation, yoga, nature, gardening, lessons, cooking, music and art all play a role these days in keeping my demons at bay.

  The bipolar cross is a heavy one to bear, and I have carried it pretty well all my life, and will go on carrying it until my last breath. The really exciting news from research in the field is that early treatment of bipolar disorder actually reprograms the brain and promotes healing. There are so many breakthroughs—such as transcranial magnetic stimulation that can rewire the brain—and so much reason for hope. Later in the book, three medical experts will describe some of the latest thinking on bipolar disorder. I’m really pleased that that resource and the practical insight it gives form a part of this book.

  When I was fifty and still in the throes of bipolar disorder, I considered the fact that many of the women in my family lived to be one hundred years old. And I thought, “Oh no, fifty more years of this?” Now I’m thinking, “Only thirty-nine more years? What a shame.”

  For those who suffer from any form of mental illness, mine is a cautionary tale. Hippocrates and centuries of doctors who followed in his wake would brand my particular form of illness “melancholia,” but they had no clue how to treat or manage it and no idea what caused it. Victims, their families and their friends all suffered horribly and unimaginably. If the suffering continues today, that’s only because many of those who are “different” have no name for their paralyzing sadness, no sense that they can be helped or no courage to admit they need help. When you’re severely depressed, you can hardly speak. My great desire is that this book gives words to people who cannot articulate their pain and despair and who have no understanding of its source.

  This reflection on my life has one recurring theme: Margaret Trudeau was able to come out the other side. So can you.

  CHAPTER 1

  THE BRAWLING SINCLAIRS

  My grandmother once told me when I was very young, “Margaret, you’re one of the more delicate flowers in the garden. But you’re also a perennial.” Only later did I understand that she was remarking on how fragile I was and yet how durable. A perennial is an eternal flower, one that keeps coming back year after year.

  ROBERTS CREEK, BRITISH COLUMBIA, AUGUST 1958

  Fish, salmon in particular, brought the Sinclairs from Scotland to Canada in 1911.

  My paternal grandfather, James Sinclair, was born in Wick, in the high north of Scotland, and grew up farther south in Banff-shire, historically a major supplier of salmon to Europe. The nearby River Deveron is still well known among fly fishers for its sizeable catches of salmon, sea trout and brown trout.

  My grandfather had been caught poaching salmon from that same river, which was then known as the “laird’s river.” The game warden happened to be a friend, and he was understanding but firm.
r />   “Jimmy,” he warned, “if I catch you again, you’ll have to go to jail.”

  “If I canna fish,” James Sinclair replied famously in family lore, “I canna live.”

  He was a schoolteacher in the town of Grange, but he had struggled to feed his family on his meagre wages, and so he went home, pulled out all his maps and decided to seek his fortune (and new fishing grounds) in the British colonies. British Columbia, with all its spawning rivers, its many lakes and long ocean coast, and some of the biggest salmon in the world, beckoned. He never regretted the move.

  My grandfather prospered in Vancouver, where he enjoyed a stellar and path-breaking career helping to establish the area’s first vocational school, which still exists—Vancouver Technical Secondary School. He remained a passionate fisherman. He saved up enough money to buy a cottage on the Sechelt Peninsula, and he would spend hours on the porch of his boathouse making spoons and lures for the salmon he planned to catch. Some of my Scottish relatives were a little on the dour side, but not my grandfather. He was fun. I remember him playing the Pied Piper in his rambling old house during parties and at Christmas, leading the shrieking grandkids up and down the stairs as he played the harmonica.

  My paternal grandmother was Betsy Ross, another northern Scot, who was as tough as she was sweet. She ran a tight ship. They had a beautiful plum tree in the garden, and Grandma made plum jam from the fruit. She wasn’t the gardener that my other grandmother was, but she did grow some things, as any sensible Scot would.

  James George Sinclair, the son of James and Betsy, was just two when the family left Scotland. Dad inherited his father’s burr and retained it all his life; the accent especially came out when he was telling stories. And he loved to tell stories. He was also a very good mimic.

  He was a smart man, my father. He studied engineering at the University of British Columbia and was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to study mathematics at Oxford University. He sent home wonderful letters describing how, as a Rhodes Scholar, he had been invited to Lady Astor’s for lunch on a Sunday. A classically prudent Scot, he knew it would tax the family budget, but it seemed important to him to own a well-cut, well-made suit—a navy-blue blazer with gold buttons.

  Later, my father studied mathematical physics at Princeton and took up his father’s profession—teaching, in his case at a Vancouver high school. One of his brightest students was Kathleen Bernard, and in 1940, when he was thirty-one and she was just nineteen, they got married. Looking back at this May–December marriage, I wonder if it paved the way for my own wedding to a man who was two years older than my mother.

  My father was a big, imposing fellow, six feet two inches tall. Jimmy Sinclair was gruff on the outside but he was also a good man, fair and sweet, and he was stern with my sisters and me only when we dared cross our mother or disrespected her. Then came the wrath of God. He doted on my mother and loved her so much. I never heard a cross word between them. Such total harmony was little use as a role model for my own marriage. I never heard my parents fight and did not know that it was possible for a wife to quarrel or argue with her husband. Suppression of anger, I believed, was how to cope.

  My father, for all his intelligence, was also a simple man with simple tastes. He would come down to breakfast wearing a green business suit, a blue tie, and one sock coloured navy, the other brown.

  “Oh, Dad-dy! Look at you!” we sisters would all yell, imploring him to wear clothes that matched. He didn’t care. He always said, “I dress to keep warm and I eat to fuel my body.” Years later, he dined one Christmas with Pierre and me at 24 Sussex Drive, where staff had opened a Château Latour from the 1940s—an extraordinary bottle of wine—to honour his presence. “Don’t waste the good stuff on me,” he told them, and asked for some cooking wine from the kitchen.

  In his political thinking, he was a left-leaning Liberal. He was born into the Presbyterian Church but never attended services. “Too harsh,” he said of that brand of Protestantism.

  My mother was outstandingly beautiful. Tall, with hazel eyes and raven hair, Kathleen had the finest, most beautiful skin, which turned bronze in the sun thanks to the Malaysian blood that coursed through her.

  Her great-great-great-great-grandfather William Farquhar was a Scottish-born British officer in the East India Company who played a pivotal role in the founding of Singapore in the early nineteenth century. After the British lost both Java and the tiny Malaysian sultanate of Malacca to the Dutch, General Farquhar set out to find a new port and, together with Sir Stamford Raffles (lieutenant-governor of Java), founded Singapore. But the two men had a falling out over the way Singapore was to be settled.

  Sir Stamford abhorred gambling, cockfighting and the notion of indentured servants, and he wanted the waterfront preserved for government buildings and residences. The more easygoing Farquhar, who spoke Malaccan and who had great respect for the Malaysian culture, knew that local people weren’t about to abandon all their bad habits overnight, and he reserved the waterfront for the merchants.

  When Raffles returned after several years away and saw that his orders had been ignored, he dismissed Farquhar. On the day William left, in 1823, the roads were so densely packed with people wanting to say goodbye that it took him three hours to reach his boat. He left behind Antoinette Clement, his companion for some twenty-five years, and their five children, settled on a rubber plantation. There was no thought of her joining him; she would have found the Scottish climate and the imperialist thinking of the day equally unwelcoming. Once back in Scotland, William Farquhar married a new wife.

  While still in Singapore, between 1819 and 1823, my ancestor commissioned various Chinese artists to illustrate local plants, mammals, birds, fish and insects found in Malacca and Singapore. Some 477 watercolours were completed, and several copies of the original paintings now hang on the walls of my Montreal condominium.

  My mother, then, could trace her line back to “a country wife,” since Antoinette was the daughter of a French officer and a Malaysian woman. In colonies all over the world, men of various empires took up with local women, in the way that soldiers, explorers and fur trade managers in Canada took First Nations women as wives (“a bit of brown,” they were sometimes called). Several years ago, the CBC-TV genealogy series Who Do You Think You Are? followed me to Singapore, where I probed my own roots.

  It turns out that William Farquhar and Antoinette Clement’s eldest daughter, Esther, married a British officer named Francis James Bernard. But Francis did exactly what his father had done: in 1827, he left Singapore on a trading ship, leaving behind Esther and their five children. She died there, destitute, at the age of forty-one. No point in decrying such behaviour; blame the times.

  Esther’s descendants found their way to Australia, from there to Manitoba, then to Penticton in the British Columbia interior and finally to the west coast.

  My mother was such an elegant and well-mannered person, with a deep well of tolerance and compassion. In hindsight, I think my mother’s strengths and values helped me as a mother. Mom is ninety years old as I write these words, and she can look back on a hard life—though I doubt she would say that.

  Firm but kind by nature, she was a quiet, long-suffering soul, and mostly content with her lot. She had emerged from a solid working-class family, found a good and loving husband, raised five daughters—nothing to complain about, and no use in any case. Still, she did suffer at times from depression and she never got the treatment she needed. There is some evidence that genetics plays a role in bipolar disorder, but I’ll never know what role that played in my own illness. I know only that my mother was alone much of the time and worried much of the time.

  When my father went overseas for the war in 1940 (he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force in North Africa, Malta and Sicily until 1945), he left behind a pregnant wife. While her husband was off overseas, my mother and her sister, whose husband was likewise off fighting, moved in with their mother. Before leaving, my father was elected as the Lib
eral member of parliament for North Vancouver—a position he held until 1957, including a seven-year stint as minister of fisheries in Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent’s government, one that finally fell to John Diefenbaker’s Tory wave in 1958. (Imagine the pride of James Sr. when James Jr. was put in charge of fish.)

  All through the 1950s, my father travelled widely—to Europe, Ceylon, the USSR and China—on political matters. Even when he was home, he worked most evenings studying briefs or engaged in riding business. My mother was very much a single mother, often alone with her daughters on the coast while her husband worked in Ottawa, or shuffling the family between homes in Ontario and British Columbia. When they were apart, reconnecting involved either a five-day train trip or thirteen hours on a Vickers Viscount prop plane.

  In those days, the wives of politicians would travel mostly by train from Ottawa back to their homes in their husbands’ constituencies. My mother would keep company with John Diefenbaker’s first wife, Edna, and they became great friends. Edna and John lived in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, so Mom had Edna’s companionship that far and continued on to the coast. My father was a member of parliament for eighteen years in total, and only in 1952, when he became a cabinet minister, did we actually live in Ottawa.

  Because she married and had children so early in life, my mother’s own education was limited. She did become a nurse, and my father used to joke that by marrying her he had “saved her from washing loggers’ backs.” Later, when her daughters went off to university and brought home interesting books, she joined a “living-room learning class”—what we would now call a book club. Bridge and the company of good friends were two of my mother’s passions.

  Mine was a happy childhood, but there was not a lot of touching in my family. That’s simply how it was in those days among WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants). If I was hurt as a child, I could crawl into my mother’s arms and be comforted. Sometimes I’d fake being hurt to get that comfort. Physical hurt was one thing; psychological hurt quite another. “Let’s have a pot of tea” was sometimes my mother’s response. Her own mother had cautioned against any excess of emotion; our joys and sorrows were always to be measured.