Lavinia Thompson's Blog: Seeking reviewers! , page 3

Book Launch Countdown: 6 days!

A countdown to the release of "Martha Holmes Mysteries" Story Inspirations

Well, it really started with an off-hand remark from an online friend who suggested I mesh my love for "Sex and the City" with a mystery story. At first, I played with a first-person narrative that attempted to mimic the way Carrie Bradshaw told her stories - except this one was going to be from a podcast, not a newspaper column.

As I wrote, however, a different type of narrative voice emerged. It was around the time I was also looking around for old Nancy Drew books, having lost my collection in the housefire many years ago. I managed to buy the first ten from a lady on Facebook marketplace, only to become immersed a familiar and comforting world. A relatable and noble heroine. Baffling mysteries. Elements I wanted to put into Martha's series.

Photo by author

And so it left behind it's original sassy title of "She's so Lovely" and embraced a new aesthetic as "Martha Holmes Mysteries". It became less about the romantic side of things, and more about a woman finding herself again upon starting over in her thirties. My marriage fell apart a year or so before I turned thirty. Starting over while many of my friends are in stable relationships with kids and careers is jarring, to say the least. And I know I'm not alone in that sentiment. Especially as a childfree woman who had never navigated the online dating world until then! It became too much of a dumpster fire for me. I left that weird era of life behind. But it gave me a thing or two to write about.

The first book of the series watches Martha and Daisy navigate a cold case that becomes bigger than them, but they remain determined to see it through. It foreshadows a new path for them: one where they team up to tackle cold cases and help families find answers and closure. Martha, the private investigator, and Daisy, the social media star and expert. A duo like no other, taking on life, love, and crime.

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Book Launch Countdown: 7 days!

A countdown to the release of "Martha Holmes Mysteries" A glimpse at the case:

Martha Holmes finds herself potentially in over her head when she accepts a case from Thomas Remmy. He's spent the last decade desperately seeking answers about his sister, Chloe, and her best friend, Sydney Mollison. They went missing exactly a year apart. However, as Martha digs, she finds more victims and the trail of a predator in plain sight...

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Book Launch Countdown: 8 days!

A countdown to the release of "Martha Holmes Mysteries"Character Intro: Thomas

Thomas Remmy is a soul full of rock and roll and old school vibes, with a guitar pick always in the pockets of his ripped jeans and leather jacket. He is a neon light shadow in cigarette smoke, sulking towards home after a night out at the bar. On stage with his band, he is known as Jaeger Keith. Those who know the man behind the musician know him as Tommy. Despite being a quiet guy, he laughs often and is always a supportive friend to anyone in need. He knows how it feels to hit rock bottom in life and the importance of having a hand or two reach out to help. One cannot survive all of life’s adversities alone.

(Image by Pexels from Pixabay )

It is at this crossroad where he lingers, looking around lost. A decade ago, his younger sister, Chloe, went missing. She vanished mysteriously on her way to her best friend’s house – the same friend who also disappeared a year later. Thomas has spent the last ten years agonizing over how he should have protected her and how he failed as a brother. He went down a road he never should have, but is finding his way back. Part of that journey, he knows, is finding closure for Chloe and Sydney, in order to forgive himself.

The obsession over the disappearance of his sister has consumed his life, constricting his ability to move on. At 35-years old, he is a music teacher and a musician, a single man with a few friends and a buried, nagging need to find Chloe. He simply cannot let it go. Music is what keeps him holding on, keeps him involved with society and engaged with other people. It is the only thing that allows him to disconnect from the mental chaos he feels about his sister. His one string of sanity in a world where he otherwise feels invisible and forgotten.

Thomas has allowed himself space to heal. Now, he wants to do the work of finding the truth – even if it means finding help from somewhere unconventional, an encounter that will change his life once more.

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Book Launch Countdown: 9 days!

A countdown to the release of "Martha Holmes Mysteries"Character Intro: Daisy

“You are gold.”

It’s what Daisy tells her friends and social media followers every chance she gets. Daisy Bain is a woman who finds the light even on the dreariest days. At 33-years old, she’s a full-time content creator on social media, where she’s recognized as “Aunt Daisy” to her followers. Her warm demeanour and loving, bright brown eyes soak in the world; it’s beauty and ruins, existence and pain, darkness and light. Her life is lived following the sun, not letting negativity or toxicity have any place. She stands confident in who she is.

Her mind is full of seeds for ideas to plant. Something new and creative always lurks on the forefront; the peek of a sunrise where every day is a new day. Daisy has been single for quite some time, but she’s having fun until the right man comes along. She simply won’t settle for less than what she deserves. Her last relationship ended five years ago. Her road to social media stardom started with a simple Facebook page for breakups and women enduring a rough period in their lives. It soon expanded to Instagram, and finally, to TikTok, where her content really took off. In keeping multiple streams of revenue, she does ads on TikTok (only ones that align with her platform of positivity and acceptance), sells merch and her own art on her website, and runs a podcast and YouTube channel. She never runs out of things to do. She eventually wants to write a book as well.

But it isn’t through rose-coloured glasses that Daisy sees the world. She’s realistic, intelligent and passionate. At the same time, life is so much more than what we see. It’s mundane on the surface, sometimes to the point of agonizingly boring. There’s a layer of mediocrity over every life which can be peeled back to reveal true dreams, goals and who one is supposed to be. Daisy believes so many people live on that surface because it’s comfortable and familiar. Few want to fall through the floor of stability into the unknown, regardless of what it may bring them. Yet having her own floor crumble to dust beneath her was the best thing to have ever happened to her. She realizes that many people never tear that surface back like she did five years ago, when the relationship ended and it pushed her out of her toxic comfort zone. She’s seen rock bottom. But a sunflower grows tall to embrace the sun. She let her soul do just that.

Image by Hebert Hebert Santos from Pixabay

Off camera, Daisy spends a lot of time daydreaming, allowing ideas to enter her and stir for a while before using them. Notes remain scattered all over her office, pieces of poetry or for her next video or a quote to use somewhere. Art pieces always in progress. Paintings. Drawings. Notebooks. Her tripod, always set up and ready to go at a moment’s notice when inspiration strikes. She is the shadow dancing in her kitchen at 3 a.m. to her favourite music, string lights hung around her filming area entangled with fake sunflowers. The rest of her home is filled with obscure art pieces from other creators, copies of CDs and vinyl from indie musicians and books from indie authors. She believes in paying back to the creative community all the support and love she’s received.

Her foundation of confidence and positivity truly comes from her family. Her parents have always been loving supporters of both her and her brother. It built her resiliency against a world that can be unfathomably abrasive. When all else fails, she always has a soft place of love to fall back on. All she wants to do is give that to others.

If she gets into another relationship, it has to be with a man who will stand beside her and give her space to fly and grow, not hang around like dirty dishes in the kitchen sink. A guy needs to match her energy and be ready to keep stepping out of his comfort zone – because that is one spot where Daisy never stays.

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Book launch countdown: 10 days

Martha Holmes character intro

Martha Holmes is falling out of love and back into her life – except she barely recognizes it anymore. Fresh out of the fallout of her marriage, a relationship that spanned almost ten years, she finds herself single and starting over at 33. Crumbled, cheated on, and heartbroken, she hasn’t dated in almost a decade and feels overwhelmed at the thought of trying again – what even are dating apps and how do they work? What are the rules and how have they changed? Can she keep up in the fast-paced world of casual hook-ups and instant gratification?

She is an old-school soul, a romantic turned cynical. Instead of jumping back into dating, she’s focused on a major case. Martha is an independent private investigator, and a former investigative journalist. Unravelling mysteries is what she does best. Her keen eye for detail, strong instinct and determination makes her a reliable woman to rely on to uncover secrets. Her job consists mostly of busting deceitful spouses, solving troubled marriage lives and busting workplace fraud. She’s tired of the mundane cases and the repetitive nature of human beings hurting each other in petty ways. But when the cold case of two missing girls comes her way, Martha finds her purpose as a PI once more: to help others and to find the truth.

Behind the work day, though, is a woman who wants to turn off her phone and curl up in bed to cry until she can’t feel a thing. Maybe turning off the online world will turn off the rest of the world. Make everything stop for just a little while so she can process and grieve. Instead, she leaves her work day to light a cigarette, drink a cocktail and numb it all out once more.

(Image by Štěpán Karásek from Pixabay )

When not working or partying, Martha loves writing, photography, and shopping. She has far too many notebooks she has yet to use, a dress and shoes for every occasion, drinks too much coffee, loves food and daytime naps. Her work and party lifestyle make her nocturnal unless she has to be somewhere. Especially now that she doesn’t have a marriage to balance with it all – her time is truly her own once more.

She was the teenager who never quite fit in. Her home life was unsteady when she was young, with her mother stuck in an abusive relationship she eventually escaped.

Martha and her sister, Amy, are close. Also constantly at Martha’s side is her best friend, Daisy, a social media influencer and star. The women are inseparable. Amy and Daisy have been in the dating world much longer than Martha has – the trio are bound for adventures while Martha seeks to answer the question embedded in her heart since being betrayed by her husband: is there life after love?

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Let's Talk about Childfree Women in Fiction

Stop making every female character a mother

Any other childfree women and writers who are tired of watching their favourite fictional childfree characters meet the seemingly inevitable fate of pregnancy? Because I am.

I began watching “Murdoch Mysteries” last year, intrigued by Julia Ogden’s character, who couldn’t have children and said a few times she didn’t want to. I am only in season four, so imagine my surprise and exasperation when I was scrolling through Facebook to see this:

Well, I nearly flipped a table.

Every time. Every time I think I am free of the baby fever and obsession that plaques other shows and books, every time I think I have finally found a character I can relate to, this happens. Someone, someway, the woman just has to have a baby as if her life depends on it. What happened to this character not physically able to have children? Why is so bad to keep a fictional woman childfree? I nearly turned off “Sex and the City” when Miranda Hobbs also changed her mind about having a baby and did it. I think Samantha Jones remains one of the few fictional characters to ever stick to her childfree status. An icon, really, for us women who embrace remaining single and reject motherhood.

In a world that cries for diversity in terms of race, gender-inclusion, and sexuality, why are childfree women still vastly underrepresented? Statistics in 2018 showed that one in five Canadian women wouldn’t embrace motherhood. Canada’s fertility rate was 1.5 in 2021. It declined to 1.492 in 2022; a small decrease, yet these rates have been on the decline since 1950, where the rate was 3.5. These rates have been nearly cut in half. (Stats Canada)

As societal changes, women’s rights, birth control, and major culture shifts happen, art should adapt accordingly. But it doesn’t always.

I’m always excited when I begin a new show or book and the female main character is childfree. But, all good things must end, apparently, because it usually ends with the beloved heroine in a relationship and pregnant, tossing her previous rejection of motherhood to the wind. It’s no wonder so many of us childfree women get told repeatedly: “You’ll change your mind.” Or, “your biological clock is ticking! Better hurry!”

I am 32-fucking-years-old and have yet to experience even a hint of baby fever. In fact, to be truthful, I don’t like kids, nor do I lose my mind every time someone walks into a room with a baby. I have never, ever seen the appeal of motherhood. The more I hear stories from my friends, the more happy I am I don’t have any kids. It sounds like hell, honestly. Yet, some women love children and motherhood, so I’ll leave the child rearing to the ones who want to do it.

And some of us don’t simply reject it. We celebrate a life free from children. We travel, write books, go out, spend afternoons in peaceful secondhand book stores, go visit friends for a weekend on a whim. We are not lonely, forlorn for the child that never was, or reclusive in a house full of cats. Personally, I love my solitude and peace that comes from being single and childfree. I work, come home, write, visit friends, go on random adventures, read books, and I still do lots of self-therapy for my trauma and mental illnesses. Being on my own for the last five years has done wonders for my healing and self-discovery. It’s so easy to get lost in relationships and parenthood and the distractions it provides. Digging deep into the roots of trauma and emotional turmoil is terrifying, but also liberating. Liberation also comes in the form of making decisions true to oneself.

In the same way mothers are celebrated for bringing life into the world, childfree women deserve to be celebrated for what they contribute in lieu of motherhood. Humanitarian work, volunteer hours, their education and careers, their art, and who they are as human beings. Why is it so much to ask for us to be seen and represented alongside our fellow women? These labels, these choices, are not divisive. At least, they shouldn’t be. Women have come so far, and the fact we can make the choice to have children or not is astounding, considering our ancestors of only a few generations ago didn’t have that option. The birth control pill wasn’t given a green light for distribution until 1960. Abortion has only been legal in Canada since 1988. Only a year older than my entire existence.

The fact we have this choice, and can choose to contribute to society in our own ways, is more than worthy of celebration and representation.

I have two female main characters in two different series, who both will remain childfree. Each has different reasons for not becoming mothers. Martha (in “Martha Holmes Mysteries”) is free-spirited and in a season of transition and self-discovery. At 33, she is embracing the freedom she’s found after her marriage ends. There’s more to life, she believes. She and her best friend are dedicating resources and work to solving cold cases.

Alyssa’s (“Beyond Dark”) reasons for being childfree stem from trauma. After being raised by chaotic, abusive parents, she doesn’t trust herself to be a proper mother, and prefers to focus on her career as a criminal profiler. Marriage and children have never been a priority. She’s focused on therapy and processing her childhood, and the emotional disconnect from society it’s given her.

It wasn’t an overly conscious choice, but given that it’s the life I know, it seemed logical. Motherhood is not an experience I can write accurately about. But the reasons for not embracing it, and the life that comes with it? Well, I know that one intimately. The old writing advice of “write what you know” can be interpreted in various ways. But at the end of the day, it’s all about being true to yourself and not only your experience, but other human experiences, too. People live different truths, different lives. And as writers, we get the honour, the gift, of injecting the differently celebrated versions into literature. But let’s keep ensuring the diversity is accurate.

Not all childless women pine for babies and motherhood. We are called childfree for a reason. Stop giving these “childfree” characters the fate of motherhood. In reality, parenthood would make childfree women miserable. Let’s see more female characters celebrating negative pregnancy tests, enjoying life without kids, contributing to society in meaningful ways outside of parenthood, and of just living authentically. We’re out here living the experience. Let fiction align with that truth.

An excellent article I found about childfree women: https://www.tvo.org/article/why-society-needs-to-make-room-for-single-childless-women#:~:text=Recent%20statistics%20show%20that%20one,not%20having%20any%20at%20all

CBC, More Canadians living alone and without children, census figures show

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/census-2016-marriage-children-families-1.4231872

Stats (numbers from the United Nations): https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/CAN/canada/fertility-rate

2001 Canadian study – childfree by choice – PDF

https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-008-x/2003001/article/6528-eng.pdf

Four decades of birth control pills: https://www.webmd.com/sex/birth-control/news/20000508/four-decades-of-birth-control-pill

Rugs aren't permanent - neither is darkness.

An interview published in The Paris Review’s spring edition caused me to go into a state of reflection. Author Rachel Cusk discussed many things in the article, namely going through a period of isolation when she was younger in which she cut off the world and wrote, the self-discovery that happened in that time, and the search for an authentic self.

Like ghosts stirring back to life, it resurrected susurrations from the two years I spent at rock bottom of my depression after ending my marriage. I’d wanted out, only to discover how much of myself I had tangled up in him, in our life, in something that was convenient so I didn’t have to face my trauma anymore. After years of therapy, I thought that was it. My happily ever after. A small, lovely wedding and a small, lovely life. At least, that’s what it should have been.

Rugs aren’t permanent. With time, they wear and fray and reveal the layers of dust and secrets beneath. It happens to relationships, too, when not nurtured, cared for and when two people are so caught up in their own struggles – addiction, mental illness, trauma, all three of which were present in my marriage – that even the frays crumble and there’s nothing left to mend. Just dust of a foundation that once meant something.

It wasn’t only the fallout of the marriage from which I was having to heal. It was also my mental illnesses and the rest of my trauma. The lack of knowing who I was beforehand, the nothingness in which I dwelt, left me desolate.

When Cusk describes sitting in her parents’ empty house for months on end, writing furiously, from the gut of some fiery passion, that’s what I longed for. Some spark of inspiration that would bring back what writing meant to me. It didn’t heal anymore. That anguish, the flood of emotions old and new being regurgitated never came. I simply shut down into numbness, barely functioning through work and coming home to a house I didn’t want to be in. Since I couldn’t bring myself to write, I partied and drank instead, which inevitably only made the spiral worse. Like – a bottle of rum a night. For consecutive nights. I was hungover at work often, existing in this soulless blur where the world made no sense and I no longer wanted to be here.

The ghosts grew louder, beckoning me to join them. I’d drive home from work and stare at a semi-truck’s oncoming headlights, wondering if the horrific impact would be enough. I’d gaze at a bottle of whatever pills I had at home, contemplating how many it would take. Or I’d pull out a knife and wonder if I was capable of it. If I could make it deep enough. These were the bleakest days where I thought I was hiding from the worst of it. But I was only drowning, and fast, convinced no one would even notice if I died. (I was incredibly wrong, of course.)

(Image by jonathan rossi from Pixabay)

I remember little between the summer of 2017 and late 2018. Those years may as well have not existed, because all I did was flap recklessly and desperately against the bars of a self-imposed prison cage, screaming silently but doing nothing to find a way out. I suffocated myself but never enough to make it the end. Some nights I’d end up broken down, crying, on my kitchen floor after looking at my dog and cats and knowing they’d forever wonder why I never came home. I couldn’t bring myself to abandon them.

I took on the challenge to go dry for January 2019. Once the withdrawal wore off, it gave me clarity and space to think, a fresher breath in stale air.

And I needed to write something, damn it.

I looked at my poor draft from “Edge of Glory”, the remnants of what had become a love/hate relationship with writing. It gutted me to face the truth: I had outgrown the story, and its characters. The me who wrote the original story was not who I was anymore. I wouldn’t shelf it completely until 2020, but crawling my way into 2019, sobering up, made me long to write something new. I had to prove to myself I could still do it – or else I really did have no will to keep living.

The basis of Alyssa’s character had been in my mind for many years, but starting “Beyond Dark” that January allowed me to truly focus on her and her story. I went down a completely new rabbit hole of writing crime fiction, which felt so liberating after all my years of obsessing over true crime. It brought me back to life, truly. Through Alyssa and her need for answers to her trauma, I came to further understand my own, and in her need to heal, I discovered the same for myself. “Belladonna” and it’s theme of reflections stems largely from the state I was in at the time. Looking not only at myself, but within myself and learning why I had gone down a darkened road of terrifying self-destruction, where headlights were a means to an end, not a light at the end of a tunnel.

Her journey of re-connecting with the world looks a lot like mine. The fear of meeting new people, the insecurity of socializing after being numb and so traumatized for so long. And how different the world looked when I returned from that road. I cut way back on drinking, started writing again, began going out to bars and socializing again. I dyed my hair, was redoing my entire wardrobe, truly delving into who I was going to be in this brave, brand new world I’d found where I was going to writing conferences, talking in front of people with confidence and making new friends and going to singles’ events and -

Then, COVID.

Watching the world shut down and devolve oddly into division and the disinformation of the far-right rhetoric, and even recently here in Canada with the spiteful protests and the hatred seeping through comment sections on social media, the toxicity and isolation feels awful. To be honest, there are times where I think, “I didn’t stay alive for this.”

But didn’t I? Didn’t I always hold out a tiny glimmer of hope that there is better in the world? That I could be better, give better, and find better? This pandemic has brought on another bout of identity crisis. Who am I now going to be after all this? It was during this pandemic that I published “Belladonna”, then wrote and am next month releasing “Martha Holmes Mysteries”. Two books that have shaped greatly my self-discovery in this bizarre time.

In Martha, I’ve begun unloading the unresolved feelings and pieces of my ended marriage, and the life that comes after it. I’ve sort of separated my childhood trauma and the need to process the marital fallout into these two characters. That wasn’t consciously done, but my brain has always automatically compartmentalized. Martha’s story started as me wanting to experiment with meshing a “Sex and the City” style women’s fiction storyline with mystery, but it quickly evolved into its own aesthetic. It became more about healing after betrayal and heartbreak, instead of jumping into the dating world again. It’s become about unshakable female friendships, that love doesn’t always have to be romantic, and about finding life after love. Her career as a private investigator shifts quickly from busting adulterous spouses to her and her best friend, Daisy, wanting to solve cold cases – a testament to the personal journey she undergoes, too.

Between Alyssa and Martha, I have discovered a sense of authenticity for myself. I’ve become content to be single, on my own, and lost the need to constantly be in a relationship. I’ve been single for almost four years after taking a weird and baffling venture into the online dating world (seriously, how do you people do it??). I deleted the apps and swore it off. Then, I kept writing.

All dark times come to an end. In the same way I saw an end to my suicidal period, this pandemic will end. The post-COVID world will look and be different, no doubt. But something else I’ve learned is that the ending of one period, one era, doesn’t have to be bad. Many systems in society are simply no longer sustainable. We’re realizing that on a mass scale. Many injustices, attitudes, and actions are not sustainable or acceptable, either. We can be the better in this aftermath. But what’s more important is this: if all you’ve done for the last two or three years is exist and survive through this, that’s okay. These periods don’t last forever. The time to thrive and rediscover the world is coming.

This wasn’t where I thought I was going with this post. But here it is. On a large scale during this pandemic, we’ve all gone through this huge identity crisis, be it personal or societal. And in a time where no one really knew what to do during lockdowns and isolations and during such a time of loss and devastation, many people turned to art, both in consuming and creating. Many found the healing it can bring, as well as the ability to find soulfulness and authenticity. It has continued my own journey into finding my authenticity. Who I will be after this pandemic will look differently from who I thought I was going to be before it began.

That’s not nearly as daunting as it was back in 2017. In fact, as we’re slowly able to tread back into the world, I anticipate meeting who I’m going to be this time. More confident? More assertive in her boundaries and what she wants? More driven, more focused on her writing career? Well-versed in her identity as a writer, making it simpler to find who she is personally and as a single woman?

Hello, world. It’s been a while.

The article, for those interested (behind a paywall but what is readable is really intriguing!)

(Image by Jackson David from Pixabay)

Cover Reveal Time!!

Official cover for "Martha Holmes Mysteries" has arrived!

I couldn't be more excited. I wasn't expecting to release "Martha Holmes Mysteries" so soon but here we are, just under a month away from it's release date! It's currently available for preorder here. So, without anymore rambling, I reveal to you the official cover. I was going for a Nancy Drew vibe for this series aesthetic. It has a whole new vibe that differs greatly from "Beyond Dark" - more on that in a future post! For now, the cover, in all its glory:

Preorder now!

Private investigator Martha Holmes is falling out of love and back into her life – or so she thinks, until a decade-old missing persons case comes her way. Two teenage girls have been missing for ten years, and their families have never given up looking. Desperate, the brother of one of the girls turns to Martha, relying on her solid reputation to find some answers.

Martha isn't so sure she can carry the weight of these girls' lives and what their disappearances have done to the community, especially when she discovers there are more victims. The shambles of her marriage have left her uncertain of her capabilities and unsure of who she even is. She elicits the help of her best friend, Daisy, to ensure the community hasn't forgotten Ottawa's lost girls. Is there a chance to find them alive, still, or will Martha deliver the news she dreads most? As she sorts through leads that aren't what they seem, and as more lives are endangered, it becomes apparent this suspect hasn't forgotten the girls either – and might not let Martha get to the truth, or to them.

My Family Murder Mystery pt 2

Where to Start? Intergenerational Trauma and its Roots

A whispered story swept through three generations of my family. A whisper that swept under the rug the life of a man, his legacy and how he died. Someone wanted Frederick George Bull to be forgotten, for his name to never again to pass over someone’s tongue, never again to meet the air he used to breathe, to never again live on. That someone was his own wife.

(Image by Oberholster Venita from Pixabay )

It’s a whisper that took me back to the early 1900s when I began researching my family history about a decade ago. One that would take me on a long venture through intergenerational trauma and would make me look at the roots of my own traumas. In the psychology world, intergenerational trauma remains a relatively new field of study. Holocaust survivors have, understandably, been the most studied in this field.

According to goodtherapy.org, intergenerational trauma “is defined as trauma that gets passed down from those who directly experience an incident to subsequent generations. Intergenerational trauma may begin with a traumatic event affecting an individual, traumatic events affecting multiple family members, or collective trauma affecting larger community, cultural, racial, ethnic, or other groups/populations (historical trauma).”

Holocaust and Indigenous residential school survivors fall into this category. However, domestic violence, sexual abuse and hate crimes can also contribute to intergenerational trauma within families. Dr. Yael Danieli is a clinical psychologist, victimologist, traumatologist and the Director of The Group Project for Holocaust Survivors and Their Children. In her studies, she organized survivors and their adaptation styles into four categories.

Numb: They self-isolate, prefer silence and seek it out and have a low tolerance for stimulation. They are also minimally involved in raising their children. Basically, emotionally absent.

Victims: They fear and distrust the outside world, try to remain inconspicuous, and tend to be frequently depressed and quarrelsome.

Fighters: They have a focus on succeeding at all costs, keeping up an armour of strength, and don’t acknowledge weakness or self-pity. I’ll go ahead and insert hyper-independence into this category as well.

Those Who Made It: They feel a need to pursue socio-economic success and distance themselves from the trauma – both their own and that of other survivors.

When parents experience trauma of their own, either in childhood or as adults, that trauma can manifest into their parenting styles. Therefore, a Fighter parent may create hyper-independent children who also don’t know how to ask for help and live in a state of great anxiety and fear of failing or being seen as vulnerable and over-reliant on others. A Numb parent might be emotionally unavailable and unintentionally teach their kids that processing and showing emotions is bad. A Victim parent could make their kids paranoid of the world and keep them oversheltered. Those Who Made It could prioritize career and financial success over family because it is what distances themselves from the trauma.

What survival mechanisms a parent learns while in the chaos of trauma, and never overwrite with new tactics of behaviour, becomes a blueprint of life for their kids.

Therapy is a way of rewiring the brain to adjust from survival mode to thriving mode, to learn how to engage and reconnect with world once more, to find healthy ways of coping with the trauma instead of living forever in survival mode. I can say from experience that the rewiring process can take years. But it was worth it once it was unravelled and I could see the trauma for what it was – and how far back it goes.

I looked at Frederick’s death and saw where the trauma began trickling through bloodlines. One little lie became the foundation on which familial ties would be frayed and destroyed. When my great-grandmother, Theresa, told her kids that their father shot himself on a ship in 1923, she exposed her chldren to something they never should have been: both the loss of a parent, and the concept of suicide, especially at a time when it was so frowned upon and deemed sinful. Mental illness, if Frederick suffered from it at all, and suicide, were not things taken seriously back in the 1920s. Frederick had already done time in the military, so it’s possible he already had PTSD. The shame of their father’s supposed suicide would have proved an effective way of keeping her kids silenced. Suppressing such a trauma would impact each of the four kids differently.

Dr. Gayani DeSilva, child and adolescent psychiatrist and author, listed off the symptoms of intergenerational trauma for a Health.com article:

hypervigilance, a sense of a shortened future, mistrust, aloofness, high anxiety and depression, panic attacks and nightmares, a sensitive fight or flight response, issues with self-esteem and self-confidence.

Passing down the impact of trauma means the trauma has the potential to be repeated in newer generations. Domestic violence and child abuse are notorious cycles for this. And such a trauma isn’t something mere records can tell the story about. It’s something I’ll need to reach out to other family members and potentially dig into some painful memories, if they’ll allow me to.

So, where did this start? Knowing all of this, having done all this reading on intergenerational trauma, what was the inciting event for Frederick’s murder and what prompted Theresa to feel the urge to kill her husband? Did she have help? And did another mysterious death a year or two later tie into it all?

Come along. There’s much to unpack, still much I don’t know, and more questions than answers – but I’ll find answers.

Sources

Intergenerational Trauma, Good Therapy: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/Understanding_Intergenerational_Trauma

Genetic vulnerabilities: https://www.goodtherapy.org/blog/some-children-may-be-genetically-predisposed-to-victimization-0906131

Health.com: https://www.health.com/condition/ptsd/generational-trauma

My Family Murder Mystery

A journey into the past to find the truth and shatter generational trauma

Not everyone jumps into ancestry research trying to solve a murder almost a century old.

Somehow, it’s what I found myself doing off and on for the last decade. Mental illness, trauma, addiction and even violence have all had stirrings and detonations within my family. When I first read somewhere that trauma is often generational, I had no idea how far back it would really go. I study serial killers and their psychology out of some morbid fascination, but nothing can prepare you for the complete obsession that engulfs you when it’s so close to home. When lies and deceit and decades of unfounded stories weigh heavy from one generation to another, only for that house of cards to crumble with one death certificate.

In this case, documents are all I have. None of the people involved or who may know are alive. Nor did they pass down anything more than rumours and speculation, the truth perhaps withheld for eternity. But those documents point to something I am almost convinced of:

My great-grandmother murdered, or was complicit in the murder of, my great-grandfather.

Silence is powerful. In this case, it means little remains of this story outside of official records and a lie. My great-grandmother, Theresa Agnes Semken, told her kids and let them believe that their father, Frederick George Bull, shot himself on a ship, committing suicide. His death certificate which I ordered offers a different story, as does his probate and will record.

His death certificate states that his cause of death was “drowning, with no way of knowing how his body got in the water PM (post-mortem)”, and that his body was found floating off King George V dock. No mention of gunshot wounds. His probate and will record state that he was last seen alive on June 8, 1923, then found dead on June 19, 1923. I have found no newspaper reports, no missing persons reports, nothing to indicate Theresa reported his disappearance within those two weeks. And then the story that circulated within the family about him shooting himself, which started with Theresa.

Sex/Love. Money. Revenge. The trio of murder motives. So which was it? What would drive a woman with four children and a decent life to get rid of her husband? How did she do it? How complicit was she? Why did she lie to her kids? Did any of them know their entire family lived a lie? Was her second marriage simply a sign of the era in which she lived, or a sign of something more sinister?

Come along as I share details of the family murder mystery over which I’ve obsessed for many years. I'll share the documents, triumphs and setbacks, and what I know so far. I try to answer the questions above in my ongoing quest to uncover the truth for Frederick, and his kids who have all since passed on, never knowing.