| | |  Editorials | Issues | December 2008 
Brenda Martin: Happy to Be Home, but Still Trying to Move On
 Joanna Smith - Toronto Star
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| | Brenda Martin has found a new apartment since returning to Trenton, but she is still looking for a job. (Steve Russell/Toronto Star) | |
Almost eight months after Brenda Martin was freed from a Mexican prison, flying home on a chartered jet amid a flurry of headlines, the 52-year-old still struggles to talk about her ordeal.
"I probably should talk about it more, but I just feel people have probably heard enough about it," she says from her one-bedroom apartment in Trenton, her new cat nudging her for a scratch.
"It's kind of hard to relive it."
Her 70-year-old mother, who lives a short walk away and calls her once or twice a day, filled a large, plastic bin with the newspaper clippings about the "two years, two months and 22 days" Brenda spent in a Guadalajara prison, followed by her high-profile return to Canada.
Martin was arrested in February 2006 in connection with a $60 million investment scheme masterminded by former Edmontonian Alyn Waage, for whom she worked briefly as a cook in his Puerto Vallarta mansion.
A Mexican judge found her guilty of knowingly accepting illicit funds and sentenced her to five years without parole. But the Canadian government brought her home in early May as part of a prisoner transfer treaty between the two countries. She was released from prison about a week later.
Martin says she has read most of the clippings and sometimes watches taped television spots about her when she feels down – cheered by how far she has come from the gaunt-faced image she was.
"Sometimes when I'm not feeling very well, (when) I'm feeling a little gloomy and doomy, I put those on just to make myself feel better, actually. And it does make me feel better, just to see where I am now."
She has put on 35 pounds since leaving prison – getting her up to 125 – and rekindled a romance with an old boyfriend she first met in Trenton when she was a teenager.
She enjoys her new apartment, which is furnished with yard-sale finds and gifts from friends and family, and is happy to be home.
But she is still looking for a job and spent the summer battling depression.
"I stayed in my room a lot," she says of living with her mother. She cancelled plans to move to Kitchener to be with her childhood friend Debra Tieleman, who advocated tirelessly for her release from prison.
"I was suffering from depression, just things like that. I was looking for a job (and that) was really hard. I felt like the doors were getting closed on me quite a bit."
She started working at a call centre last month, handling customer queries about their Internet bills, but soon quit on the advice of her psychologist.
"It was people with big beefs and it was people yelling and screaming and calling you names. Telling you to do something, fix something and so it was just really hard on me."
She said there are a couple of job possibilities in bars, but nothing solid.
She is feeling better now and has decided to stay on medication to stabilize her mood.
But, after a decade in Mexico, she finds the cold weather challenging.
"I think it's the winter that sort of gives me the blues. It's my first winter in a long time, you know, and it's a small town. There's not really much to do," she says.
A neighbour who looked after her apartment in Puerto Vallarta while she was in jail calls her every Sunday. "He tells me about the wonderful weather and I tell him to shut up," she says, laughing.
Her mother, Marjorie Bletcher, wishes Martin would laugh more often.
"I'd just like to see more joy – more joy in her," Bletcher says with a sigh, over the telephone.
She also worries about her daughter burying memories, although she was horrified by the one Brenda did share.
"She was feeding the cats at the prison and she was collecting all the scraps from all the meals before it would go into the garbage," she says.
"But then the warden found out and – I could just kill her for doing it – she killed the baby kittens in front of her, stamped on them with her big spiked shoes ... So, I don't know how many more things (she endured) but that's one thing I did get out of her. When I start talking about it she just doesn't want to talk about it."
Martin tells the same story without prompting. She calls the incident "psychological warfare."
Martin says the worst thing is being labelled a criminal.
"It's kind of sad to know I'm on parole and I'm a convicted felon ... I'm not allowed to go anywhere unless I have permission," says the former world traveller.
"It's hard to know that I'm going to be on parole until 2011 ... I didn't have a really big life in Mexico as far as grandiose or making a lot of money or anything like that, but it was my life. It was a simple life and it's hard to have that taken away from you and have to start all over again." |
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