Margaret (publicly she goes by the name Margaret Trudeau and privately she uses Margaret Kemper, although she is divorced from second husband, Fried Kemper) usually shies away from talking about her own descent into madness and her recovery, but on this afternoon, she has chosen to talk openly. She knows that her children, especially Justin and Sacha, won’t be happy she’s revealing private details. Like their late father, Pierre, her sons value privacy highly.
“They don’t like me to talk about me, but I like to talk about mental health issues because I think I can make a difference,” she says. “It’s important to give back to your community – that’s just the way Pierre raised us.” The way Pierre raised us?
She stops, suddenly realizing what she has said, and laughs. “I guess I shouldn’t include myself with the children, but I feel he did raise me. I was so young.”
Before Margaret met Pierre, she had already had her first bipolar episode – a depression that caused her to take off an entire semester from her literature studies at Simon Fraser University near her Vancouver home. “I didn’t get help or treatment for it, and I wasn’t diagnosed,” she says. Family and friends thought she was simply obsessive and finicky. She came out of that depression on her own. A few years later, when she married Pierre, she thought her “blues” were over. “Pierre was so wonderful, and we were so in love. My marriage to Pierre, when it was happy, was the love of my life. It was exquisite. It was the disease that turned our marriage into a sad place,” she says.
Margaret began spiralling downward once again when, as a bright, energetic 22-year-old, she was forced into the position of having absolutely nothing to do. She’s always loved domestic chores (in fact, today she has baked a delicious lemon bundt cake, which she serves on elegant china) and she’s especially passionate about ironing. But when she was the prime minister’s wife, the many servants prevented her from doing even the smallest task. She says, “I didn’t get to do any of the things that normal people do to give them a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment – the details of daily living. I was just supposed to sit there, and it just made me so empty.”
Since she wasn’t allowed to keep house, Margaret wanted to go to graduate school, get a job or do volunteer work. Pierre, who was 51 when they married, said no. “He kept me very private,” she says. “The thing that I regret is Pierre didn’t want me to get involved with anything. When I first became the prime minister’s wife I was just inundated with requests to do this charity or that one, and he had me say no to all of them. He didn’t want me to take on a public role. He wanted me to be a young mother and a good wife. At one point, I wanted to go back to university and do a master’s in child psychology – there’s a very good school at the University of Ottawa, and I had been accepted – and he wouldn’t allow me to do it. I think it’s because he was jealous that I would be with younger people. He was extremely jealous.”
