"Nazi mom" wants to set a few things straight.
She thinks Mein Kampf is garbage. She didn't teach her daughter to kill minorities. And she's certainly not a Nazi.
"I'm not one of these idiots going down the street saying, 'Kill all the Jews,' " she says, sipping a Starbucks coffee in The Globe and Mail's Winnipeg office, a day after a judge awarded Child and Family Services permanent custody of her two children. "I'm preaching pride, white pride, not hate."
For nearly two years, she has been the target of bloggers and editorialists, lawyers and social workers, all picking apart the lifestyle and worldview of a woman who sent her seven-year-old daughter to school festooned with a swastika and white supremacist slogans. She's lost everything since then: her two kids, jobs, friends, family - everything except a stubborn adherence to her belief in the supremacy of the white race.
"I'm reforming my life - moving back home, working hard, getting an apartment - but I won't deny what I stand for, even if it made all this go away."
Dressed in a conservative black V-neck top and blue jeans, she pushes her auburn hair away from her green eyes as she explains how she arrived at her race-dominated outlook on life and how she plans to get her kids back.
In her early teens, she joined the army cadets and fell in with a large skinhead contingent.
"I learned from them what kind of immigration policies we have," says the mother in her late 20s who cannot be named to protect the identities of her children. "I mean we're bringing in people from Haiti now. They still practise cannibalism there. Do we want that here?"
Her stance on race stems from her understanding of evolution. The way she sees it, all races began in Africa, and while Asians and Caucasians adapted and thrived, other races floundered. "Africans, they really haven't evolved much," she says. "The blacks that we have here - and I'm going to use the wrong words here - we domesticated them. We made them who they are. Otherwise they would still be eating each other and killing each other. ... It's not racism, it's racialism. There's a difference."
She had her first child at 18 with a much older man she worked for. Her parents beseeched her to have an abortion but she refused, prompting them to kick her out of the family home. She moved in with the girl's father but soon moved on, eventually marrying a man closer to her own age who was prominent in Winnipeg's skinhead scene.
Family and friends questioned the marriage, but she ignored them. The couple moved to a number of homes in southern Manitoba, but, contrary to testimony from family and social workers, they never lived in squalor, she says.
"When they say we lived like pigs, it was all hearsay," she says. "The testimony was wild. They said we would shoot birds and feed live animals to feed our dog - that never happened. They say we showed our kids violent racist videos - it was the History Channel. They said we had neo-Nazi flags all over our house - we just had a couple of White Pride posters on the fridge.... All this shit destroyed my life and none of it was true. They just wanted 'Nazi mom' starving in the streets."
But there's one truth she can't deny. When the case began last year, she fled to another province, leaving her husband - the two are now separated - to argue for custody alone. In the custody decision released last Thursday, Justice Marianne Rivoalen wrote that the mother "essentially abandoned her children" and chastised her for what she called a "narcissistic quest for media attention" that "demonstrated a puerile disregard for whether her actions conflicted with her children's best interests."
With eyeliner streaming down her cheeks, the mother insists that she would never abandon her children, that she simply moved to a province where she felt child services would not judge her lifestyle. "I wanted to have the case transferred away from Manitoba so I could get my kids back," she says.
She now admits it was a misguided move. During her time away, she allegedly stole and maxed out her mother's credit card and now faces fraud charges.
In the week since she's returned to Winnipeg, she's secured two jobs and a decent apartment. A year from now she can apply for custody of her daughter and son, whom she hasn't seen in a year.
"Child and Family Services is finally helping me," she says. "I'm doing everything they want me to do. We will need a lot of family counselling. A lot."
