Visible: I see you Renate Boerner

At 57 years young, soft-spoken Renate Boerner is a picture of elegance as she shares difficult stories of her marriage, divorce and coping with the loss of her children’s father, who battled mental illness for many years.

Originally from Vancouver, Renate moved to Hong Kong at 23 as a journalist. She married her husband in 2000 and had two daughters, now 18 and 16. He unfortunately began to suffer from clinical depression, which deepened over their 12-year marriage. “Mental illness is so cruel. He was one person when we met, then gradually became a very different person. In the end, it was like living with a ghost, you can see their shell, but it’s not the person you married. It’s a horrific disease,” she says.

They sought professional help, together and apart, but the home environment became increasingly more difficult as his illness worsened. Renate recalls, “He was sometimes a very angry, scary person. I was constantly worried about what would set him off. I kept hoping he would get better, but he didn’t.” One day Renate arrived home and could feel seething anger. When she walked into the girls’ room, she could see her daughters (then ages 6 and 8) were terrified. He left and their eldest burst into tears. Renate walked down the stairs and said to him, “That’s enough; I’m not doing this anymore.”

Renate had a wake-up call: “I wasn’t modelling the kind of behaviours I wanted my daughters to learn. They deserve to be treated appropriately and respectfully. We were taught the nuclear family should be this 1950s, white-picket-fence kind of thing. It doesn’t always work like that. I had to ask myself, what is the impact of staying on the kids?” Describing the difficulty of divorce, she says, “As a mother, you spend so much time worrying about the kids. You need to be able to take care of them, so you may not have the space to think about what you want to be, what you want to do when you get through the tunnel. Sometimes you are in shock and pain, incredibly concerned about what the future will bring, and always your kids. My advice to others is that you will get to yourself; eventually it will be time for you.”

Post-divorce, her ex-husband’s mental health continued to decline. Eventually, he returned to his home country of Australia and lost the battle, taking his own life in 2019. Renate recalls, “the grieving process started a long time before his death. I kept hoping he would come back from the illness and have a relationship with his kids. That was another huge loss for all of us, the loss of dreams, of possibilities.”

Renate sought various forms of therapy for the kids since the separation – play therapy, art therapy, talk therapy – and continued to utilise counselling for all of them to cope with his death. That support, along with her friends, colleagues and her beloved helper, gave Renate the tenacity to help the girls through their grief. “Now that my kids are older, they understand their father was unwell, and they appreciate how we came together. In going through that, you model strength and resilience – ‘this isn’t going to beat me, and I’m going to get back on my own two feet’.”

Life as a single mother hasn’t been without challenges, but Renate was determined to make a safe, soothing, loving home for her and the girls. “You just get through it; you find a way. We moved to smaller and smaller places, and we made it work.” Renate laughs, “Most importantly, I managed to keep our helper with us.” Renate used her creativity and moxy. In one flat, the girls’ bedroom was so small it just fit an L-shaped bunk. Renate divided her bigger bedroom with IKEA wardrobes and used them to a build a wall with her helper. “It wasn’t perfect, but it gave us the storage space we needed. I wanted our home to be a cozy place where we could relax. That was important.”

Renate began working on her Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing in 2019 and is now writing a novel as part of her thesis. “At first, I wondered, am I too old to do this? But I thought, my dad is 89, what am I going to do for the next 30 years?” And above all she aims to be a continuous source of inspiration and motivation for her daughters. What inspires her? “Survivors, the people who wake up and get out of bed every day – even when that seems impossible. They get through that day, and then they do it again. When you are lying in that bed it’s hard to imagine a brighter day, to imagine the weight will lift, but it will, it does. Trust that you are enough, for yourself and your children. Trust that you will see yourself.”

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