Submit an Academic Petition or Appeal

Petition Letter: Dear Associate Dean (Studies),

I am writing this letter to appeal the Faculty's decision that I must withdraw from my studies at Queen's University for a minimum of one year.

My parents have had an abusive relationship, which, at more times than one was taken out on me and my siblings. Last year, my youngest brother and mother were forced to leave our home. The first few weeks after finding out the news I did not tell anyone, I started by calling my mother. She was weak, stressed, exhausted, terrified, everything that I was feeling at this point. A conversation that had started as me trying to figure out what was going on turned into my mother attacking my father; the same is what happened when I called my father. Before long, I had become the middle man, and was the main form of communication between my mother and father. Soon enough, one phone call a week turned into one or two phone calls a day. My life was being engulfed by my parents' rants, and it was taking a huge toll on me, in all aspects. I felt as though I had become the parent, and my parents had become the children. It was a struggle to get out of bed in the morning, I did not want to go to class, when I sat down to do assignments my mind would wander off to what was going on in my family, I did not want to leave the house. I would not go to hang out with friends. I could not fall asleep at night, and once I did I would wake up periodically within the night; I could not get a good nights rest. My eating habits were also affected, I started skipping meals, some days I would not eat at all, I had little motivation left to do anything. People around me started to notice that something wasn't right, and eventually I told my housemates and friends what had been going on. After which I went in regularly for the remainder of the semester, and into the summer to talk to a counsellor at HCDS. I also started to journal, and tried out mindfulness breathing to calm myself down, things seemed to be improving, until the next phone call I had with my mother, in which she informed me that she was going to be having a major, cancer related surgery, and that she, and my brother were going back to live with my father. I was now, not only angry, but confused, frustrated, disappointed, and frightened, my mind was racing all over the place. I had been planning on staying in Kingston for the summer, to relieve some of the stress that I had been carrying around, but hearing this news, I was on a flight back home. The whole summer I was living in my own home in fear. I was scared of my father as he turns to alcohol when he is stressed, I was scared for my mother, multiple blood clots had formed in her lungs post-surgery, and she was put on bed rest for 3 months. Every other day there would be an argument, in my home, I had no place to go and would spend nights crying to myself in my room. I felt as though I had become the mother, but I tried to help out as much as I could before I left home once again. This year I had decided that I would try out chemistry, it was a new program, I knew no one in my classes, and it was quite the adjustment. Not soon after starting classes did I found myself being made the middle man in my parents relationship again. It was all becoming too much for me to handle, trying to balance a healthy lifestyle, a new program, and my family, I could feel myself slipping once again. My head was being filled with my parents bickering about each other, my siblings wanting to take no part in their arguments, I was left to try and mediate it on my own once more. I would spend hours listening to them rant about each other, I was being guilted into listening to every phone call, every message, every argument. I contacted HCDS and regularly went in for counselling appointments again, I tried to stop answering phone calls and focus on myself and my studies, but I could not leave my family to fall apart. This carried on throughout the entire year, by the end, it had become I who would be calling home to ask how everything was, was there any argument that I should know about, had my father been civil, did he lessen his alcohol consumption. These became daily questions that I would ask myself and put before everything else because I did not want my family to fall apart.

Best regards,
Jessica Deol
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