It’s 6pm and I am sitting at the top of the staircase as my baby brother hangs in his jumper off my bedroom door frame. I look to my right, straight into my parents bedroom, where there is an exercise bike. The pedal of the exercise bike spins around once. I panic; I spring to my feet and race down the stairs leaving my baby brother to be victim of whatever evil entity is messing with my parent's bike–or my mind–as I run to the garage where my mother and her husband are hiding as they smoke their cigarettes; it’s the same garage filled with the same nicotine that recently killed my pet mouse Pepsi–I suspect cancer–at least that is the sense my child brain can make of it.

“When are you coming inside?!” I wail. 
“Soon, we’ll be right there” mom utters back.

I go back inside and sit at the top of the stairs, rocking my knees back and forth, filled with the same sense of urgency, the same panic and anxiety that would coarse through every permeable cell inside my body for the next 25 years or so until I became 28 and powerless to the magnitude of the gravity of within. Under the guise of healing boasting gratitude, love, intent, mindfulness, safety and whatever else new-agey optimism turned marketing buzzword you can think of and their allure that flirts with every traumatized person standing on the outside, I would begin to tell this story.

*
She is sitting to the right of me in the passenger seat. She is talking all sorts of trash; “I’ve been sober now for two weeks Carli, honest to god, not a single drop of booze,"–like booze is the real issue nowadays–like I am still the five-year-old child back in our Cloverdale townhouse when booze really was the issue.

She places her elbow on her thigh and rests her right cheek upon her palm: “So what are you doing nowadays anyways, are you seeing any men, having any babies? No…” she cackles furiously, “no I’m just kidding I know you’re not having any babies but you know Carli you’re not getting any younger and I want to be a grandma living in the house you’re to buy for me with a pool on the second floor and a maid.” This was something we always joked about growing up as a kid; one day I was going to be rich and I was going to buy her a house with a pool on the second floor and she’d have a live-in maid. How original. I always trailed off in thought about the pool on the second floor... Can you have a pool on the second floor? How thick does that floor need to be then? I suppose if the house has a basement, the main floor counts as the second floor, right?

Now she’s telling me about her dog.

“Ping pong is so smart, you know they’re one of the smartest dog breeds. They can walk tightrope. He bit Susan the other day, which is alright because that bitch deserved it anyway. He bit Bill too, but that’s alright he was pissing me off. He also bit Hans, that son of’a bitch– that’ll teach him. Hans and I are through anyways, I told him I don’t want him coming around anymore. I can’t handle him anymore, he’s too needy. I told him to get lost, anyway I’m staying sober now.” 

Honestly I don’t think she has taken a single breath yet. I just sit, and I am frozen, and I am listening but I am also not. My head is fragmented at best; listening to everything she is saying but also providing my own commentary to myself while she speaks; “I don’t care about your dog, I’m sure you’re sober, and Hans isn’t coming around anymore– last month’s monologue again.” It’s like this meter; when she goes off on these rants of declaration it is an immediately verifiable test that my mom still isn’t my mom. She’s projecting some figure she thinks I want her to be. And of course I want her to be sober, she isn’t wrong. But all I’ve ever needed from her was the truth, but she’s so far removed from any sort of legitimate reality in her head that she has no idea what the truth is. To her, truth is what she wants it to be; the truth is in the story, not in the moment to moment decisions she makes for herself. Sure she couldn’t withstand the beckoning to use, but god dammit she wanted to. She really wanted to, so she’s sober by all accounts to her–that’s her truth.

That is the nice way of looking at it anyway. I think closer to the reality of it all, the truth is whatever she needs it to be. If she is sober she earns more of our trust than if she is still an addict. 

*

It wasn’t until years later that I really learned that ‘sober’ was just a shirt to be worn–in fact the drugs themselves were just a blanket keeping something else safe and warm. I think of it like that Russian doll set, where there is one little doll inside of a bigger doll, inside of a bigger doll, and then on.

When I was about 22 or 23 my mother started calling me weekly, during a time when I heard from her every couple of months or so. She had intentions with these phone calls; she’d ring me up to tell me how she misses me, misses being a mom, and wants to go back to ‘normal’ life. She was ready to be sober, but she couldn’t do it alone. Not for emotional support, but operationally; she didn’t have a safe way to get around, she didn’t have a computer or resources to figure out where to go. I didn’t take her word on it, as I hardly ever listened to a word she said. For about two months I just shrugged her off saying, “I’ll look into it,” waiting for her to disappear into the folds of this world where she would ‘be out there’ instead of ‘in here’. But nonetheless she kept calling. 

I’ve always bought magazines from Megaphone Magazine vendors here in Vancouver when I come across vendors on the street. It doesn’t matter if I’ve already bought that week’s issue–if I come across somebody selling, and I have a toonie, I buy the magazine. I was reading an issue around the same time mother was calling, and came across a feature on a place over on Vancouver Island called ‘Woodwynn Farms.’ It was a retreat, a program, a collective, or whatever it is you want to call it for homeless and drug addicted peoples who want to get clean and need a safe place to do so. It didn’t have an entrance fee, instead the payment was following the program rules. These people would have a bed to sleep in, meals to eat, in exchange for a daily schedule: rising at 5am, having a communal breakfast, participating in group yoga, working on the farm, having family lunch, participating in more farm work, group therapy, and then the rest of the night was for private time. To me, it seemed right. I proposed it to mom, and she was desperate, “whatever it is, I just want out.” 

So we started the process. I picked her up my next day off, as I was working at a law firm in Vancouver full-time back then. When I picked her up, she was gassed, limp, lifeless. All she could do was walk to my car, and lay in my passenger seat sleeping. I remember we stopped at Triple O’s for food, and this frail and starving woman–who likely hadn’t eaten for three days–couldn’t even wake up to eat some food. In any case, we were on the ferry and she slept the whole way there. We got off the ferry and arrived at the farm, and she could hardly wake. The counselor had to come and interview my mother from the cardoor of the passenger seat. My mother just laid there, answered her questions in whatever way answered the questions with the least amount of words. They told me she needed to complete a round of detox, and once she was done she would be picked up from the centre and transported straight to the farm so they could ensure her being clean and through the withdrawal process. It all made sense to me. 

I was tired and stressed, but I watched as my mom completed one step after the next. I felt some sense of hope, but at the same time utter despair and futility. Everyone in my life was checking in, but reminding me not to get too invested. My father, my step dad, they have all been there before with her. My father had witnessed my mother through detox many times, my step dad even more than that throughout their 10-year marriage. In fact, not only had my step father seen my mother through detox, but a number of different rehab programs that never worked. He was there while she went through therapy, self-help retreats, rehab, AlAnon, detox, medication; they tried to do the work but it just never amounted to much. They knew this time wouldn’t be different, but I had never witnessed the process for myself. And so, I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. 

I took her back home to Brookswood that day, and arranged for her bed in the detox centre of Victoria. When it came time, I took her there. When it was time to pick her up, she had a lot more energy than the time before. Likely, the reality was she wasn’t right in the thick of coming down from a bender, but instead, in the middle of a bender. She was up, instead of down. I picked her up from her house, and we were off to the ferry once again. After 20 minutes of driving, she begged me to let her use my phone so she could call her dealer for one last indulgence. I pressed my back straight up against my car seat, charged with a desire to fight her on this. She pleaded, saying it was her last goodbye, the grand finale, she just needed to part ways with it. There’s always a little part of me that relates to another’s suffering, and I did relate to hers. I caved under the pressure of desperation, and she made the call. We made an agreement on where to meet, and we drove there; it was along our route to the ferry. By the time we arrived, he was already there. We parked and I gave my mother $20. She got out of the car and got into his. She was there for a few minutes, and then came back to my car; frantic, scattered, hyperactive, but more or less coherent. And so back on route we went.

We eventually made it to the detox centre, though it really felt like we would never make it. When I pulled into the parking lot outside the tall, bleak, clinically white building, my heart sank. I had so much empathy and love for this woman, and in a way, felt I was responsible for locking her up in some sort of prison. I felt awful. In any case, she got out of the car, and made her way in. I sat in my car, and I cried. Through my sobbing, I told her that I loved her, but she was already long gone. In some ways, I’ve always talked aloud in an attempt to speak with those in whom I couldn’t actually speak with. My vulnerability with my mother wasn’t between my mother and I, it was between me and myself. 

I made my way back home, and I figured I had made it through; there was a sense of relief, my part in this story was over. Mother just had to keep walking the line that had been drawn out for her. A few days later I received a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize and I answered. It was my mother’s voice on the other end. As soon as I heard the frequencies of my mom, my stomach just sank through the ground. It wasn’t right; I don’t know much about these situations but my sense was that a patient going through detox should not have contact with the outside world. I was angry–why were they letting her contact the outside world when her only work, her only focus, was there? 

She sounded great. She was peppy, optimistic, happy even. I thought, why does she sound so good? She told me that the withdrawal really wasn’t bad. She told me she was astonished, it was easy being in there, being sober. We talked for a little while, and then she left. She then called me again the next day. She told me the nurses were telling her that she was doing so well she could leave early, and that she didn’t need to be there taking up a bed. I wanted to vomit; I tried to fight her yet again. Anybody who’s been in an abusive relationship, knows how much power an abuser can hold. I fought with her, but at the same time I had no power. It was like I was in battle with a plastic sword.

This is where I start to see the victim that lives inside of me show itself. Many times have I felt this way in life; in some ways that’s what my entire childhood feels like when I look back. The child inside of me feels as if she’s just fighting a battle she doesn’t want to be fighting. Ambushed, with little defense. What does she know about defense? She doesn’t want to be defensive about anything, she just wants to love her parents and have her parents love her back. She just wants to go to bed at night and wake up in the morning to her mother in bed with her step father, sleeping like two content and normal people. They open their eyes and they’re alright just being there–they can handle the day ahead without falling off the cliff into a lake of intoxication to once again drown in. She doesn’t want to have to take the keys and hide them, to be yelled at for trying to protect the only love that she knows. She wants to be loved for her love, because she does, she loves them but she’s never given a chance. The same way that she loved all the people after her parents that fucked her around too, but now she’s learning that’s just what life is I guess.

She told me if I wouldn’t come and get her, then she’d call Hans–her then boyfriend–to come and pick her up. I felt helpless, panicked. I thought I could at least try to manage the situation if she was with me rather than with him. The stupidity of it now just curls my insides, I was such a strong girl and yet I had no power. I was so smart, and yet my intelligence was a futile defense. My fear told me I had to be the one to pick her up or it was all over. I didn’t entertain the idea that it was already all over. I went into this whole situation with the commitment that I was giving it my all anyways. So I went and I picked her up.

I had rules though you see: she was to be staying with me until it was time to drop her off at the program. I couldn’t go straight from the detox centre to the farm then because they weren’t ready for her. I remember calling Carmel, our counsellor at Woodwynn, and she told me they wouldn’t admit her because she didn’t fully complete detox. I played mediator. I told her that my mother was still committed and that she would be staying with me, she wasn’t out to use. Somehow, I managed to convince them to keep her spot. In hindsight, by no means do I believe they did this because they believed in her, or even their empathy for her, but instead their empathy for me. 

And so I brought my mother back to my place, in my little one bed Victorian apartment in New Westminster. She was all sorts of wretched. She called her boyfriend to come and see her. I fought with him. I let her go outside to meet him on the steps of my apartment, but threatened that if she left there would be no returning. I tried to get her to sleep in my room, where we were to sleep in the same bed. She couldn’t sleep, she needed to get outside. I wouldn’t let her. She fought with me, yelled at me, tried to get up and run for the door. I got up and blocked her attempt to leave. I stood in front of the door, barricading it and weeping. I used everything I had, and it just wasn’t working. If you’ve ever done cross-country it was the same sort of feeling where you’re impaling your legs into the ground to gain power for speed, but no matter how hard you try, you have a maximum that you just can’t beat.

We had only two or three hours of sleep that night. I eventually gave up, and had my mother return to Brookswood with her partner. 

I couldn’t be at work, I’d step into my boss' office and cry. There was nothing on my mind other than her recovery. In the beginning it wasn’t I who believed in this recovery, it was her persistence that I was playing some sort of medium for. In the end, it was I who was persistent about the recovery, and she who wanted no part in it. 

To some, it’s a familiar story–in the beginning, you still had yourself, your boundaries, your distance, but then you get jerked around in brownian motion and you’re on the other side somehow, logically unable to make any sense of it. You’re fighting for something that you never believed in. You’re fighting for something that isn’t yours. What is it that turns us into hypnotized warriors?