wildcat

It's been a long weekend. It isn't over yet but it's been a long weekend.

The sky broke on Good Friday, or it mended itself, but: sunlight poured down, the air grew hot and listless, I noticed the pollen for the first time all year (only distantly, though), and I saw my mother. I walked over to the Grandparents' house and picked her up, we dropped the car off over where the Oak Bay People have seen fit to fence in an area of "natural plant growth" and then walked around Beach Drive in the heat.

Then we had to go to a meeting. Well, Mum had to go to a meeting, and she figured I should go to the meeting so I could see what's involved and understand what she's experiencing in the Alcoholics Anonymous program. She had to go to the meeting because this the very first trip she's made down to Victoria since going into the program, the very first time she's been around my grandparents while she's been sober. And the standard method of dealing with the grandparents has always been drinking, drinking, drinking. My grandmother is an alcoholic as well, "raging," as Mum says, and even if you ignore that she's a frustrating mass of destructive insecurities focused outward on all those around her. She hates women, she hates men, she gets caught up in her little control dramas and psychological gambits. It's all rather exhausting.

Naturally, my mother is staying with my grandparents and not drinking and watching my grandmother drink and my grandfather shout things at my grandmother and the house is (always) dirty and she's not in her own bed and she can't remember where anything is in Victoria anymore. She's stressed, she had to go to a meeting.

Admittedly, I was edgy about coming with her. I'm neurotic and tend to feel awkward about new social situations and of course our parents reduce us to disgruntled adolescents no matter how old we get. But we pulled into the church parking lot and I got out of the car with her. There were people milling about at a back door.

I can't rightly say what I expected.

The room was one of those old church meeting rooms, closed off from the majority of the building with plywood floors and it had clearly been converted, an old store room, with dusty windows and school chairs all around the walls. Someone had set up a couple big tables in the middle and the Twelve Steps were on a big piece of cardboard up at the front. The lettering was a little small so I didn't get a proper look at them, what with my eyes and the dim.

There were several large, wooden crosses leaning against the walls, unfinished-looking with obvious nails sticking out, holding them together.

They were very big on introducing themselves to us, engaging us, although I remained relatively impassive because you never quite get over being a shy six-year-old and I was uncomfortable, even if I can't articulate all the exact reasons for this, but I sat down beside Mum and the meeting started and people were called upon to talk. Faith in various things was brought up quite often. It was hot. Mum talked for a while, about dealing with her parents while she down in Victoria, about the drinking and the not drinking and how things were. She talked about being dragged down by negativity and dark thoughts and having to work out how to get away from them. Other people talked. They asked me if I'd like to speak but I declined, preferring to play the observer. It's dumb, the clichés that sprout, about the diversity of the people at the meeting, and you'd never expect, and all of that. But there were those who didn't want to speak and tried to hide but spoke anyway, and they were funny.

There were some people who spoke about alcohol like it was a demon and there were those who spoke about their alcoholism as something within themselves, and the drink was inert, a receptacle for disaster, which felt more honest to me.

Things finished up and we went around to a bistro on Oak Bay Avenue for lunch, which was a salad with avocado, papaya, and prawns. Sweet dressing, glasses of iced tea. We talked about the meeting and the religious undercurrents, her use of "God" as shorthand for talking about nature, how the program emphasized personal choice in higher power, even if that gets muddled in the religious climate of Oak Bay, and we talked about the grandparents so more, and I'm almost done, I think, with talking about the grandparents. I don't want to talk about them anymore. I'm tired of talking about them.

The rest of the day was a typical visit with Mum; the complaining and frustration and shopping -- shopping with the same attitude I had when I was ten -- and I ended up with two pairs of new shoes and she'd brought a couple books down with her for me, and my dad had sent down a fake, hollowed out book with her, so of course I can hide things when the horrible Fascists come to break my windows with rocks and climb inside to cuff me. We picked up Michael and ended up on the patio at my aunt's house, then at Don Mee's for dinner. The three of us went our way from the family and drove around in the dark, walked up and down the breakwater, then went home.