Drunk Mom (20 page)

The next day, in the first women’s group meeting, called “Grief and Loss,” I find out that I am dissociated.

Dissociated.

It rings true but so what? So what that now I know what it is that I am?

The group facilitator says to give myself some time, see what else comes out.

After the meeting is over, I think about following her. I want to tell her that the other thing that might come out is a flood of love and happiness, what I felt when my son was born, and that it’ll sweep me away; it’s so much bigger than me. And I can’t take it. And, at home, I have to drink to calm it down.

I don’t say anything like that to her, partly because I can just imagine her getting all hot and wet over my poetic language. Everything in here sounds like poetry, or rather, sentiment. Everyone—counsellors and some clients—uses words and phrases like
stay in the present, enjoy the journey, non-judgmental, believe, miracles, hope, serenity
.

“Believe in miracles, hope and serenity.”

The group meetings themselves carry combination names. Besides “Grief and Loss,” there’s “Wellness and Spirit,” “Feelings and Triggers,”
“Refusal Role Play (Clients practise refusing offers of substance in high-risk situations),” “Anti-Boredom (Activities for combating boredom while in treatment and recovery).” Crap like that.

I know some of these words and phrases from before—both from AA meetings and my harm reduction group. They puzzle and irritate me just the same. I’m not the only one.

At lunch the next day, one of the guys comes up to me and says, How was your “Grief and Loss”? and we both giggle.

I know that I should be grieving Frankie’s first few months, how I will never get them back, I tell the guy.

He says he talked about his babymama in his “Grief and Loss.” How she was such a bitch to him and she used to be totally different before she became a junkie.

Nobody goes outside.

There’s not much of an outside to speak of.

In the women’s section, there’s a garden that the men don’t have access to, and we’re told to go and check it out. The garden area is the size of Frankie’s crib. There are cameras above the door. There’s a wooden fence, the magic fence that I’m not supposed to jump or I’ll get kicked out. I can see what’s behind it. Houses and cars on a quiet residential street. I have no desire to jump the fence, not even to see what might happen.

Nobody checks out the garden except for me. The other women spend most of their free time on payphones talking to boyfriends or in the lounge watching TV.

Inside, I wear my rehab costume. I’ve got runners and sweatpants and headbands. Stuff celebrity addicts wear on reality TV. The rest of the
girls—because that’s what I call them, and that’s what we are in here,
girls
, in this strange boarding school—dress just like they would outside. Everyone has a pedicure, even the shaky, skinny crackhead, Donna. There’s a new girl, Alex, who is introduced to us after lunch on the second day. She is skinny and doesn’t talk. She keeps her hands hidden in her sleeves, is probably the only other sloppy dresser besides me. She’s freezing all the time. She’s coming off Oxys, Sade says.

Over the first few nights, my roommate’s gassy condition dissipates and it’s possible to breathe again at night. She tells me this is a common side effect of a long-term user, this horrible gas.

I learn so much from her all the time. One evening she tells me about being up for ten days straight and losing control of her left arm—it kept jerking and flinging itself forward, against her will. She thinks it must’ve been a mini-stroke.

Naturally she laughs about it and I laugh with her as she re-enacts those bizarre, jerky movements with her other arm. The left one never fully recovered and will still spasm uncontrollably, and her hand clenches painfully when she’s agitated. She says it’s better not to mess with it. She says her sugar daddy makes fun of it.

Your sugar daddy?

Well, how else do you think I keep my head above water?

Before meals and group activities, my roommate runs around nude trying on different combinations of tight sweaters and leggings. She changes her outfits three, four times a day. It occurs to me that this is a clever tactic, just one of the ways to divide our days further, keep busy. Sade’s telling me more about herself in furious bits and pieces.
The stories are complete with re-enactments of how people were standing or leaning, voices and how they yelled at each other, even how some bitches got slapped.

She talks about her addiction too, how she spent a month in a crack-house once and one morning came to with her face and hands covered in bedbug bites. That experience ruined crack smoking for her. Now she sees the bugs whenever she does blasts.

I have to express milk, so standing in our little bathroom, I pump my breasts, letting the milk drip into the travel mug. The travel mug has come in handy after all. I told my roommate about what I have to do and she’s curious about how it’s done without a pump. I invite her to watch as I squeeze around my nipple, hard, until a few tiny white threads of milk erupt on the surface, combined with some watery-white droplets.

Wow, is all she says, and I point my nipple downward to direct the stream into the travel mug and I keep squeezing. Because it comes out in such small amounts, I need to do this for a long time—press, squeeze, press—to get as much as one-third of the mug filled.

My roommate says she never breastfed her kids. She was too out of it. She never breastfed her first either. The baby died two weeks after being born. She says this breezily, in a matter-of-fact way. It’s just a fact from her past, as is the fact that her mother is dead and so is her real father.

Everyone is dead, pretty much, she says, sounding a little surprised. Then she bursts out laughing. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s wrong with me. It was a long time ago, when my baby died, she says when she calms down.

She says, I was fourteen when I got pregnant. I thought you only took the birth-control pill once and you were good to go.

She laughs again, and I join her because this
is
kind of funny.

After breakfast, men and women meet in the Group Room upstairs and go over goals for the day with the counsellors. We go around the room and speak about our goal when it’s our turn. The goals are simple: to call parents, to call boyfriends, to exercise, to finally start reading a book.

I’m going to call Frankie, I say, even though I brought no phone cards. But this is supposed to be a goal, right? So I should do anything I can to achieve it, even steal, right? I don’t know where this thinking comes from. Perhaps it’s all the thieves and other petty criminals in here who talk about stealing and holding up convenience stores. On the other hand, I don’t know if I should believe anybody in here anyway. The angel-faced Alex who in one of our earlier trust exercises confesses to being an escort at an agency? Please. She has zero social skills. She barely talks and spends most of the time chewing on the ends of her sweatshirt sleeves. I have a hard time picturing her as a great seductress.

After the goals, we usually have a fifteen-minute anti-smoking session with an overeager woman whose father died of lung cancer. She is one of the nurses here.

She brings DVDs and clippings about tobacco-related deaths. She’s full of curious statistics, like comparisons of deaths related to tobacco consumption versus deaths due to homicide or car accidents.

She plays movies in which people with holes in their throats and oxygen tanks on wheels talk about wishing they had had better foresight.

The only person relatively interested in these workshops is the main dad pants guy, who’s the first person ever to come to New Hope for help with a smoking habit.

He asks questions. He’s the one who’s usually silent during our other workshops, where people talk about visiting the afterlife a couple of times thanks to overconsumption of heroin.

In the tobacco workshops, Dad Pants gets to talk.

After the morning sessions, we’re given the choice of staying in the Group Room with everyone or going to a one-on-one meeting with a counsellor. Most people choose to stay. I stay almost every time. In the Group Room we’re taught breathing exercises and meditation techniques. The first week they even bring in an acupuncture guy who explains that he will put needles in our ears to stimulate positive energies that will help us to relax, deal with our cravings and help us sleep. I let him stick ten tiny needles in my ear. Within seconds, they detach themselves, one by one, from my skin with a minuscule silver prickle.

It means that my energy lines are sufficiently stimulated, the acupuncture guy tells me in an excited whisper.

Plinky-plonky Asian music plays gently around us. Most people have their eyes closed.

Alex, the anorexic escort in her giant white hoodie and white jogging pants that cover her feet, sits with her back to me, facing the window. Her hair is long and wispy, lit up from the window like a halo. Next to her sits an old heroin addict, a lovable goofy guy in his forties or fifties or sixties. He’s been following the anorexic around and I can’t decide if he wants to have sex with her or protect her. Probably both.

I close my eyes but I can’t relax. I want to jump up and run out of the room. I want to scream and break through this stupid waterfall music and the quiet giggling and whispering echoing from all corners.

I open my eyes.

I see Alex and the old guy in front of me. Now he’s touching her shoulder gently, carefully. He calls for the acupuncture guy in a whisper and explains that a needle fell out of her ear. He’s looking down on the floor.

The acupuncture guy walks up to Alex and bends down too.

Now they’re both like this, bowing down on each side of her. It’s the coronation of the Virgin, the two guys moving hands gently, without touching, around her head and delicate shoulders. She sits still in the light.

Watching this, I feel myself calming down a bit, for the first time.

I
n the afternoons men and women attend separate group meetings where they discuss issues more specific to their genders. The women meet in the lounge downstairs; downstairs is also where all the women have their bedrooms. The men have no access to this floor.

During one of the early sessions I learn that I’m the only one with an infant, and the women ask to see my son’s pictures, again. He’s so beautiful, they all say. The counsellor who’s with us says, You’re so lucky you’re doing this now. Your sobriety, it’s the best gift you can give him.

I disagree. I tell her the best gift I could have given him would have been not picking up that first drink at the party we had to welcome him to the world. Or maybe the drink I had in Warsaw before I even knew I was pregnant? Or the very first drink I ever had?

But there’s no sense beating yourself up about it now, is there? she says and hands me back the album after everyone has looked at it.

I haven’t really looked at these pictures since coming here, I’m just showing them to people. There’s no lying on the bed, staring at my baby’s face, crying.

It’s not that I don’t care. I’m still numb, locked inside myself.

After this group session is over, the counsellor asks me to meet with her one-on-one. She asks how I feel when I look at his pictures, possibly picking up on my keeping the album shut close on my lap once it made it back to me.

I don’t know, I say.

The counsellor says that maybe I’m dissociating. It’s a normal part of recovery. It happens even in the first week of recovery.

Dissociating? Like how?

You’re not entirely in touch with the painful emotions, you’re protecting yourself from the pain that the pictures may bring. And the dissociation may be due to post-traumatic stress disorder.

Like what? I say.

Birth. Even birth. Even birth can cause post-traumatic stress disorder.

This is one of those things that therapists talk about. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Anything can cause post-traumatic stress disorder, it seems. It’s not just for Iraqi war veterans anymore. Becoming a new mother, immigrating, getting married, getting fired—everything causes post-traumatic stress disorder if the mind isn’t ready to absorb it. We’re a walking fucking trauma, all of us.