“Reminisce With Me” by Kristen Sommerfeld

Jan 26, 2012 by Sentinel

Does everything happen for a reason? Or do we simply give reason to everything? I like to think of life as semi-predetermined; there are certain guidelines that must be followed—laws and rules that set boundaries. Levels of maturation must follow a reaction. However, there is an exception to every rule. We are trapped in a world that has a beginning and an end; from our first breath to our last. I often wonder if one simple choice has the ability to change the way our life’s scroll should unravel.

I should have only lost one parent. Losing both is simple bad luck. Let me say this: I’m disappointed. I have the power to move on, to look past the negative and find a positive. I’ve had to. There is a powerful story waiting for the knowledge of understanding that everyone has to tell. It isn’t until you have reached high ground that you are able to witness the storm.

I look back to find meaning, a significant moment in my life that has changed me, I can’t. It is impossible to think that way considering that so much has happened thus far that has significantly impacted me. Family has always played a major role in my existence. Without it we are isolated to the created love of strangers. There is nothing as pure as the love that comes from a tree of generations, as extraordinary as sharing the same DNA and knowing that you will, literally, forever be their heart, even if you are expected to forever part ways. My dad’s heart stopped four days after Christmas because of Oxycodon. He fractured disks in his back carrying a bucket of supplies at work on the cold November morning. He was accident prone. My little sister takes after him; breaking her wrist in basketball, spraining her ankle goofing around with her friends. I wish he could see us now. What if my dad’s heart condition was diagnosed prior to being prescribed those pills?

After being moved away from the friends I had for nine years, the town I loved, the place my roots had been firmly established, I swore to rebellion. I didn’t even like my mom’s pot-head boyfriend Randy, but because he had work in Strathmore, we moved. My mom had been back and forth from Strathmore to Sundre, where we were living, often leaving us alone for weeks. Social Services was starting to ask questions regarding why it was possibly for a fourteen year old to put herself into the hospital with alcohol poisoning on a Wednesday. The seedling truth that I would make my mother’s life a living hell for this was already planted deep into the grooves of my cortex. If only I knew then that being a rebel is only fun when you’re not allowed.

I had friends over that night, we drank cheap liquor. My mom was hiding in the tiny bathroom crunched between her room and mine. It was obvious by the copious amount of sweet smoke that poured out of the bathroom that she was smoking crack. I had, by that time, tried numerous approaches of laying crack awareness pamphlets around; one in the paraphernalia littered top drawer of her dresser, another under the bathroom sink where the small dinner plate acted as a place to catch scrapings from her over-used pipe. Nothing worked.
“Mom? I need to use the bathroom!” I banged on the door; half trying to make sure she was still alive.
“Go upstairs!”
“Jessy is in there. Can you just open up for like two seconds, I really have to pee” Surprisingly the door opened. “What are you doing in here? Why aren’t you in your room?”
“He’s being a hog Krissy,” She said quickly through her dry, frozen mouth.
“Cool, don’t really want to hear that,” I was shattered when her use moved from being an occasional trial to an almost every day experience.
“No, Krissy, you don’t understand. He gets weird when he’s high, always jonesin’,”
I wish this was the one and only time I would ever have to hear those words. When I finished peeing I stood up, but she flooded me with words I could barely understand.
She handed me the pipe. Maybe if I wasn’t already feeling a good buzz from the whiskey and I guess the fact that I was probably slowly getting high off the second hand-smoke I would have gotten the hell out of there, but I didn’t. I made up my mind: If you can’t beat them, join them. I took a hoot. I didn’t feel any different, well, besides a sudden surge of excitability and a subtle floating-like feeling in my arms. It was nothing like ecstasy which lasted for what felt like hours. After probably less than thirty minutes I was just whiskey drunk.

Alcohol was my coping mechanism for life in general. I had it scarred somewhere in my mind that if I got drunk enough, that if drank fast enough, everything would disappear. And it did. Until I woke up. I was fifteen years old, smoked crack for the first time, and my friends didn’t want to go out with me because of my over-indulgence. One drunken day I decided I didn’t deserve life and tried to drink nail polish. It seemed easier to make a fool out of myself than to live with the burning knowledge that my only parent looked like she hadn’t eaten in two years, hadn’t slept in days, and was starting to hallucinate. I remember seeing her back with a loose towel draping over it; I could clearly see every bone and exactly how they were positioned like the carcass of dead animal. I went to my room and sobbed. When had she gotten so bad?

It was always about protection. If I just got high with my mom, there wouldn’t be enough for either of us to overdose. I didn’t need another family casualty. Logically it worked. Emotionally I was robbing myself of a childhood, my sister of a means of rational support, and my mom from her last remaining responsibilities. I was being selfish, but I dared not try to cope with the external emotional forces without a substance, it was all I knew and apparently in my blood. I didn’t want to smoke crack. What fifteen-year-old does?
My friends had rented a campsite in town one night and I was allowed to come if I didn’t get drunk, so I didn’t. I kept my word, and only had a couple beers. Until the walk home. Strathmore was the kind of town that even though we were so young we could get any substance we wanted. And we did. I saw a group of kids I wasn’t particularly acquaintances with but they had booze.
“Oh, you guys suck at drinking, let me show you how it is done!” I reached into the brown paper bag. “Mike’s? Really? What a pussy drink!” The cap hissed as I twisted it off. I lifted the bottle high into the air, pressed it to my lips, and allowed the sharp, familiar substance to pierce my throat.
“Chug! Chug! Chug!”
“Ahhhh!” I wiped the remaining evidence on my sleeve. “ Any other takers?”
“Let’s do it!”
“You’re on! You’re going to regret this tomorrow, young one.” When the last of the liquor flowed from the bottle neck to my throat, and down into my stomach, I was well already feeling the effects. The stars battled the man-made street lights and oncoming headlights. The path home seemed to stretch out miles longer than it should, and with concrete blocks for shoes and what seemed like a purse full of rocks, the distance my drunken ass had to walk was impossible.

I stumbled through the door, purse-less. Puke plastered my hair to my face. I banged on my mom`s door making sure that they weren`t having sex, I knew they weren’t: why have sex when they can get sky high?

“You a little drunk Krissy?” My mom teased as she scraped the crystallized pieces out of the blackened spoon, carefully placing them into her metal pipe titled just enough not to drop anything, lit the lighter and inhaled.
“Ugh, you got anything there for me?” My stomach tightened as I watched her exhale.
“Can you hear that ring Krissy?”
“No, but I want to!”
“This is potent shit,” She loaded one up for me. “Don’t hold it in too long.”
Anticipation whirred inside of me as she carefully handed over the pipe. I symmetrically tilted my neck and the pipe, carefully not dropping anything, lit the lighter, and flew. The ringer I had been waiting for.
How could I fight something like that?
The summer after grade nine my sister and I went to B.C. for our regular visit with my dad’s side of the family, we didn’t hear from our mom all summer and when we finally did and came back to Alberta we found our lives were about to change dramatically. My family in B.C. had witnessed over the past couple years the weight that my mother had dramatically lost, and the way her face had sunken in. They knew what was going on and tried to help. At that time my sister and I were used to the life style; the freedom, the power to do whatever we wanted. We obediently stuck up for our mom, our creator, there was no way we were about to lose her. Besides that, we had heard on countless occasions that she would kill herself if we ever left.

We were living in a fifth-wheel crammed in a shop on Randy’s dad’s unoccupied farm. They had spent ten thousand dollars in the past month on stalking their daily supply and were evicted from our ghetto apartment. I remember the first conversation I had with my mom when we got back:
“I bet you really wanna get high!” She handed me the pipe, it had a new extension consisting of once clear rubber tubing, now a murky yellow.
“When did you get this thing?”
“It’s so you don’t burn your fingers, and you can scrape it and get a nice pile. Less falls out too, just tilt it up.”
“Here goes,” I flicked the lighter, listened to the familiar fizz, snap, and crackle of the burning rock as I sucked the mouth numbing smoke through the new contraption, held it in. And exhaled. Oh, that sound. Whether it was the sound of my synapses bursting where they remain, or just the tidal wave of the blood circulating through my body, it was a hit when you heard the ringing. “You hear that Mom?” I joked.

Wanting more was a constant tug on my will-power, a test that I never seemed to pass, unless there was nothing left to beg for. At the time I didn’t think I had a problem, mainly because if we didn’t have any drugs, I didn’t care. However, my little sister constantly reminded me that I was addicted. We tortured her soul. What twelve year old kid deserves to watch from the backseat her big sister, who practically raised her, and the woman who gave birth to her smoke crack? She had no one. What we put her through is a tragedy in itself.

After my mom didn’t need Randy any more to find the drugs she split, and with social services closely following the stench of her pulling us out of school late in September we were on the run. We were living solely through her addiction, and where ever it took us was where we laid my sister’s head, and where my mom and I got ridiculously high. After awhile I hated the path we were taking, but followed my mom like a lost dog to where ever the crack was. I was hooked and my thumbs told the story even when I tried to lie to myself. Crack-thumb is caused by constantly touching harsh chemicals, flicking a lighter and holding it until you get the perfect hit, until the pipe burns your fingers and you are high as hell.

We used to drive around with Bubba; drug dealers always have code names. My sister would ride shot-gun chugging back Smirnoff coolers, while my mom, and Darwin one of Bubba’s friends and I sat in the back seat. We went fishing on Mcgregor Lake one day, it was more of a chance to get drunk and high and no one really did any fishing. I had not eaten much in the last week and because my mom was withholding her drugs from me I got wasted. The last thing I remember was smoking a joint with Bubba and my sister, and taking a chug of Crown, the next I had entered Hell.
“Mom, I need to go to the hospital,” I moaned.
“Oh, you’re fine.”
“Ughh, Mom, I feel like I am going to die”
“You’re just drunk; don’t drink so much next time!”
“Mooooooom, help me.” I rocked myself back and forth trying to ease my raw, dry-heaved throat.
“Here, take a hoot, it will help you get back to reality.”
I remember thinking: Seriously? I am balling my eyes out on the cold ground loser drunk, and you want me to smoke crack. Water would be nice, or crackers, or a blanket, or something. Next thing I knew I was reclined in the front seat of my mom’s car, ill, and she was pissed.
“I hope your happy you fucking idiot, now I got nothing.”
Her words burned through me, sobering me up. I knew what her priorities were, if it were up to her she probably would have left me on the ground to choke on my own vomit. Our safety was never a concern to the addict that had kidnapped her and replaced her with a monster.

Every now and again, Randy would splurge to try to get my mom back, rent a hotel, buy us dinner, and drugs. Randy’s would glaze over and his hands would start jonsin’. Jonesin’ is a side-effect of crack; your hands and eyes scan the premises for pieces that may have fallen victim to the floor. Sometimes you got lucky, other times you smoked wax or a variety of different types of white debris. Wax was the worst; it melts the same as crack so it is easily mistaken. When the stash ran out, tempers were usually flaring, and yet another side of my mother shone through her fading high.
One night when we were in Canmore my mom took fifty-two Gravol. For as long as I can remember she always took acetaminophen, seven at a time. When she upped the dosage to twelve I wasn’t surprised. Those two drugs were easy to get and there wasn’t any limitation on how many you could buy. I often wonder if they got her high, or just numbed the aches of not having any crack. I close my eyes and see her pale sunk in face convulsing on the floor, vomit close by. She almost swallowed her tongue. Randy held her, as he rocked back and forth, combing her blonde hair out of her face, this wasn’t her first failed attempt. He couldn’t call the ambulance because we were running from Social Services. A suicide attempt would set off red flags, and we would be gone faster. All we could do then was keep her conscious enough to get what she could out of her system and pray to god that she had built up enough of a tolerance over the years that it would not kill her.

I don’t blame my mom for her unfortunate parenting; she was being controlled by a power that one doesn’t ever understand until you are in that position. Drug addiction, any addiction, will completely change a person. My sister and I were finally apprehended from our mom. She was given the choice to go to rehab and fight for her kids or sign over custody. I could never tell anyone about my own addiction in fear that my mother would be in more trouble than she already was. So I hid it, and battled those, oh so, excruciating triggers; those songs on the radio, those minutes before bed every night wasted because of the powerful flash backs of using. Those dreams that threw me back into those long sleepless nights; sounds, tastes, sights, flooding back to me. Reminding me. And all she had to do was sign, and her world went right back to the way it was, only this time baggage free.

I always knew there had to be something better out there, but I wasn’t about to go searching for something great when bad luck was my thing. The opportunities kept presenting themselves so I latched my teeth into my open wounds and drain the hurt of our broken home, through the fabricated relationship my mom and I had achieved through drugs. At least we had something. It has been years since the peak of the chaos, and still no call. I want to share my Graduation photos; that empowering walk across the stage caught in the midst, my big puffy Cinderella dress twirling as I danced. So much has happened that I wish she could see, and maybe she will. Maybe I will be her motivation. Maybe she will see what I have accomplished; graduating with honours, being accepted into College, and working towards a degree in Psychology. Maybe she will see that it is okay to ask for help, that it is okay to trust and to love. Or maybe she won’t be bothered; maybe her scars are too deep to heal. My biggest fear is that the next time we see her we will be softly kissing her cold, peaceful cheek whispering: “Goodbye.”