Unhappy Mother's Day

These days are hard. Not because I don’t have a mother, no. My mother, Brenda, lives on healthy and well, and I am very fortunate to be her daughter.

I grew up in her single-mother household and saw her work so damn hard for us ungrateful, demanding, and selfish three kids. I didn’t know then it wasn’t normal for parents to work in excess of 12 hours a day. For weeks, then months, then years on end. How she still attended our band recitals, sports competitions, and even had time to pursue her hobby and passion, gardening, is beyond me. She must have had some arrangement with the universe’s timekeepers, because otherwise I truly do not know how she did it all.

No, today isn’t hard because I don’t have a mother. It’s hard because it also serves as an anniversary of my brother’s car accident. An alcohol-fueled accident involving just his vehicle that was in all likelihood an attempt to take his life. It’s a powerful reminder of the role and relentless grip that addiction still has on our family. We had hoped it would have ended with our late father’s passing, but addiction and mental health is a wicked beast.

Today is hard because it marks another milestone. It’s almost a month until Father’s Day, and I no longer have a father.  I have not celebrated a Father’s Day since I was 12.  More than the absence of my father, it was hard seeing my mother unsupported by an immediate partner.  Perhaps seeing this lack of close companionship in her life forced me to lean on my other communities early on in my own life.

Sports, band, part-time jobs, church all become parts of a network that made me feel safe, valued, and challenged.  Of course I felt those things at home from my mother, but it still felt somehow incomplete without a pair of parents sharing the roles and responsibilities of raising three very different kids.  I no longer say it’s a deficit or an absence I feel everyday. Rather, it creeps up at inopportune and unsuspecting moments.

Dry July

As my brother is on a waiting list and daily checking in with an alcohol rehabilitation centre in Alberta, I too, am off the booze - for the month.  Inspired my a Kiwi friend's musings, a few too many big nights alarmingly close together and my bro's brain injury as a result of alcohol, I'm hoping to use the next 29 days to reflect on alcohol's role in my life and consciously make active and healthier (booze-free) choices.

Dry July is a fundraiser for the month of, you guessed it, July in Australia and New Zealand where Dry Julyers (DJers) go booze-free for the month to raise funds for adult cancer patients.

With work uncharacteristically slow (seriously, it's mind boggling difficult to find stable, seasonal employment), I'm not logging the kilometers and elevation gains I have in past summers.  Suddenly I'm worried about the grams of carbohydrates and the liquid, empty (delicious) calories in a cool, crisp brew.

The price of recreation is this town is absurd so I've been keenly attending all the budget options I can find.  Toonie Wednesday swims, free Pickleball at the Rec Centre, free Canada Day Zumba (Jaana says I have to put an (r) here), dog walks, mini hikes up Baldy.  Great as these all are, I half miss the views, uphill slogs and exercise that employment usually affords me.

Glasses up for Dry July!

Chetwynd is a long way to come for cake

Spring, with a smattering of summer has finally arrived in the Peace!  Apple trees, dandelions and lilacs are flowering in town while prairie crocuses have already gone to seed in the bush as false saloman's seal and strawberries are getting their fragrant white flowers out.

BBQ season is in full swing with at least one invite rolling in per week from various friends around town.  Yesterday afternoon Caity and I sat on the deck under a sunny sky, drink in hand and caught up on the week we hadn't spent together.

Janice, the once-mother cat, will not be carrying on her reproducing ways as she was spayed on Friday.  That means our cutie kitty pot pies will be available for adoption this Friday to a loving furever home.  Will I miss them?  Absolutely.  Will I be pumped to see them come into their full kitty selves as indoor/outdoor cats together?  Even more so!

Our first couchsurfer, Yoko, from Japan was a hoot!  We popped around to the local pub, Murray's, for an early lunch  yesterday and as our sever's special table of her shift, she bought us a piece of chocolate cake for his long-distance visit.  His valiant attempts at English, a delightful tea ceremony with procedures resembling Communion preparations and keen attitude for anything Canadian, Alaskan or First Nations made for a delightful weekend.  

Work is hum bumming along.  I'm waiting for the first hatch of mozzies to start their annual assault but have otherwise been occupied ID-ing juvenile plants, classifying streams, planting lease sites (Seriously! I thought I'd hung those bags up!) cranking out nest surveys and logging some brain-numbing hours in the office reading manuals.  

It's weird being "The Local" on the crews.  It's true this is my fifth summer in Chetrock, but I by no means consider myself part of the permanent residential population here.  A plus of "local" status: I don't have to live in the company house.  

Back on the Alberta front, my extended family is taking turns visiting my brother in the Foothills Hospital after he rolled his truck two weeks ago.  From the updates, he has good and bad days where confusion runs rampant as his brain is attempting to slot info, data, sensory while also healing itself.  I'm beyond immediately worrying about him and much more concerned about how my mother is coping and processing it all.  

A trooper through and through, her state of mind and health are compromised and she openly confesses she is sleeping poorly and I fear that the responsibility of caring for him post-hospital (admittedly a long way off) is more than she can carry alone.  

Blessed beyond belief with a caring Calgary Crew composed of friends and family and a rocking group at her work, Mom says she is getting the support and breaks she needs while gardening and her kitties keep her distracted when she's not in Calgary.  

Kevin's given us substance abuse scares in the past and wonder of wonders he only injured himself with this most recent one.  

Don't get hurt in Laos, they'll chop your leg off

"It's the buffalo whisper," travel companion Jenny appropriately said quietly pointing to a middle-aged, sun-bleached blonde man, who tens and tens of minutes before was in the Nam Song tripping his nuts off on an untold cocktail of drugs and lao lao and communicating with a herd of massive water buffalo.

This, a few inebriated slips and tell-tale crutches and bandaged ankles in town were miraculously all we witnessed while passing through Vang Vieng, Laos, a town made over into a backpacker destination for its tubing and renowned for its scale of partying, death and drugs.

Accidents are also very frequent.

Two weeks before my first lap through VV, a tuber died after hitting the bottom of the river after plunging face first from a slide. A few days before my second visit, a girl broke her leg in six places. Since Laos lacks adequate or any, really, decent hospitals, her leg wasn't set and placed in a cast, but amputated above the highest break.

The stories, rumours and quickly issued warnings about the river's appetite for turned ankles, broken bones and lives lost too early were sobering reminders that too much fun is possible and excess is capable of extinguishing.

Gemma, Jenny and I made a sober pact that we were to mind one another and absolutely not allow each other onto the dodgy swinging trapeze, crudely engineered flying fox or fourth-grade-science-project slides.

Learning upon arrival at the launching point that tubes had to be hired from the cartel in town, we were limited to stopping at makeshift bars we could walk to. This didn't prove to be a problem as we quickly found ourselves at the bottom of another lao lao bucket and not an early grave on the Nam Song,