A Bit of Weirdness

I stepped into a time machine today. Inadvertently. Maybe it would be more precise to say a trap door opened beneath my feet and I fell into the past.

It happened like this.

I was at work. The phone rang. I answered it as I always do, "Good Afternoon, blahblah blah blah...." and the voice on the other end, a man, knew it was me but I did not know who he was. After a bit of confused and unbalanced verbal back and forth, I realized it was an old friend of my parents'. He and his wife are visiting my mother for the weekend. It was hardly 2pm, but my mother and his wife had been drinking. I knew that. I simply knew that. And as I heard them in the background while the man gently harassed (gently, and yet, with a trace of menace) me for not knowing who he was, I suddenly was the 8 year old kid with the crazy drunk parents up to who knows what chaos creating madness. Them over there, sitting and drinking and verbally harassing us kids. I always knew, and know, those people could explode at any time.

Those friends have 3 kids. We'd spend weekends together, us kids being kids while the adults sat around and drank and drank, marathon drinking sessions lasting from early afternoon until well after midnight. My mother can do that, sit and drink and talk for hours, hours, hours, and then go to bed at 2 am and get up in the morning and function, and even do it all over again. Back in the day they'd be smoking cigarettes too, and maybe playing cards. And, they probably wouldn't explode on us all gathered together for a friendly weekend like that, but afterwards, after we left, on the trip home.....

As a child, I was well acquainted with catching hell in the car. I was well acquainted with the terror that lives in private family spaces.

This might sound like a simple thing. But I was catapulted back into a bad old past, a place of being bullied and harassed and prodded by guilt. Of adults who acted badly towards children, then blamed the children for their bad behavior, and laid guilt like a blanket soaked in gasoline over us if we dared speak up for ourselves, dared call the bad behavior by its true name. I heard all that in the man's voice today. I heard the uncomfortable heat of that in the laughing banter behind him, of my mother and her friend, already tipsy by 2pm and still hours of drinking yet before them. I didn't try to feel like an 8 year old again, I simply did, despite the fact I am 50 and I talked to him in the smoothed polished voice of a woman skilled in handling crazy people, the very polite, measured cadences that keep the volatile calm. Saying, "I really need to get back to work now, but it is so great to hear from you. Thank you for calling." Smooth as satin kid gloves, smooth as pearls. I have left that world behind and I will do anything I can to keep it far away, over there.

The thing is, I have had 2 good talks with my mother lately. She wasn't drinking and our emotions never ran the conversation. We said things that needed to be said, and a bridge of toothpick sized trust was built between us. Something after nothing for so many years. But after that call today, to me at work, of all places--part of my mind kept insisting, "This simply isn't appropriate'--I remembered, she still is crazy, and I still need to keep her far away, over there.

Until next time, I remain, your friend, Rozenkraai