Georgina Underwood
7 min readDec 28, 2024

A beautiful wedding and a saving grace.

Family celebrations without alcohol. Fall forward in a single step. Stop myself as emotions overwhelm me! Anxiety rises. My usual outlet to go pray and breathe, cold water wash up etc., was interrupted by shared stay at Harrison hot springs. The excuses begin to flow. I should have stayed home. What a knucklehead! That was the kind of thinking associated with my alcohol use disorder. Duality in my thinking, is this recovery? Where am I at one year alcohol-free?

This is an extremely important day for my first born baby girl. I was afraid and my emotions kept rising into my throat. Never before have I seen her look so graceful very much the queen- like womyn the creator had made her to be.

The wedding day!

DESPITE ME!

I believe that the Creator looked after my two eldest children. Many of my memories have started to flow. I was a parent that did not express myself in terms of endearment. I often treated them with indifference. Something i truly hate about how hard my heart had become. I remember my ‘cute’ (a word I hated and hated to use) little girl came to sit beside me on the couch and she kinda leaned on me and I pushed her aside. Asking her, what she thought she was doing.

My mom and mother-in-law. Significant family on my dads side for his 75th

Those interactions with her that I remember in our relationship were not all contentious. Most days were good. I got hangovers back then so Mondays could be terrible. I worked for our band and my sister moved in to help with my daughter. Much from those years are still a blur. I believe those memories will come back as I need them, now that Im sober again. Not too long ago, she told me I was a terrible mom and it hit like a sword in the heart.

During my early parenting years I was building a tolerance for alcohol and was not ever a social drinker. Binging on weekends. My late mom would say, “whats all the celebration..which also became, ‘you dont need a reason to celebrate, everythings a celebration…you just dont know when to quit.” Playing sports was a weekly and often binge-every-weekend progression in my use disorder. I remember training so hard. I remember abstinence from alcohol during my training. I don’t know when it all changed exactly but I believe loss and unresolved grief has a lot to do with it. Losing two of my brothers and nearly a third in the early hours of a housefire in 1981 was a catalyst for drinking. We had also lost some of our grandparents and our great grandmother on my moms side. Our culture warns to stay away from alcohol for 1 year, not being specific in any details except it is not good to grieve and drink. Made me think that’s a slogan. DONT DRINK AND GRIEVE. I get the wisdom in it. I thought I could handle it, my way. I am silently stubborn.

RESIDENTIAL SCHOOL AND THE UNSPOKEN LAW

Many members of my mom and dads family went to residential school. Their silence harboring the pain of separation from family and each other. The physical,mental,emotional, and spiritual experiences they had were rarely heard by family. The remnants of their treatment in positive and negative ways appeared in most families within our community. Our family was no exception even with a heavy christian and shaker faith influence. Addictions included the learned sexual and physical deviants inherited from the residential schools. Mental and emotional stressor were less visible but existed amongst the women, who maintained family and with my grandparents had begun restoring what had been taken. I believe there was tremendous strength amongst my aunties and grandmother’s.

This is my second cold-turkey quit of alcohol. I did not do the work of reconciling my past the first time I guess. Maybe the creator was giving me as much as I could handle. It haunts me.

I witnessed my first-born in the kind of relationship comparable to all she had achieved in making herself. So thankful am I to her willingness to find solace in her father’s mom, who ironically enough had been very important and significant in my life as well.

It is too easy for us to blame our parents for the way we are today when we did not share with them the realities of our existence throughout our lifetime. (I felt all Sherman Alec there) How we seen ourselves was not a daily topic. I remember a lot of good in my family growing up. Positive ways of being within the likes of our huge family. Parents the hardest working people around. Taught me a lot about being prepared, ready for the ‘offerings’ within every season on land and sea. Our home was busy, surrounded by the bay, boats docked by our swimming spots. Two sometimes three boats, grampas, my dads and my uncles docked in a channel that lead to a creek and a large boathouse where my sisters and cousins often played climbing around singing and dancing, probably a show tune. I wouldnt and still wouldnt get caught dead in a bikini, for some reason this act’ required bathing suits. In recalling this event sometime later, my sister says, ”you left me with the ugly bikini remem-buh” as we walked along some beam or something…that cracked us up. A nearby well offered us a space of enchantment created by a circle of trees darkened by long healthy branches of cedar, a few maple, and shrubbery from soap berries, thimble berries, and wild rose. A place to be, feel safe and ‘hide from the dishes’ as mom would say. She would come looking for us, me and my sisters and cousin. Chores had to be done, or it was time to comb our hair. A fearful moment for proud members of the Bushyhead tribe. One memorable time, and I could get the facts messed up, we were hanging out at the well smoking probably stolen cigarettes in a circle. All but one saw mom coming. Running passed the well and through a couple of exit trails my sister watched us sprint away, talking to us still. Standing, poised sophisticated-like enjoying the moment when moms approach caught her by surprise. I am unsure at this point if I watched my mom put the smoke out on my sisters nose. My recollection fails me, did I high-tail it out of there or was I watching?Anyways it happened, there may be slight variations to any of us in recalling the events, except the sister who got butt-nosed.

The old house with mom and older siblings

Shouldn’t 1 year be less complicated?

I have asked myself that a number of times as memories of my childhood come back, and even the ones I barely remember return and expect their due recognizance. It hurts not to have full memory of life happenings. It hurts to remember the tidbits of your own or a siblings life. You long to put it all together but you can’t, that time in our lives is gone. It is just memories. The kind that make you laugh and cry, sometimes both at the same time. They are from a time when my heart, mind, and body were being influenced by the world we lived in. A time when I was developing a need to find my place. Politics of this time and the present have not changed much. I became a rebel I longed to serve on the Frontline with activists and the Indigenous political voices and actions from the 60’s. I had sympathy, empathy, and compassion, and a willingness to learn and serve. I have those elements of my trueself returning. Still an important part of my reason to change my ways and get sober, a semi-return to normal. A past that deserves reconciliation within my self and the rest of us, my family. It is very much a spiritual awakening, as the prayers of my ancestors awakes me each morning to begin the rituals that make life easy. Communication with spirit, my environment and all living beings within it. Today they shout for peace and love for all. Requesting an end to world War 3, and GENOCIDE to be the reconciliation point to our history and our present. Truth-telling begins with our Indigenous peoples. Reconciliation does not come from weapons of mass destruction or at the barrel of a gun. Let us fight for peace and love and an end to genocide and war.

Thanks for reading. I’m new at this so hope it’s a good read.

Georgina Underwood
Georgina Underwood

Written by Georgina Underwood

Indigenous Warrior Womyn, mother of five, grandmother of 15 with a great grandson. Have many arrows in my quiver. Land and sea 4 life. Sober and alive!

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