As you all know its certainly pretty difficult for me to get on with my roommates.  Tomorrow one of my roommates is one year sober.   She's been going to court diverted classes for a year now and had had mandatory drug tests week in week out.  Somehow someway she made the choice to stay clean, through illlness, through tantrums, through constant temptation from her former peers and through my new encouraging her at all.    I can't say that I've exactly appreciated her sobriety at all.  In fact I'd say I spent most of my time, judging, labelling and cataloguing her faults internally and always but always lamnting the fact that I had the bad luck to live next door to her.

There's been times when I've really not shown much support for her efforts.  Indeed I've been impatient, cross, fed up and totally exasperated a lot of the time.  I'd have said I wanted anyone but her as a roommate.  I longed for someone I coudl have intellectual discussions about sobreity with, compare war wounds, feel an affinity for.  I never really took a moment to relate to her choices, her struggles (although I was certainly well aware of them) or her accomplishments.  She was just another notch on the belt of the "poor me's".

The truth is however far more noble than my over reactions.  Evelyn has pretty much lost everything to drugs and alcohol. She's spent most of her life in jail, couldn't bring up her two children she birthed (her brother and sister did that) because she was so lost and so out there. She's been homeless, jailed, sick and more.  Then a year ago something changed after being arrested she got the chance to go to a program or go to jail.  Jail was never really a deterrent for her before in fact she quite liked the structure and stability it gave her.  But this time the drugs had stopped working for her.
So she chose the program.  Or rather I like to think the program found her and she was wiling. 

Yesterday in my practising Powerpoint 2007 I made all these banners for her saying Congratulations Evelyn with all these different renditions of what an accomplishment she'd made.  I put 15 of them all over the wall by her room.  I went to Safeway and a congraulations card with a song  within it leapt out at me. I went around and made some of my roommates sign.  They had no idea what they were signing for.  They signed anyway because I put the pen in their hand and pointed to the place to do it.  I got these decorations at Safeway too, decorative ribbons and put them alll over the door.  I put the card on the door too.   When you enter the house all you can see through the door is ribbons, congratulations messages and who they are for. 

Tomorrow Evelyn gets her graduation. I won't be there in person because of course I've got my own pressing needs to attend to.  After that ceremony and cake she can go home a place I havent' exactly made hospitalble to her in the past.  The classes will still continue and maybe just maybe she'll go with me to get a chip at the local Al anon club. I'm not banking on it but she said she might.

Tomorrow Evelyn will have the opportunity to save something that she never had beofre.  She'll get to eat the pumpkin pie I'm baking tonight with her mother who's been through so much and her friends, the new friends who are sober or rather trying to be.  I'm leaving them with another roommate who'll do the honors in my place.   

Tomorrow a miracle happens which defeats all the odds, the woman who had nothing who lost everything to drugs and alcohol will get to celebrate and mark a special occasion when there were none before. 

And I'll have done my part to acknowledge it.

Maresie.