Mel Of Bacchus

When I was 11 years old, we lived in a Government House across the road from the primary school in Elizabeth Street, Moe, Victoria, Australia. I lived with my mother, my 10 year old brother and my 14 year old sister and this was the first home my Mum obtained in Moe since we moved from Koo Wee Rup, Victoria, Austalia the year before.

Mum had made drug-related friends and also knew a lot of people in the area as Moe was where she went to school and high school, her hometown one would say.

One afternoon after school I got home to find a group of strangers sitting around Mums kitchen table. Mum had extended our wooden table out in our dining room to fit these people around it, had the stereo playing tunes and two wooden “mull bowls” circulating along with her long stem bong on the table.

This was pretty much a typical night for my Mum since she and my Dad split the year before.

I would often come home not knowing what I’d be walking into.

This afternoon though, Mum was in good spirits, stoned and happy to see me, introducing me to her new friends before I could even put my bag down.

Mum cooked me a packet of two minute noodles and sat me beside her at the kitchen table.

I ate my noodles occasionally coughing as smoke circulated the dining room.

I had asthma as a child and second hand smoke wasn’t a known thing back then so I was inhaling cigarette and Cannabis second had smoke from a young age unknowing what impact that would later have on my health.

As I finished my noodles, one of Mum’s new friends was play fighting with her boyfriend beside me. They were fighting over a lighter and who’s bong it was next.

I was asked by the girl, she would have been in her early twenties to pass her another lighter that was sitting on Mums packet of cigarettes.

As I leaned towards her to give her the lighter, she yanked the lighter from her boyfriends hand and accidently punched me in the nose causing it to bleed.

Mum took me into the bathroom and could clearly see my nose was broken.

I was taken to the hospital and ended up at The Royal Children’s Hospital in Victoria’s capital city, Melbourne.

Mum made up that my brother and I were play fighting and that my brother accidently hit me as my Mum was of color, indigenous, and in our country, indigenous kids had been taken away and put into foster care for less.

We grew up scared of Police and Welfare as Mum taught us that they were not safe people.

That night, in emergency, I got a metal plate put into my nose to straighten it.

I also remember Jelly. Red Jelly.

But my favorite memory was playing on a tablet for the first time as Mum held me.

I remember having Mum all to myself, feeling safe and warm.

She was a good Mum to me at that time.

But it wasn’t always like that..