Drug and alcohol use was consecutively worse in the people who directly received trauma. Uncle Mick and Aunt Trudy both had very serious addictions while Aunt Kate and Al lived more normal lives. This came from the fact that Mick and Trudy were both sent to residential schools when they were young, where they were abused. Kate was already married and Al was too young, so neither of them were forced to attend residential schools. You could see this impact on their lifestyles. Aunt Kate was a good mother, raising Erica and taking care of her mother, however her sister lived with a lot of resentment towards her mother for sending her away. This was a common problem throughout the novel, and Aunt Trudy would often turn to alcohol instead of to her family for support, and she refused to go visit her mother …show more content…
Trudy would often get blackout drunk, leaving Tab to take care of herself. Trudy often is very verbally abusive towards Tab when she gets drunk, saying things like “you think you’re so good. You think you’re so special. Don’t you?” (128) and later going on to call her a whore. When Lisa angered Trudy, she told Lisa that her Uncle Mick was a drunk and that he had an affair with her mother. The next day when Lisa asked Trudy about this, she didn’t recall saying anything and assumed that Aunt Kate and Erica had been the one’s gossiping. Even though Aunt Trudy was a rude, unreasonable person when she was drunk, she was also a very kind and caring person when she was sober. When Lisa had nowhere to stay, Trudy told her she could stay at her place saying that “my floor is your floor. You can stay at my place as long as you want” (306). This shows how issues like drugs and alcohol can have such a large influence on people. By the end of the novel Aunt Trudy had decided that she was going to go to treatment to get sober, and even though Josh doubted her, she seemed