Better Chunky Than Drunky…

Dear God,

Even though we talk every day, it has been a while since I sat down to write something.

So much has changed.  So much has happened!

I am sneaking up on five months sober, and that makes me really happy. I was alone last weekend for the first time in 18 months, and I didn’t drink at all. I was afraid to be alone all weekend, because that used to be when I drank the most, but this time I had a plan. I went to meetings. I had dinner with friends. I planned for a whole day of play and goofing off, and another of getting things done. It worked! I had a great weekend and I didn’t drink. I ate a good amount of sugar, but I’m still working on that.

On the other hand, things have been really emotional and difficult when it comes to my mom.

You know I take care of my mom. Things keep getting weirder and weirder because of her illness and I am beginning to wonder if I need to set aside my career to be a caregiver. I don’t like that idea, and I know it wouldn’t have to be forever…necessarily. But I don’t like the idea…I just…don’t.

But what I like doesn’t matter much, since I’m asking you what to do.

I’ve done this before: put a question before you and then waited for an answer to come. I always wait for a clear answer, and a few people to confirm that it’s a clear answer.  Basically, I am stupid enough that I always need you to drop a burning bush on me along with a few folks to say “Holy shit that bush is on FIRE!” before I am certain of your will for me. Thank goodness that you are patient about this. You’ve always dropped a bush on me when I’ve asked you in the past, and I’m counting on it now.

My sponsor says that it is good idea to pray and then follow your will, because your will for me will always work out best for everyone involved. I agree with her.  So I’m waiting…

And wailing.

Watching my mom decline is painful and I am having all sorts of feelings that I don’t like.  I’ve already been down this road with my dad, and I don’t want to do it again.  Knowing that I might have to (possibly temporarily) set my career aside is not a pleasant idea. The whole thing freaks me out…enough that I had a little meltdown in my office today. Like…a literal meltdown. I was shaking and I was so anxious that I felt like I couldn’t breathe and I kept crying. It was awful.

Until I realized that I used to have to drink before I could cry.

I would drink so that I could let the feelings out…and then I would drink some more to make the feelings stop.

I’ll admit that I feel pretty crappy and tired from crying right now, and I keep having to take deep   breaths to keep my anxiety down. I’m taking care of myself. I’m exercising and eating healthy foods and drinking lots of water.  Okay…we both know that I had a doughnut earlier today, but other than the doughnut, I’ve eaten pretty well today…and I know that you didn’t invent doughnuts just to tell me not to eat them…

Basically, give me this day my daily bread and the occasional doughnut, because it helps with the feelings and I’d rather be chunky than drunky, if you know what I mean.

No one gets a ticket for driving while fat.  Anyway…

I’m trying hard to do the next right thing, God…and amazingly, I am finding that I am able to feel and not fall apart…and feel without drinking.

I may not like what’s happening right now, but you promised that things would start getting better and that you would do for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

I’m counting on that. I really am…and you haven’t failed me yet.

Not drinking while my husband was gone was HUGE. Crying (and stopping) without having to drink to do it is HUGE.  Asking for help from my sponsor…asking for help from ANYONE is HUGE, because I have always sucked at asking for help.

Things are changing, and I am really, really grateful.

Thank you!  And thanks, as always, for listening.

Shit Gets Better, and Other Things With Flies

God,

I cannot believe how quickly time passes.

It wasn’t that long ago that I realized that I was depressed.  I started taking anti-depressants back in early June, and it has been almost a month that I have been on the full dose of my antidepressant.  I will hit the magic ‘six weeks’ date right at the end of July, which means that soon I will find out what it’s like when my medication is fully effective. I haven’t had a bad depression day in at least a week, and maybe my depression will be gone by August.

I’d like that.

It wasn’t that long ago I got my 90 day chip—that lovely green disc that now lives in a happy place in my wallet.  I keep it there so that I can see it every now and then and remember the celebration moments of my sobriety.

I’ll be four months sober in only a few days.  Time really flies!

You know what else has flies?

Shit. Something that I’m having a lot less of in my life these days.

Sorry…bad transition, I know, but I thought you might get a giggle out of it.

I’m starting to work my fourth step with my sponsor, and things are already starting to change, which surprises me. When I say things are starting to change, I mean that I’m starting to look at my shit, the stuff that I’m doing that is mucking up my life…and it’s helping.

I read the directions in the Big Book, and then decided the best way to start my fourth step was to make a list off all my resentments. I actually sat and tried to think of people that piss me off.  A few came to mind almost immediately: my mom, people I work with, a few of my supervisors, some folks who engaged in gender discrimination or sexual harassment in the workplace, my husband (after this many years of marriage, there are bound to be a few things that piss you off.)

I made the list of my resentments as detailed as I could, making sure that I listed every single resentment I could think of, even if they were only mildly annoying.  Afterwards, I felt kind of petty.

I spent a few days dreading giving my sponsor my list of resentments, thinking that she’d point out my (obvious?) character flaws, fearing that I’d go right into defensive mode, worried that I’d be busy trying to protect my fragile ego.

None of that happened.

First off, we spent our entire first meeting talking about my mom. We only met for an hour, and my list of resentments against my mom was really long, and I didn’t want her to think my mom was a train wreck so I spent some time explaining the why behind the resentments, and…

You get the picture.

Anyway, at the end of the first hour, she asked me to think about my expectations of my mom.  In other words, how did my expectations for my mom (i.e. what our relationship should be like, how she should have behaved when I was younger, how she should behave now) have to do with my resentments? Basically, what is my part in the problem?

I went home and thought about it for about a week before I started writing.  I thought it would be harder, but it wasn’t.  Moreover, the first blessings of working my fourth step landed in my lap the day after we started working my fourth step.

So many of the resentments I have against my mom are based in my childhood. Those things cannot be changed.   However, there are a few resentments I have against my mother that are based in current behaviors, and I realized that every single one of them is based in the fear that I will have to make choices about my mom’s care that will cause her to resent me.

Let me say that again: I resent my mom because I am afraid of something that hasn’t happened yet.

I’m afraid of something that hasn’t happened yet…that may never happen. And because I am afraid, I have feelings of resentment that I don’t have to have at all, if I would just stop focusing on my fear and live in the present moment.

In other words, I don’t have to be resentful and I don’t need to be afraid either, at least not when it comes to this specific set of issues dealing with my mom.

Holy crap!

I don’t have to have this resentment.

I don’t have to be afraid.

And I realized all of this, just by talking about the resentments I have against my mom.

God, you amaze me over and over! I had no idea that things could change if I would be willing to examine the reasons behind the emotional stuff that fucks with me, that makes me miserable.

And the good news is that there is more on my list of resentments that my sponsor and I haven’t even gone over yet, and I may find other resentments that simply disappear because you reveal other areas where I am afraid of things that are not happening and may never happen, or that I am afraid of things that happened in the past and may never happen again.

You know, God, I didn’t think I’d get so many blessings this early into my sobriety. I thought I’d have to work much harder, that I’d have to wait much longer, and that sobriety would be more…miserable.

We both know that I miss alcohol. Hell, last night I dreamed of drinking for the first time since I stopped drinking, and I don’t even know why I dreamed of drinking. And I didn’t dream of drinking the stuff that I really liked, the stuff that I actually miss.

I miss cold Sauvignon Blanc.  I miss good Cabernet Sauvignon. I miss cold sparkling Rosé. But mostly, I miss cold Sauvignon Blanc…a tall, cold glass on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon, while I read or watched some TV. I also have to admit that I miss drinking myself numb on wine at the end of the day, and it didn’t really matter what type of wine. I just wanted to be numb.

I miss it.  I really do, especially after a rough day at work.

But I don’t miss waking up at 3am, anxious as hell. I don’t miss lying awake for an hour or more, berating myself for drinking too much the night before. I don’t miss realizing that I couldn’t remember anything that happened after 9pm the previous night. I don’t miss coming home after church, wondering if my husband is going to be angry about how much I drank the previous night. Not that he ever was, but I was sure it was coming one day. I don’t miss being anxious about seeing my doctor for my yearly check-up, afraid that she’s going to tell me that she can tell I’m drinking too much just by my blood test results. I don’t miss being afraid that I’m destroying my body one organ at a time. Most of all, I don’t miss hating myself for being an alcoholic.

The funny thing is that I am still an alcoholic, but I don’t hate myself at all anymore, because I am a grateful recovering alcoholic by the grace of a God who decided that I shouldn’t have to wait to start experiencing the blessings that come with sobriety.

And I’ll take a cold glass of that feeling every hour on the hour all day long, and whenever I wake up in the middle of the night as well.

Thanks for listening!

Something Has To Break

God,

I finally went and saw my doctor, and they agreed that I need some anti-depressants. I wish that I could say the lovely mood that came on when I realized I was clinically depressed lasted the six days until I saw my doctor, but it didn’t.

In fact, Sunday and Monday were absolutely awful.

It helped to have a good cry and admit to you that I was incredibly overwhelmed and exhausted, and it also helped to admit that something has to break before I do.  I keep repeating that, because it reminds me that I have choices to make, priorities to keep in mind when I am going through my day.  Until now I have tried to just keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other in the vain belief that I could keep all the balls in the air if I didn’t give in to the depression.

That turned out to be a lie. I can’t even think straight enough to read emails thoroughly so I don’t attend meetings that were cancelled two days ago.

Yep…I’m writing this sitting in the empty room that was supposed to be filled with my colleagues. I glanced over the email when I got it, but I was so overwhelmed that what it said didn’t register with me at all. So here I sit, alone in this room, frustrated that I left my class to attend this non-existent meeting. I was really upset about it until I realized that I should expect moment like this, moments when my depression clouds my ability to keep up with my own schedule.

This must be one of the things that needed to break.

I kept repeating ‘Something needs to break before I do’ all day Monday, even as I got multiple requests for appointments. I even got a text from a previous client asking to get back on my schedule. 

I turned everyone down. Even though people are not ‘things’ to be broken, I cannot be everyone’s solution. It’s not like you aren’t on top of everyone else’s needs, God…so I don’t have to be on-point, ready to service the world.  Things need to break before I do, and one thing that needs to break is my sense that I should always be available to help. I am not available to take any more clients for as long as it takes for me to be okay again… and maybe for a little while after that just to make sure that I’ve got my footing. I’m going to have to trust that you have those folks in your palm and are taking care of them, because I can’t take care them.

Then I went to the 12 step meeting that I ended up chairing when the actual chair disappeared. I worry about her safety, but everyone else says that she ‘went out’ (meaning that she started drinking again.) I don’t know why that’s supposed to be less alarming than the potential that something terrible happened to her, but the other folks in AA are not concerned, so I am leaving her in your hands and letting go of my concerns. Anyway…I got to the meeting that I am chairing and discovered that we will be rotating to new meeting chairs at the end of June.

I call this God doing things for me that I cannot do for myself. Pulled that meeting right out of my hands, didn’t you?  Thank you!  I decided to attend the workshop that teaches us how to chair meetings (it might be nice to know what I’m doing) and also decided not to sign up to chair a meeting for at least three months.  If you are going to pull something out of my hands, I am going to let you take it.

I’ll be honest…I don’t like feeling this messed up. I don’t like crying myself to sleep. I don’t like feeling overwhelmed. I don’t like not being up to my normal standard of performance.

This is the part where I have to accept life on life’s terms. Sometimes I will be sick. Sometimes I will be ‘not okay’ and I won’t be able to be as on top of things as I’d like. Sometimes I will have to ask for others to be patient with me and maybe even to forgive my failures.  Maybe I need to ask myself to be patient with me and to forgive my failures. Can you help me do that?

Actually, I don’t know all of what I’m going to have to do to get to the point where I’m better. All I know is that I am doing my best to do the footwork and do the next right thing. The rest I’m going to have to leave in your hands.

Please keep doing for me the things I cannot do for myself, and I will do my best to do your will, albeit slowly and with some difficulty at times. I’m guessing that you are good with that.

Thanks for listening!

The Strange Way That Things Get Better

Dear God,

It’s been a while since I’ve had the energy to post anything. Much to my surprise, everything still feels overwhelming. I do have to admit that some things have gotten better, though.

Shortly after I stopped drinking and started attending AA, I stopped hating myself, which is a victory all by itself.  What I didn’t anticipate was that I would no longer be ashamed of the label ‘alcoholic’…in fact, it comes in handy at times. I was with my extended family in another state, and we were at a restaurant for lunch. Everyone ordered their (alcohol-based) drinks, and when they were trying to decide if they wanted another round after lunch was over, I blurted out “Go ahead and have another round. I can drive.  You’re with an alcoholic, so you always have a designated driver!” The funny thing was that I didn’t feel weird saying that out loud. It felt no different than saying that I’m only 5’2”, or that I have curly hair. It was just a thing about me…not some terrible, shameful secret. The fact that my daughter was all excited to see my 60 day chip and gave me a huge hug was just icing on the cake.

I have also gained some clarity about why I was trying to erase myself from the room with alcohol. This is about me not wanting to make waves, not wanting to be inconvenient or vulnerable. Basically it’s hard for me to be honest about what I’m feeling: what I’m willing to do and not willing to do, or what hurts me and doesn’t hurt me. I learned the wrong stuff in my family of origin, and while they were doing their best, I have a lot of unhealthy things to unlearn. This is going to take a while, and I’m going to have to be patient with myself. I’m also pretty sure that I’m going to have to cry in front of other people a few times (something I HATE to do) before I learn to say ‘no’ or ‘stop that, it hurts me’ without falling apart. I’m pretty sure I’ll get there…I’m just really, really anxious about it.

I have also gained some clarity around how I’m doing in general, and sadly, it’s not good.

While I was drinking, I kept running through the Beck Depression Inventory** in my head, asking myself if I was becoming depressed. After all, there had to be a reason for my drinking. Whenever I thought about it, I’d decide that I was still okay, that I was just having some negative thoughts about myself for drinking too much.

I was definitely right about drinking too much, and along with negative thoughts about myself, I could have added crushing anxiety and difficulty sleeping. But all those problems went away after I stopped drinking. Like I mentioned a moment ago, I don’t hate myself anymore. I also don’t wake up at 3am with crushing anxiety to lie awake and berate myself for being a worthless drunk.

So why do I start to cry whenever I have a minute alone with my feelings? And why am I overwhelmed whenever anything happens?  At first, I thought I was just letting out the grief that I drowned in alcohol (I lost my best friend and my father 3 months apart in early 2018.) And I kept chiding myself to stop thinking that every damn thing was some major pain in my ass; basically I chided myself to stop acting like an active alcoholic and start learning to accept life on life’s terms.

But then I noticed that I wasn’t pissed off when things went wrong. I felt utterly overwhelmed…so much so that all I heard in my head was ‘I can’t…I can’t…I just can’t. I can’t. I can’t do one more thing. I can’t.”  That’s not me being unwilling to accept life on life’s terms, that’s me begging for things to stop bulldozing me.

Then I noticed that every time my husband or my best friend (not the dead one…I have more than one ‘best’ friend) talked to me, I would have to try extra hard to listen and to care. The whole time they were talking, I’d be in my head thinking ‘Please shut up. Please stop talking. Please leave me alone.’ Add to all this that I am utterly exhausted all the time, and I finally had to admit something to myself.

This whole mess is NOT. NORMAL.

I finally realized that I might be dealing with clinical depression after all. You may ask what ‘clinical depression’ is. Everybody gets down now and then: the job isn’t going well, troubles with a spouse or a child, issues with health or with chronic pain, the recent death of someone we love…all these things will cause us to feel down, and this is totally normal. We don’t call that depression because a normal reaction to stress or loss isn’t considered pathological (something that is a disease), and depression is an actual disease. You might not think so, but as someone trained in this field, let me tell you: mood disorders are diseases, just like kidney failure and diabetes are diseases. I watched my youngest daughter struggle with terrible depression and anxiety driven by thyroid failure and have worked with a patient whose brittle diabetes caused horrible mood swings and intractable depression (depression that didn’t respond to medication) and nothing helped until the doctor got the diabetes under control. Depression and anxiety aren’t just moods, not when they are daily realities. Depression and anxiety are diseases that require medical treatment.

So guess who made an appointment to go to the doctor? 

Me! Me! Me!

Yeah, I’m kind of excited about it, which I realize seems a bit strange.

The thing is that I’ve been trying to work my program and straighten myself out, to basically ‘sober’ myself out of the deep hole my moods have fallen into. Realizing that I might actually be depressed and need treatment made me feel better immediately, because it means that I might feel much better in six short weeks! I realize that six weeks seems like a long time, but as someone who has been sober for ten weeks now (I am sneaking up on that 90 day chip) I now prefer to think that things get just a little better every day when you just keep doing the next right thing. So I’m going to take the antidepressant that my doctor prescribes, and keep taking care of myself (eat right, get rest, exercise regularly) so that I have a good chance of recovering by the time I have moved onto my fourth month sober…and I cannot tell you just how relieved I am.

I have no guarantee that I’ll get on the right medication right away, or that my depression will resolve easily with medication, but I have to admit that just simply being sober for over two months has given me all sorts of gifts, and increasing levels of clarity has been one of those gifts. That increasing clarity is what made it possible to observe myself a bit more closely and realize that I needed to see a doctor.

In meetings, we say that when you work a program of sobriety, that God does for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  That is absolute truth, and my upcoming appointment with my doctor is evidence of that. If I was still drinking, I would still be struggling to get past self-hatred and anxiety. I would still be putting all my effort into learning to control my drinking so that I could stop after one or two glasses of wine. Controlled drinking is the elusive unicorn that every alcohol longs to find and never does. I’d have been so busy being focused on trying to control my drinking (and failing) that I’d have entirely missed everything else. It’s hard to thoughtfully observe your own struggles when you are too drunk to remember what you did or said just 20 minutes ago.

So here I am, sober and depressed and strangely grateful to know this.  Of course, the fact that I just spent a holiday weekend hanging out with friends and family and I remember every damn minute of that weekend adds to my gratitude.

Every day I discover new miracles of sobriety, and it turns out that discovering my depression is another one. Who knows just how things will change, once I’m on the right meds? Hot damn…life is looking up and I haven’t even gotten to my doctor’s appointment yet.

Thanks God. Actually, thanks a LOT. And thanks for listening.

**  The Beck Depression Inventory is useful for helping you determine if you need some intervention/help with your mood. It is available online here:

https://deprese.euzona.cz/en-index.php

So Soon?

Dear God,

I could have sworn that sobriety was about me not drinking anymore, about me finally being present in my own life and not getting numb and hiding. There is quite a bit of truth in that, but I am discovering that there is so much more to being sober.

For instance, feelings.

I have realized that I often have no idea what I’m feeling. When I have really strong feelings (like the intense anxiety I had at the beginning of the pandemic) they are easy to identify and I can talk about them and take action to help myself deal with them. But smaller feelings…the kind of feelings that drift under the surface without making much noise…I have no idea about those.

For instance, as I started writing this, I felt a little tightness in my chest that has moved to my face as I’ve typed these few paragraphs.  For reasons entirely unknown to me, I want to cry. When I first got sober I cried at the drop of a hat because I felt so negative about myself. I don’t feel that anymore. In fact, when I go to meetings I actually feel happy. So I have no idea why I want to cry right now. In fact, as I sit here thinking about what I’m feeling and writing about it, I feel the sensation less and less and am losing my connection to the feeling.

It seems that analyzing my feelings (instead of just sitting with them and feeling them) causes them to recede. Maybe I should try sitting with them for a minute. Give me a moment here.

Yep…those tears were right under the surface, waiting for some silence. The words that came to me in those tears were tired, scared and sad. I don’t know all of what those feelings are about, and I’m not sure I want to analyze them much because that seems to stop me from feeling my feelings. So I guess that I am just tired and scared and sad and perhaps that is enough to know at this moment. And if I let myself feel how I am tired, scared, and sad, maybe I won’t want to drink those feelings away, or eat them away. I’ve been doing that a lot lately instead of drinking. My sponsor says that I need to be patient with myself, and that as I work the steps to stay sober from alcohol I will also find it easier to have feelings without having to eat to make them go away.  This is good news, and I’m trusting that what she says will come true for me at some point. For now, pass me the cookies. NOW.

Along with feelings, I have also discovered clarity that I didn’t know was possible.

Don’t laugh, considering that I had to stop typing just a moment ago in order to get to a genuine feeling. This clarity thing has been a bit mind blowing, since some of the things I’m getting clarity on have been really difficult for me for a very long time.

I have been trying so hard to do the right things when it comes to taking care of my mom and instead, things just keep getting harder and more confusing and frustrating. Talking about it with my sponsor and my husband has helped a great deal, possibly because I am sober when these conversations happen and that means that 1) I remember the conversations the next day; and 2) my emotions and thoughts are not exacerbated or muted by alcohol. Because of this, I am beginning to see patterns in my mom’s behavior that have been there since I was a child. Recognizing those patterns and how I was taught to ignore them, accommodate them, and pretend they weren’t dysfunctional helps me make sense of my resentments towards my mother. I am also seeing how attempts to placate her are backfiring and causing more problems than they are fixing. 

I have figured out more about my relationship with my mom in the last three weeks than I have in the last five years, and I was in counseling for several months at least twice during the last five years. Not that my counselors didn’t try to help me…they did. It’s just that you can’t pour poison into your body every single night and expect your brain to be in top form the next day. I’m not judging those who still drink. Remember…alcoholics have an obsession of the mind and allergy of the body.  Alcohol is poisonous to me just like penicillin is deadly to those who are allergic to it.

Anyway…

We read this thing in meetings called the Ninth Step Promises that swears that as we work the steps, we will instinctively come to know how to handle situations that used to baffle us.  This morning as I was getting ready for work, I suddenly knew what needed to change in regards to my mother’s medical care and why it needed to change. I knew how I was going to present it to my mother, and that I had to do it in front of her neurologist. I also immediately knew that she would probably balk and be upset with me, but that I shouldn’t let that stop me from setting this boundary so that she can receive the medical care that she needs.

Boundaries upset lots of people when we set them, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t set them…and I am about to set some boundaries regarding medical care with my mom. Good daughters do such things.

And there it was…suddenly I knew how to handle a situation that until that moment had utterly baffled me. And not only was I not baffled, I had a profound sense of peace about the decision. Two Ninth Step promises, come true.

I haven’t been sober very long—exactly 51 days, if we’re counting. Having said that, these moments of feelings and clarity tell me that I need to keep working on my sobriety, that I need to keep working the steps with my sponsor, and that I need to keep going to meetings.

This whole thing isn’t easy, but God…

You are doing for me what I cannot do for myself, and I am very, very grateful.

I have hope that things will get better, that things will change, and this hope that is stronger than any hope that I have had for a very long time.

I’m still dealing with Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome, but I’m not dealing with self-hatred, shame, and hangovers anymore.  It’s a nice trade-off, really, and the PAWS goes away after a while. 

So here I am God, a grateful alcoholic.  Thank you for listening.

On Such A Night As This…

God,

I did it!

I have been so afraid of doing anything in public with other people, afraid of going to dinner with anyone other than my husband P or my kids. Basically I am afraid of doing anything that will bring me in contact with alcohol when there won’t be anyone with me who knows that I have decided to be sober. When P is with me, it’s not like I’m going to order a drink because he knows, because he was a part of my decision to stop drinking. The same thing goes for my kids.

But when I’m out with friends who have no idea, what’s to stop me from having a drink?

I mean, like, other than the memories of waking up at 3am hating myself, and the tears I cried at every meeting for the first two weeks of my sobriety, and the fact that I’m supposed to be chairing a meeting this Monday evening and you have to be sober to chair a meeting…

That’s a lot of reasons right there, but lets be real. Addicts are good at lying. Addicts are great at lying! And addicts lie to themselves and to everyone else if they think that they can get away with using their substance of choice without penalty.

I have had this dinner on my schedule for two weeks, and the whole time I’ve wondered what it would be like to sit in a fancy restaurant known for it’s wine collection and watch everyone else drink while I try to be a ‘good girl’. I wasn’t sure I could do it. I was afraid that I wouldn’t make it. I was afraid that I’d lose control. I was afraid that I’d crave alcohol like crazy and not be able to think straight.

This is what happened: We spent at least 30 minutes catching up before we even ordered the first course. We shared delicious tempura fried mushrooms with fontina cheese dip and seared scallops with green beans, cherry tomatoes, and saffron bernaise to start. I had rack of lamb with baby potatoes, and then we shared two desserts between us, and I’m still not sure which one was better.

You know what I didn’t have?

Guilt. Self-hatred.

Oh! and I also didn’t have any alcohol.

I didn’t have alcohol even when the bartender brought us expensive dessert wine on the house. I told my dining companions that drinking caused me terrible pain and suggested that they share it since it just wasn’t an option for me. They made ‘so sorry’ sounds, and then gladly shared my portion.

After dessert, I would occasionally get a waft of fortified dessert wine (meaning that there was hard liquor mixed in) from the empty glass sitting in front of me. I picked up my iced tea and held it in front of my face, and after a minute I pushed my wine glass further away so that I could set my iced tea directly in front of me.

You know what else I didn’t have?

Anything to confess to my husband when I got home. A reason to call my sponsor.

Oh! and I also didn’t have any CRAVINGS.

I didn’t have any cravings!  I sat there facing an entire wall of wine racks filled with expensive wine. I caught myself trying to figure out the brands from the labels and then decided that was unwise, so I turned my attention to my companions.

And at the end of the evening I realized I enjoyed dinner, had a wonderful time with my friends, and didn’t have one stupid craving.  What makes this truly amazing is it was a group of friends who are dealing with dementia in our families and who are all grieving lost family members.  Everything we discussed was raw, honest, and somewhat painful…and I still didn’t have any cravings.

It’s a miracle.

I know it won’t always be like this, where I have no cravings and it’s easy to get through the event, but tonight God delivered me a beautiful craving free night that (only a few short weeks ago back in March) would have involved me drinking two or three glasses of wine during dinner, and then more after I got home to my own stash.

I am beyond grateful to you God!  Thank you from the bottom of my (incredibly full and satisfied) stomach, and from the bottom of my very happy heart.

Sorry. I Have Mommy Issues

Dear God,

Well, for someone who was wondering about stored up emotions, I do believe I have found a few that were stuffed in a drawer or something, because I was a hot mess this last weekend.

Basically, my mom decided to do her ‘bad daughter, guilt, guilt!’ thing with me. My mom learned to be a master guilt artist from her mom, who used to use guilt to manipulate people into giving her what she wanted instead of just asking directly for what she wanted. My grandmother twisted my mom into emotional pretzels for years. It was horrible to watch, and I swore that I would never let my mom do it to me.

Let’s all stop for a moment and laugh at how naïve and hopeful I was when I was younger.

Back to the plot: my mom called me this Sunday because she was “all alone with no one to talk to”.  She complained at length about being alone all the time, even though I hired a caregiver to be with her five days a week. She complained that her neighbors all have families to be with even though her friends Jim and Cathy, a childless couple who are the same age as my mom, live only two doors down on the same street.  I asked her if she had gone to church. She said no, and then complained that she doesn’t want to go to church anymore because no one knows her there. I invited her to consider joining a group at her church so that more people would get to know her, but she refused. I asked her if she had called her friend Donna. She got very snippy saying that Donna never calls her, so why should she call Donna? Then I asked if she had called her best friend. She told me that she called her best friend, but best friend was out to dinner with her family like they always do on Sunday.

“At least she has her family to go out with.”

Excuse me for a minute while I breathe deeply and unclench my teeth.

By the time I got off the phone with my mom, I was livid. I immediately went to my husband and told P about the phone call and vented my frustration.  My mom has spent the last 10 years of her life in increasing isolation, having pulled away from her friends while my father was still alive because of his dementia. She refused to go to caregiver support groups, because “what are those people going to tell me that is going to help?” She refused to hire caregivers because “your father would never allow it!” When I broached the subject with my father, he told me that my mother would never allow it.  When I offered to spend time with Daddy so that she could go out with friends, or just run errands alone, she told me I was too busy. When my father would get out of control because of his dementia, she would call me, screaming at me that I didn’t know how hard it was for her, that I just didn’t care. After my Dad died, I invited her to go to a grief group with me.  She told me that she didn’t want to go and listen to other people whine about their grief. When I took her to my grief group’s “Surviving The Holidays” seminar, she openly mocked other people’s grief (quietly to me during the seminar, and then loudly in the car on the way home.)  Now that my father has been dead for three years, she tells me that I have no idea how hard it is to live without my father and that she can’t get over his death. When I suggest a grief group, she says “What are those people going to tell me that is going to help?” 

By now you know the tune of the song I’m singing, so join in the chorus with me:

“Victim…your mom’s a VICTIM! And as a VICTIM, her life is not her fault. (Oh yes it is) She’s such a VICTIM….”  Everybody sing along!

Yes indeed, folks. Yes she is. And this Sunday, she wanted to blame me for her victim status, because my husband and I aren’t taking her out to dinner so that she doesn’t have to be alone on the weekend. Not that she has done anything to end her loneliness. Not that she has reached out to re-establish connections with the dozens of friends she dropped while caregiving my father. Not that she reached out to ask me to spend time with her. She just dropped a guilt bomb and hoped that I would respond accordingly. Despite the fact that I refused to accept the guilt, I ended the call extremely perturbed and went to vent my anger to my husband.

I spent most of Sunday evening livid.

On Monday I woke up and immediately started crying.

You see, anger is a secondary emotion that occurs when pain, sorrow, fear, and/or dread are there. We use anger to marshal our energy to fight whatever it is that is causing our sorrow, fear, pain, or dread.  If we want to stop being angry, eventually we have to feel whatever is feeding the anger (pain/sorrow/fear/dread) so that we can let the whole thing go.

Apparently, what was underneath my anger was sorrow and pain.  Good evening, ladies and gentleman! Without alcohol it appears that our little lady here has feelings about her mom’s behaviors and a lot less patience for them than she originally thought.

While I was drinking it was easy to numb myself to my frustration with my mom’s refusal to take responsibility for the loneliness of the life she built, with her refusal to deal with her emotions and her grief. I thought I had patience for her endless complaints and her evident misery combined with her unwillingness to do anything to remedy that misery, but that patience came out of a wine bottle. Moreover, drinking made me numb to the pain and sorrow I felt because of my mom’s choices, her actions, and the way those choices and actions impacted me.

I thought I was good at dodging her guilt bombs and the blame they carry…but I’m not as good at it as I thought. I seem to be able to avoid the guilt, but apparently I am unable to avoid the pain that comes with being blamed for not remedying my mom’s misery. And believe me, she blames me. Even my husband thinks that she blames me.  

She blamed me for not saving her from my father’s dementia when he was alive (that would take a book to explain it to you) and she blames me for not being the remedy to her loneliness and misery now.

As much as that hurts, I am unwilling to be her remedy. There are things that I can do that will temporarily ease her loneliness and grief, but in the end, only she can make the choice to own her sorrow and process it, and sadly she is running out of time. Eventually her dementia will seal off her ability to change anything, and she will be trapped in the misery she has created for herself, without sufficient cognitive power to process much of anything. I am genuinely afraid of such a thing happening to her, and of how much she might blame me for the decisions I will have to make about her care in the aftermath. Sadly, her cognitive decline is like a train coming at both of us, and I can’t manage to get us off the tracks.

For a while now I’ve been asking you for help with my mom’s care, God, for help with the decisions that we need to make in order to take care of her. It’s just me and my husband dealing with my mom’s cognitive decline (that will soon be re-diagnosed as dementia) and I need all the guidance and help from God that I can get.

It turns out that I am having to turn my mom…not just her care, but her entire person…over to you. I am second-stepping my mom multiple times a day right now, and to be honest I’m probably going to hand her over to you again as soon as I’m done writing this.

Please help me not to resent her for the pain that she causes me.  She is the adult child of an alcoholic father and a narcissistic mother, and so many of her issues stem from her childhood. Like the Big Book says, she is sick. I am sick too…I’m just starting my recovery. I still have time to free myself from the patterns that might hold me tight to my misery. I don’t want to be bitter and lonely when I grow old. As crazy as this sounds, thank you for alcoholism, because it just might be the thing that keeps me from growing up to be just like my mom.

So please God, help me to make wise decisions about my mom’s care, her finances, her housing, and her caregivers. And please take care of my mom, because there is only so much that I can do, and she is really miserable.

Thanks for listening.

Other People’s Misery Makes Me Feel Normal

Dear God,

Not that you don’t know this already, but I’ve been on a tear of reading memoirs of sobriety. Reading about other people’s addictions serves two purposes: first…my bottom wasn’t very low and it can be very satisfying to realize that other people got sober without first having to destroy their lives entirely.  It is also satisfying to read about the people who did destroy their lives, just because it’s fascinating.

If you are wondering, yes, I do slow down to look at car accidents as I drive past them.

The second reason for reading all those sobriety memoirs is that they make me feel NORMAL.

First I read Laura McKowen’s We Are the Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life. McKowan was the first person to explain that it is okay to grieve over becoming sober, that giving up anything that I relied on as much as I relied on alcohol would involve a huge sense of loss, and loss kind of requires a time of grieving.  I had felt like such a fool for being sad that I couldn’t drink anymore. I kept faulting myself for not finding that ‘pink cloud’ that I was supposed to be experiencing. I think I found the pink cloud one day, for about five or six hours, on a Thursday about two weeks ago. Every hour other than those five or six has been relatively bleak, but I hear that things get better after 90 days of sobriety.

The other thing I learned from McKowen is that being truthful is not an option for sober people. Basically, dishonestly = eventual relapse.

For some, this is because their alcoholism took them to the place where they lied constantly. I heard a speaker say that she lied about what she ate for breakfast, not because she needed to, but because lying was a thing she did. For her, lying is a sign that her sobriety isn’t on solid ground anymore.

My disease didn’t take me to the place where I lied just because it was what I did. Mostly, I tell the truth about myself, my behaviors, etc. The major place I was hiding was in my drinking. However, I need to admit that I drank because I needed to erase myself from the room. In other words: I drank because I didn’t want to have to admit all the things I was doing that I just didn’t want to do anymore. Alcohol was my editor, the one who kept me from saying all the things I really wanted to say.

I edit myself around my mom because she is so difficult for me to manage (I am her care manager and medical POA as she has cognitive issues and needs caregivers.)

I edit myself around my husband and say ‘yes’ when I want to say ‘no’ (or vice versa) because I want to make him happy.

I edit myself in situations where I am supposed to ‘serve’ like a good (what I do for a living). I’m supposed to be compassionate, kind, always thinking of others, outgoing, intelligent, and in so many ways—servile. There are times when I want to say things that are not kind but are definitely true (at least for me), and I edit myself into silence while forcing myself to continue serving on that committee, helping with whatever they want, etc.

I fear that my sobriety is going to make me unpopular with people who previously thought I was easy to work with.  But if maintaining my good standing in other people’s eyes means that I need to soak myself in alcohol every damn day, is their opinion really worth maintaining? Aren’t I worth something more than what other’s think of me, or what I can do for them?

That’s a question that I already know the answer to, but doing what it takes to live that answer is incredibly scary for me right now.

I am currently reading The Sober Diaries by Clare Pooley. She started writing a blog about becoming sober (gee…who does such a thing? LOL) right as she quit drinking, writing an entry every day just to get the thoughts out of her head and onto virtual paper. I’m pretty sure she used the blog when writing her book, as each chapter begins with the amount of time she’s been sober. I think I might re-read the early part of her book because the details of the first 30 days of her sobriety are so very validating to me and my experience.   I especially loved it when she pointed out that alcohol is the only drug where you are considered to be weird or flawed if you have to stop using it, while those who still drink are considered ‘normal’.  I’m not so sure that we’d view things the same way if I was becoming sober from heroin or meth.

Lately I have been craving carbs, especially sweet carbs. And when I say that I’ve been craving them, I don’t mean, gee, maybe I’ll stop by the store later and get a candy bar. It’s more like OH MY GOD I NEED AN APPLE FRITTER RIGHT NOW! RIGHT! NOW! NOW!

At first, I thought I was just having a couple of carb-ish days, the kind that happen when you have a hormone surge.  I’d been having hot flashes for about a week and had been fighting with chin pimples, so I figured the whole estrogen thing would go away within the week.

The estrogen thing did stop, but the cravings did not.

I finally realized that my brain had decided to play nice and not ask for wine when it was stressed, having emotions, or just wanted something soothing…so it was asking for carbs.

Toast.

Pasta.

Sugar, especially if it comes in the form of cake or donuts.

I texted my sponsor and she assured me that this is normal and that I shouldn’t be too alarmed. She told me to try and keep the house stocked with healthy foods, and to limit my consumption of low nutrition, high carb (read that CRAP) food simply because it would make me feel sluggish and numb…much like alcohol used to make me feel.

Part of me is disgusted with myself for being unable to deal with emotions without some sort of crutch to comfort me. For God’s sake, what is so bad about sadness? Why are tears so terrifying? I’ve been angry plenty enough times to know that I can deal with my anger without falling apart.

Then again, I have to wonder how many old emotions have been waiting in the wings, hoping to be expressed. I’ve been drinking for over 10 years…and I’m pretty sure that I stumbled into the unhealthy drinking stage back in 2015 or so…meaning that there could be six years of emotions stacked up, waiting for release.  That’s a lot of fear, pain, sadness, frustration, anxiety, and anger all waiting for their moment to be felt, acknowledged, and let go. Just thinking about it makes me want a donut.

Maybe I’ll go to a meeting instead.

Thanks for listening.

OMG I made it!

Dear God,

Today is Day 30!! 

30 days of sobriety means something in AA.  I won’t be going to a meeting tonight, so I won’t get my 30 day chip until later this week. I’d get my chip on Thursday, but I’m holding out until Friday because I want to get my chip from my sponsor A. I figure she has to put up with my daily text messages, so she ought to get the pleasure of handing me that 30-day chip.

I went to a meeting last night. I was the only person in the room for about 10 minutes, and then one other person showed up.

Long and short of it…we both needed that meeting.   We shared about our challenges and our awareness that sobriety means changing the way that we relate to the world and see ourselves in relation to the world (which is so much more than just ‘don’t drink or do drugs’…so much more!)  In fact, we talked for an entire hour.

We both really needed that meeting.

Today I am really grateful that I don’t have to be sober alone. Today I am really grateful for one other person who shows up to help me stay sober another day. Today I am really grateful for AA literature, for sponsors, for the 12 steps, and for the realization that I while I am powerless over alcohol, I have the power to go to a meeting. I am grateful for the fellowship I find in AA, and that I am not alone anymore.

Today, despite all the things that tell me that I should be grumpy and unhappy, I am happy to be sober and able to work a program.

God grant me the strength to start working the steps (beyond the first three…like, I need to start figuring out the crazy crap that got my drunk in the first place, so I need to start step four) and to trust my sponsor to get me through the emotions that will come up when I start getting really honest with myself. Help me to retain my gratefulness when things get painful, and to trust that the promises in the Big Book will actually happen for me if I am willing to work the steps.

Most of all, God, grant me the strength to show up to meetings when it might be just me and one other person. Keep me in that chair in an empty room long enough for someone else to show up, because that someone else needs me to be there just like I need them.

Thanks for sticking with me through the first 30 days!

On Being Invisible and the Bendable Truth

Dear God,

Sobriety, as I understand it right now, involves getting honest with myself and with others. It involves learning to speak difficult truths about myself to myself and to at least one other person. I am also beginning to realize that it involves speaking my truth to other people, especially when I find myself saying ‘yes’ when I really want to say ‘no’, or vice versa.

I get all that, and while I am not there yet, I am working on it.

So what do I do when the other person wants nothing to do with the truth?

I’ve spent the last 10 years erasing myself from the room by medicating with alcohol.  I can do anything, be anyone, endure anything, as long as I am numb from alcohol. It makes me much more agreeable, but entirely dishonest about what I really want in life, and so I get that I need to be honest. But right now, my mom is not interested in my honesty. She isn’t interested in the truth, not even her own truth, and I don’t know how to deal with that.

I know you know this, but I need to say it out loud.

I call my mom “Miss Revisionist History”. I call her that because the truth on any given day depends on her mood.  When she’s in a good mood, the truth is lovely and smooth and attractive, although it frequently isn’t honest. When she’s in a bad mood…well, at that point her words are a lot like knives; they are sharp words not because she is accusing or hateful towards me (at least not consistently) but instead because she hurls ugly truths—real truth—at me without thought for how those truths impact me.  Sometimes she actually hurls truths at me to accuse me; sometimes to accuse me of not caring enough about her struggle, and sometimes to accuse me of being responsible for her struggle.  Don’t worry…I don’t take responsibility for my mom’s life, because her choices are her own. That doesn’t mean her word knives don’t hurt, but that they don’t convince me of my culpability.

The funny thing is that I only ever found out the more difficult truths about our family, about her marriage to my father, when she was angry. I took those truths in, even though I didn’t like them, because they were the truth. I have known for a long time that truth isn’t always pretty, but the funny thing is that once the truth is known and it doesn’t have to be hidden, it can be dealt with in productive ways. Real truth—not the objective truth, because only You know that kind of truth—but the truths that each of us hide deep in our hearts? That kind of truth will set us free. The Bible said that the truth would set us free and I actually believe that.  So I was willing to hear her hurl words like knives because I thought it might set her free. Sadly, she never stayed free for long, choosing to return to smooth stories and pretty lies. I guess it made her feel better about herself.  

The problem I have is that despite the fact that I know the ugly truths, my mom wants me to pretend that I never heard those words, that I am ignorant of those ugly truths.  Even shortly after she told me the ugly truth, her mood changed and she changed her story. She expected me to go along with the new story immediately. She expects me to go along with her lies, no matter who those lies are about—my father, my brother, even my own childhood. Yes, that’s right. She expects me to lie about my own experiences, things I remember experiencing, things that I remember as violence and abuse.

It’s like she only remembers the part of the truth that she wants to remember, and she expects everyone else to be on the same page of truth that she is.

Now that my father is dead and she can freeze his history and tell only pretty stories about him, she expects me to lie about her present.

This leaves me in an uncomfortable position in so many ways.

I am her Power of Attorney, and I take her to medical appointments.  She has cognitive decline, and I have written her doctor many notes about the symptoms of my mom’s cognitive decline as well as her obvious depression and anxiety, about her never-ending grief over my father’s death coupled with her absolute refusal to see a grief counselor or go to a grief group. Nothing I do seems to budge my mom from her pretty lies, lies that she tells the doctor. I can tell that he doesn’t believe her any more than I do, but neither of us can get her to tell the truth for the sake of her own health and her quality of life. Even in her medical care, I feel forced to be complicit in her lies, although I do write lengthy letters that are shared with the doctor before each appointment.

I can’t even be honest with her about my grief over my own father, because the only grief that seems to matter is her own. She constantly talks about my father, cries about my father, pours over pictures of my father. Her grief is unending. Yet when I mentioned this morning that I cried all the way to church, all through the service, and all the way back home this last Sunday, she says nothing, asks no questions, seems uninterested even though the anniversary of my father’s death is only three weeks away. She behaved like my grief was non-existent when my best friend died only three months before my father, and then ignored my grief and my needs when my father died. There was no space for me—literally no space for me—I stood in the hallway outside the room where my father’s body lay because she was busy in there with all the church members that came to comfort her. She didn’t have space for me then and doesn’t really have space for me now.

So what do I do?

I know that she isn’t going to change. She has been this way her whole life, although it wasn’t quite as evident when I was younger. She didn’t become totally self-absorbed until my father became demented; it became even worse after he died.

I tried praying the Serenity Prayer about her today. I am her POA and I’ll be taking care of her in one way or another until she dies. I need to be able to deal with this, and yet dealing with her makes me want to drink, big time!  I don’t know if her inability to see me is my trigger, or if she is a trigger, in and of herself. Either way, drinking to deal with her just isn’t an option.

So God, please grant me the serenity to deal with a person that I cannot change, the courage to accept her as she is and to continue caring for her as she declines, and the wisdom to know how to do that without drinking to numb myself. Grant me the wisdom to let the emotions flow, because it’s that or letting the wine flow, and that just doesn’t work well in the long run.

I know that looks nothing like the traditional serenity prayer, but it is the prayer that I’m praying today.

Thanks for listening. I needed to get that off my chest.