Headaches and Heartaches

Days Sober: 20

Anyone noting the date of this entry and the date of Sober Day #5 (February 1) might notice a slight discrepancy in the timeline. Yes, I should be on Sober Day #109, had I towed the line. But no. Just one little bottle of champagne ushered in a whole new bender of headaches and heartaches.

Valentines Day, February 14, Sober Day #20: My husband brought home a bottle of champagne to celebrate what he assumes should be sex day. A little bubbly, a little romance, aren’t we the happy couple …

I did an emotional back flip and full gainer into the ground when that bottle came out of the grocery bag. No! Yes! No, no, no, no! How naughty! My husband is the Devil. Oh, what the hell. Yes! Yes! Yes! That was so yummy; let’s go get another!

And so it began. It took more than two months and a lot of heartache to feel lousy enough to re-commit to AA.  I chose May 5, Cinco de Mayo, the let’s-get-drunk-on-tequila-party-day-of-the-year,  to stop drinking. My husband said, “Why don’t you start tomorrow?”

Why? I love the date: 5/5/11. Someone once told me that the number 55 represents the separation between my heart and my head. The number 11 represents their alignment, their synchronicity. Think, feel, act in accordance with your heart, is the message. Something like that, anyway. And I believe it.

So, since 5/5/11, I’ve been hunkered in while “everyone else” has been living it up all around me. Mostly I just feel alone. I’ve reached out to God and to the Universe, turning over my wreckage and offering myself to the benefit of my fellow travelers on this earth, instead of to my own benefit.

As above, so below.

All the Pretty Cocktails

Days Sober: 5

I hate not being able to drink. Especially when I see champagne in pretty glasses. I’m a reluctant drunk, still longing to be normal, to be able to drink occasionally and then just one or two.

I have a lot of voices in my head, voices that mingle with others in a subconscious committee of sorts. No, not a committee, formed through a common purpose. Rather, a collection of warring tribal leaders, each with her own needs, desires, commands.

I often hear the voice of a child, loud and distinct, who just wants to be held at the end of the day, just for showing up and trying, just for breathing. Because life is hard.

I’m sure there is a playful voice in there somewhere, too, the voice of imagination and make-believe. That’s the voice I love the most. It’s the voice that writes words on the page, like these.

But the voice I hear the loudest these days is the Saboteur. We all have one, I think, bent on self-destruction, prone to procrastination, and happy to be nasty to lovers. This Saboteur says, Oh go ahead and drink. Start this AA business again next week. Give yourself just one more weekend, a few days, and then go back into the program. You can always quit again tomorrow.

Still another voice – who did it belong to? – was the voice I was listening to last Saturday night, when my husband went to a bar to listen to music. I stayed home, even though I’d already promised to go with him. I just knew that a bar wasn’t the best place for me. I didn’t want to put myself through it – the longing, the sideways glances at all the pretty cocktails, the sitting by myself while my husband hob-knobbed.

I wanted to stay home alone more than I wanted to put myself in a dangerous circumstance. I hear that some husbands want their wives to quit drinking, implore their wives to quit drinking, threaten their wives if they don’t quit drinking. My husband is not like that. He says, “Just don’t drink at home.” Right.

So I dodged a bullet on Saturday night, and broke the promise to follow my husband wherever he wanted to go. I’m trying to find that singular voice and to sustain it – the one voice that wants me to live, to thrive. And to stay sober.

I”ll Gladly Pay You Thursday for a Hamburger Today

Days Sober: 1

Tonight, for my big brain idea of the day, I’m going to a bar with my husband, who wants to see a comedy show. How smart is that?
I’m happy to report that I woke up without a hangover this morning, though. What a lovely feeling! A feeling I don’t ever want to forget. Though I know from experience that one forgets the misery of a hangover, over time. And the feeling of a warm and happy wine buzz sounds sooo much better. Sometime I feel as though I could happily suffer the misery of a hangover tomorrow for a bottle of wine today. This philosophy reminds me of Whimpy, who always said, “I”ll gladly pay you Thursday for a hamburger today.” Remember him? He was a character in the Popeye cartoon.
But, I’m not feeling “Whimpy” today. I can go to that bar with my husband tonight and drink Diet Coke and leave the booze to other merry revelers, who can wake up with hangovers of their own.
How do I know this? Sheer determination. I don’t want to be the buffoon in the comic strip of life.

The Perfect Excuse

Days Sober: 0

Yesterday afternoon, when the doctor told my husband that one of these times he would fall asleep at work and never wake up, I had an epiphany: this is the perfect excuse for a glass of wine tonight. That happy, shining light bulb went on right after I recovered from the impact of the ten-ton truck that had just hit me upside the head.

I have spent plenty of time being angry over my husband’s predilection for sleeping pills and pain killers. I’ve gone into rage, control, stress, disappointment, strategy, outreach, intervention, you name it. But true, real fear … not like this. My husband could die any day: suddenly and too young.

So, I slammed down two glasses of wine at a business function right after the doctor appointment. Then we went to dinner and I drank a super margarita. Then I got mean, as I often do when I drink, especially the hard stuff.

After my family was asleep, I was jonzing for more to drink. I thought about driving to the store for a bottle of wine. But it was late at night and I’m a picky wino: I don’t like mini-market wine brands. What I really wanted was a double shot of 80-proof Rumple Minze from the bar down the road. But I’d heard a horrid story in Day One’s Alcoholic Anonymous meeting from a woman who had gotten a DUI and she was scared and humiliated and despised by her family. That story put the fear of God in me. Then, I thought to call a cab and get a ride to the bar and back.

Oh, the effort it took, all the energy I spent trying to find a way to get a drink in front of me! Finally, a small voice of sanity bubbled up from below the crusty surface of my heart: Go to sleep.

I slept 12 hours, mostly from self-loathing and a desire to avoid the day ahead. In the end, I went to a noon AA meeting, reached out to someone there, and found some support. Tomorrow will be Day One again, but I am not all alone. I have hope and tonight I’m jonzing more for self-esteem than anything else.

I Do Blame My Mother

Days Sober: 2

I admit it. It’s not a empowered approach, or a particularly helpful approach, but I do blame my mother for my disease. My earliest memories of her are of her, my brother and me all sitting up at a bar in Montana. This was familiar ground for her. She knew everybody and everybody knew her. My brother and I, wide-eyed, drank Shirley Temples while our legs dangled off the bar stools. Mom enjoyed something more distinctive: bourbon, I believe.

Ben and I were being raised my my father’s mother, because our own mother was busy living the high life and our dad, wide-eyed but not necessarily innocent, ran away from home. Far away from home.

In my grandmother’s house, this notion of preschool barhopping would not have gone over well, not that anyone ever told her how we spent our afternoons with mom. They wouldn’t have dared. And truth isn’t the habit of drinking moms, or of the children who desperately want the love of those moms.

My complaint isn’t the Shirley Temples on rare appearance of my mother, though. It’s the damage she inflicted before I was born and before I was old enough to be able remember the cruelty and the neglect. Who could have asked a young mother to give up booze and cigarettes while she as pregnant? Who could have told an 19-year-old that she needed to hold a hungry, wailing baby? She was as damaged from her horrid mother and father and she later damaged her own four children.

So my task is to forgive – a word I don’t particularly care for – and to find a path to this allusive thing the Alcoholics Anonymous people call serenity. Hard to image such a thing.

I Was Born in Booze

Days Sober: 1

I was born in booze, weaned on whiskey and tears. My mother’s love was as powerful as it was toxic and I wear her scars as if they were my own. Heredity, karma, bad luck? I don’t know.
I do know that I admire my mother in some ways, as much as I resent her in others. Following the chains of memory and regret, I return again and again to the losses, the aloneness, and of course the abandonment – my Scarlet Letter, branded onto every branch of my personality.
Who is innocent and who is guilty? I don’t know. Nothing is clear in the haze of wine and shame.
But I am two days sober and going back to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. It’s not where I want to be. I want to be where the normal people are. I want to live in a home where the wine glasses don’t sing to me from the cupboard. There is no such place for me.
So I’m drinking water through jaws that are clenched and counting the hours, one day at a time.

I started this blog as a way to record the days of my sobriety, to help hold me accountable, if only to myself, and – as writing does for me – offer myself some comfort and clarity through the words I am given. This is the second day of the rest of my life and I don’t want to stumble off the path.