Sometimes lately I feel like I’ve been taken over by dancers from “Up with People!” or put on the psychic Hallmark wavelength, or placed in a John Denver song (“Sunshine… on my shoulder… makes me happppy..”)
It could be that next month I’ll have completed one-year of sobriety. Â It could be any number of things indescribably joyous that seem to have little relation to anything but a feeling that life is grand and that things are funny again, not just these things, but gallows humor kinds of things…Â
***If you’re interested in being part of an exciting new on-line magazine, please send me an email (redsydarling@gmail.com)Â and I can get you more detailed information***
But right now, nothing seems as lovely as watching Tina Fey impersonate Sarah Palin:
P and I have been going to meetings together since last Fall. He’s a self-proclaimed redneck intellectual with a long overgrown beard and ice blue eyes I didn’t look into until we’d known each other nearly 3 months. He’s gruff and sweary and likes to tell dirty jokes. He emails me pictures of birds and flowers and when we get coins for our sobriety time, we pass them first to each other for a blessing and a wish. In February, he stopped coming to our meeting ( “our” meeting, like it’s just his and mine), and I began to panic. I craned my neck around and would ask the others: “Have you seen P?” Where could he be?
But I knew. He was drinking again.
When he came back through the door a few weeks later, he had his hat pulled back down over his face and dark glasses covering his eyes. He sat next to me in his chair and I rested my hand on his knee. When they called on me to speak, I started sobbing like someone who has just been told she is missing a limb, but OH WAIT!! Here it is again!! — a strange combination of relief and sorrow and grief at how fragile this life is. How much I depend on the others, my sweet friends like P., to get me through. Am I really this weak and dependent? Yes. Absolutely yes.
P will have 6 months this Saturday and yesterday he told me, eyes lowered, that he is moving away. I felt the lump in my throat and looked away long enough to swallow my fake good wishes. “It will be ok, sweetie, we can still email,” he tells me, but I’m not so sure.
I turn to him and pretend to joke, “You know, P, I find this move of yours incredibly selfish. What about me? We were supposed to keep taking our time together!!”
He knows I mean it. He puts his hand on my knee. I put my head on his shoulder and breathe, fingers crossed, prayers sent to God or whoever, Please keep him safe. Keep both of us sober.
***
I had the great honor to be included in a wonderful dinner the other evening in Seattle. L and I have known each other through emails and stories from our partners (who are good friends), but I wasn’t prepared for how sweet, kind, funny, and completely adorable he is in person. The dinner was a farewell of sorts*** and I had to excuse myself part way through because I couldn’t keep my composure. No greater buzz kill than a sober person at a goodbye dinner who is crying into her Diet Coke.
***Message from L. who has Terminal Cancer***
Please get your skin checked by a dermatologist for a baseline and then regularly after that. Please do what you love NOW and don’t put it off.
The concept of threesomes has been employed by unhappy spouses (or marriage partners with superior imaginations, depending on your view) since time immemorial. As an antidote to the occasional doldrums of monogamy, it seems perfectly wise and preferable to adultery. Why then can’t we imagine a similar relief from the monotonous isolation of modern-day nuclear families? My husband and I could both really use a helper sort of person around the house. Someone like Donna Reed, pretty and cheerful and wearing gowns of one kind or another, who fetches our slippers when we get home after a long day so we can lounge around and read the paper. Just the thought of this evokes deep feelings of peace and love, similar to how I feel watching Daniel Craig emerge from the blue ocean in “Casino Royale,†like all is right exactly where it should be.
Who wouldn’t want another adult around? I think kids need an adult-child ratio of at least 1:1. When you’re tired or they’re sick, 2:1 is probably more like it. Grandparents can provide some of this type of assistance, especially if your crew is as divorced and remarried as mine, but grandparents usually come with strings attached, and much less energy than they need to wrangle little people. When we have a babysitter around (every other year or so) to help with bath-time or cooking or cleaning up, it is astounding how much easier childrearing becomes. I think some of the wisdom of days gone by (boarding schools and governesses and “children should be seen and not heardâ€) is not fully appreciated by modern parents. We are so hands-on much of the time. Even when we work full-time, we’re full-throttle with the child psychology books and the guilt and the creeping belief that every little thing we do will land our kids in years of therapy.
My beloved twin daughters graduate kindergarten today. They celebrated by waking up at 4am and playing tag downstairs. My love for them, at that moment, was clouded by a desire to wring their skinny little necks.
Congratulations, Josephine & Olivia! You’re such big girls now!
Next week, I’ll have 8 months sober. As a good friend reminded me recently, once you’ve put in significant time working on something, it would be a mistake to toss it all away over an old pattern, or person, no matter how alluring.
The thing about paying attention and trying to live more honestly, is that you have more accountability to yourself. It’s a good thing, but it often interferes with that old fun of “following one’s heart” (translation: doing whatever the hell you want if it makes you happy).
I’ll not claim anything even close to improvement or clarity or life is perfect, but I will say that sobriety and following a spiritual program is something I cherish now… sometimes even more than having fun, or following my natural inclinations and instincts.
When we were in high school, my older brother and I shared a 1972 bright blue Ford Pinto. It had ferns growing in the backseat, and you could see the road through the rusted out holes in the passenger side floor.
My brother was extremely popular… One girl fanted when he graduated (I kid you not) and other girls pretended to befriend me just to be near him “Hi Rachael. I want to come over and hang out. Is your brother there?” His powerful beauty and charisma spilled over to the Blue Pinto so this car became cool by association.
I was a band-nerd who didn’t talk to boys until I was 19 unless it was about God, and unfortunately hanging out with my beloved (if at times indifferent) older brother did not have the same cool-by-association effect on me.
But the Pinto was different. It was an automatic and it could go zero to 35mph in under 30 minutes. It was a love machine.
I have a warm place in my heart for junkie cars that you can pay for with cash. I was raised in a series of beaters each given names like “The Blue Bomber,” “Mystic Sea,” and “Gloria.” These were cars you could really connect with… The kind you could talk to when they failed to roll their windows down properly. The kind even 12 year old younger brothers were allowed to drive around neighborhood parking lots.
The days of driving cars with more character than safety are long-gone… but the love lives on…
I’ve just received some wonderful news. I’ve got an official book contract with a small publisher from San Francisco. I’ll be writing a book about parenting in early recovery and it will come out next Spring.
To get paid to do something I love is an honor I cannot completely fathom.
Thanks to all for the ongoing love and support.
***
In other wonderful news, my beloved younger brother Mark and his beautiful wife Rebecca have a brand new healthy gorgeous baby boy! Welcome little angel!
Sometimes I feel like a transvestite trapped in a straight woman’s body. Heels? They should be high high high. Makeup? Sparkly, heavy, and colorful. And dresses? Yes yes yes.
Self-expression, whether sparkly gaudy makeup, religious beliefs, writing, or spouting opinions is a dangerous and necessary act. If one has the courage to speak from the heart, after the kids and the marriages and the mortgages tell us we better shape up and act like a lady (or at least act “mature), the pressure to keep it all tamped down is pretty strong. But let’s not fool ourselves, also scary as hell.
So today I dare you to do something that is from your heart. For you. Some small secret place you’ve been waiting to open up and tell someone about.
The thing about recovery is that we’re all in it. Recovering from something. Bad childhoods, bad clams, bad breakups, bad timing. But we’re also recovering from self delusion. When we get lost in the scary woods of our own minds, we make bizarre claims about what we need and where we’re going (“Honestly, this job is great for me! Yes, it’s in the middle of Antarctica and it’s minimum wage, but they give you your own winter jacket!”). Whether you’re talking to an imaginary executioner or judge, this self-justification can create a whole mess of wrong choices.
Anne Lamott talks about KFKD radio — that self-loathing noise between our ears that keeps us hunkered down in isolation and waiting for Godot.
I’ve been trying to find the courage to be myself for awhile now. Finding the True North inside and trusting that it’s right and good. Not hiding away, tamping down, lowering the volume, or turning it up to screeching angry volumes. True North. That place in each of us that sits back on soft pillows and sighs knowing that all will be all right in the end. Even though we’re turning 40, our marriages are a mess, our kids will grow up and leave us, and the house isn’t selling.
KFKD radio tells us that everyone is more important than us, that we don’t deserve happiness and peace, and that we can’t write our way out of a wet paper bag and should just be a secretary somewhere since all we’re capable of is answering phones cheerfully anyway.
I used to drink to drown out that station. Now I pray. And go to meetings. And love my kids like they are my bones and blood. But it’s all such a mess. Not a beautiful mess (yet) but I’m hoping one day at a time it soon will be.
But this is all so depressing, so I must also say this. I’ve never had this much serenity in the face of so much struggle. And honestly, if that isn’t recovery, I don’t know what is.
