Filed under: family, Life on Life's Terms, Monthly Record, Recovery, Take me home
Dear Disease,
A friend who is an ER doctor says that she prefers her specialty because she always knows exactly what her primary goal is: keep the patient alive. To ease pain, diagnose illness, or dress a wound, that’s important, but it all comes second to her prime directive. Keep the patient alive. The first months out of rehab felt like that to me: stay sober. Everything else was icing, had to be icing, because it took all I had to just address my primary goal: stay sober.
The past month has taken me beyond that one clear goal out into the world of shaping-up-my-act. I’ve gone back to work, had a birthday, navigated off-limits medication, started my spring project, had bad days and some very, very good ones. I’ve started some healthy habits. I’ve measured and recorded and kept track and made lists and other basic things that must have been taught the day I skipped class in People School. We go walking in our neighborhood on Saturday nights, and I have loved it, loved the quiet time with our two unruly hounds and our little girl zipping around on her scooter. I joined a Moms of Preschoolers group. I’ve gone to the movies with a grownup friend and we’ve met friends of Mimi’s at parks for playdates.
It is scary out here, working without a net for the first time. I am no longer in full-fledged crisis, no longer just a patient. I am a wife, a mother, a sister, an employee, a friend, a daughter. Now it is time to apply what I have learned, to claim these identities and to show myself and others what I can do with them. I am learning as I go. It is definitely on-the-job training.
In the last month I’ve had moments as a mom that I wish I could bottle up and keep, and moments I so wish I could live over. I have had moments when I felt like a good wife, and moments when I was keenly aware of my shortcomings as one. I have done some things well and others poorly and in half a year I’ve compiled enough experiences to sift through them and look for patterns. I can start to build on what works and retool what doesn’t. I can ask myself why I hurt someone and can have a reasonable expectation of learning from that and not doing it again. I can mend: I can mend me, and I can attempt to mend damage I have done.
Two strange things just happened. Yesterday, Jon and Mimi and the dogs and I were in a big pile on the living room floor and I suddenly exclaimed: “I love our house!” Jon looked at me as if I’d just announced that I love the Republican party. Since Mimi came home I have done nothing but complain about our too [small, old, hot, cold, etc. etc.] house. Then this morning we were racing around, communicating in short bursts when we passed each other in our various tasks, and I was starting to quiver with anxiety. Jon stopped and asked if I was all right. Stressed, I said. And I have yet another cold. And my shoulder hurts. But I’m happy, I said. I don’t know why, but I am happy. Right here, right this minute, standing here in my kitchen, I FEEL HAPPY.
And for now, that is all I need to know.
Love,
Robin
Filed under: Adventures, Everyday Blessings, family, Holidays, Recovery is Fun
I’m convinced that life doesn’t let you suffer too long, if you do your part: sleep, eat, be of service, have faith. Sunday brought to my house the best Valentine’s Day ever. You know, best day recovery style: full of love and giggles and predictable enough. We rode the train into the hills to visit a petting zoo. It had been a long time since, instead of writhing in anxiety, I could see and feel the beauty in such a day.
Best of all were my travelling companions. A fluffy haired moppet who danced in fountains and spun in her princess dress, and a gentle man whose tired eyes relaxed and smiled and enjoyed. Who could ask for more?
Dear Disease,
There’s an empty wine bottle stuck in the top of my bedroom closet, been there since May, it mocks me but I don’t want to touch it. I could ask Jon to throw it out, but I just can’t face the associations. He’d be kind, I know he would be, but I can’t expect him to smile during such a chore and I can glean so much meaning from the tiniest of grimaces that it would knock me down.
This was the month when I faced, head on and with eyes wide open, the wreckage of my life. Sifted through the ashes. Recovered what I could, mourned that which I could not save. Cringed at the damage. This was the month that forced me onto my feet and forward. I returned to California, left my support system behind in Florida, and reclaimed my life. On Sunday, we’ll see friends for the first time in ages. Next weekend we have a playdate arranged for Mimi. She has had so few in her lifetime, it’s criminal. And last night I taught my first class since May, since I dropped out of life nearly completely. It was a mess, but I forgive myself for that because now, I can. I can evaluate what I did well and what I did poorly and go on. I couldn’t do that then, last spring, my darkest days.
I feared finding bottles or pills in my office. I didn’t, although I did find a cork. It was the vestiges of my old, successful-appearing life that shocked and pained me. When I opened my office door, it looked like I had simply gone home the night before. The teapot was half full, a book was open on the desk, the answering machine light was blinking. Papers were strewn everywhere, half written, now useless. Papers that were meant to be articles that were meant to be in journals that were meant to be published by now. That is where I was meant to go.
Instead, I went to rehab. I like to think that there was something in me, some part of a salvageable me, that rose up to fight for survival and got me to treatment. Some essence of me didn’t want to leave this life, leave Mimi. Some spark got us on a plane to Florida where I knew Mimi’d be cared for, deposited us at my mother’s house, planted wine bottles all over so my family would finally believe me, begged my sister to drive me to the hospital. I touched down there like a tornado, catching everyone by surprise. By then I’d spent hours on the internet, looking up treatment programs, recovery groups… but always in secret. My husband had been hounding me about my drinking for a while but that was in private and even he didn’t know how much Xanax I was also swallowing.
I suppose these memories are rushing up right now because this, where I sit right this minute, is where it all fell apart. And I do mean, fell apart. I can barely connect the dots from sitting here miserable to lurching through the first weeks of treatment, sobbing myself to sleep with the one picture of Mimi they’d let me keep tucked under the hard little pillow. Some days I couldn’t find the picture as soon as I woke up and I’d toss sheets and blankets around the room, wailing like a madwoman. On my last day of rehab, I threw away that picture. I still feel a twinge of nausea when something tangible reminds me of that time… the sweater I wore against the institutional chill, applesauce (which I think is a food group all its own in hospitals), Sandra Bullock. On Saturday nights they’d show movies and one I remember was about a woman going to rehab and she was played by Sandra Bullock. Whom I now see everywhere I turn.
Oh my God. When I look at these words I feel like I am telling someone else’s story. Right this minute I am crying so hard I can hardly type.
I remember a friend who lost her home in a fire telling me that the oddest thing was that all of her underwear itched. She had had to buy all new and she didn’t have even one pair of those comfy old cotton undies. That was 10 years ago; I imagine she has plenty of comfy undies now. And I imagine she appreciates them that much more. Which pretty much describes how I feel. I won’t say I like these tears but I will say that I welcome the sign that my soul is in there somewhere, that whatever essence-of-Robin fought so hard for survival is finally joining forces with the rest of me to make one whole person who can breathe, think, make decisions, and, oh my God, feel. This month was all about integration, I suppose; this was the month that forced my present to meet my past. I will have to face that wine bottle, I know, soon. I will have to acknowledge its existence. But you know what? It’s up there, uninvited, in my closet, but it’s empty. Hollow, unoccupied, void, containing nothing. It no longer has power because I no longer let it. It is inert.
And I? Fina-fuckin-ally? Am Not.
Love,
Robin
Jealous? HELL YEAH.
My father gave my brother a restaurant for Christmas. Now, my father isn’t a magnate. He’s a veterinarian. My brother is 27 years old. He hasn’t finished undergrad. He’s never owned a car, a house, or anything more complicated than an Iphone. He’s sweet-natured, friendly, delightful — and I love him, across the decades, miles, and other obstacles that remind us we have absolutely nothing in common except a father.
Our dad, who took the loan on an ailing Italian restaurant and transferred it to my brother’s name, is showing as much of himself here as anyone else. He’s retired, married to a woman who could take him or leave him and tells him so, comfortably well off, bored, and scared to death of being alone. Living vicariously.
So… damn. It’s hard to be a grown-up. It’s hard to feel jealousy where it doesn’t belong… am I envious of his youth, his freedoms, his access to our father? Um, yes.
One of the most powerful lessons recovery has taught me is that everyone has successes and trials, and the external often doesn’t map onto the internal. The surgeon who just pulled up in his Porsche? May be so lonely he’ll take the long road home so he can pass by more liquor stores. The stay-at-home mom who never misses a soccer game? May feel so anxious that she is hiding a pharmacy of medications in her pocket.
So, no one’s given me a restaurant lately, but no matter. I can honestly say I have been given gifts of much greater value. My needs this year have been the internal kind, and they have been more than met. All the restaurants in the world would have done me no good. I am lucky.
I’ll send up prayers for my brother’s success. I’ll feel little pangs of jealousy for what they are: little pangs. That I can get over. Quickly. I’ll take my focus by the reins and guide it, instead of letting it drive me. I’ll recognize that our 70-year-old father could be ill, infirm, or gone. I’ll be grateful that he is well and able to buy a restaurant.
My father just bought a restaurant.
And gave it to my brother for Christmas.
((gggrrr))
