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It’s 1:02 AM as I begin to type. Jon and I fell asleep four hours ago watching His Girl Friday on Jon’s laptop (we’ve learned to work around the whole not-having-TV thing).Mimi came into our room half an hour ago and I got up to change her pull-up. The room tilted left, then tilted right, and right now it’s swirling around and it’s way warmer in here than it should be and the floor feels about a mile away from my head. I can’t sleep.
I feel drunk; I swallowed some cold medicine before bed on an empty stomach. Just some over-the-counter, no-alcohol, generic brand cold medicine.That has to be it. I don’t like this feeling at all and yet I used to seek out this sensation on purpose. Add that to the long list of things that make no sense to my alcoholic brain. Ugh.
But if I dig deeper I have to admit there is more at play. Jon and I started this week with a fight about moving back east — I want to; he doesn’t; we’ve been fighting about this for 10 years. He’s been working nonstop. I haven’t been to a meeting or called or gotten a sponsor. I goofed up the time of a playdate for Mimi. I have been reading Caroline Knapp’s Drinking: A Love Story, which has led to way too much time in my head. I haven’t prayed. On Monday night I stayed up to make apple bread for my Tuesday faculty meeting, and then we overslept and it was raining and Jon couldn’t take Mimi to school and I ended up staying home. I bought Valentine’s Day cards for my relatives and forgot to send them on time. On Thursday, I went to work and left my laptop sitting on the kitchen floor.
Put simply: I’ve let recovery slip. I haven’t paid attention and I haven’t used the tools and I haven’t dialed the phone. I have not been grateful. I’ve set expectations for myself and failed to meet them, charging back to feeling hugely inadequate, which is miserable but familiar territory. It’s been a week like the weeks I used to live all the time. I have felt the dark pull of despair, always waiting just right there.
NO.MONSTERS.IN.THIS.HOUSE.
This is a chant Mimi likes to do before bed, when we’ve turned down the lights and the stick-on constellations Jon carefully applied to her ceiling are glowing softly. We hold hands, a trinity, and warn off interlopers in our deepest voices. She giggles, but I know she is serious about the monsters. And I know how to do this now, how to right myself and fend off the demons. I know how to have faith that it will get better if I keep doing the next right thing. I know it will be all right if I get up tomorrow and remember to be gentle with myself and others, set reasonable goals for the day, go to a meeting, call my sister, fix dinner and read stories and take a nap and return the email that has been waiting a week to be acknowledged. These things will be done, and the doing will feel good, will be good. And if I just keep doing that, the monsters will stay out of my house.
Filed under: Recovery is hard
It’s Friday once again, and I find myself kicking around in “who am I” quandary. I’m still discovering who I want to be, in particular, on the web. It’s not an existential issue, I’m more honest than I’ve ever been and will jump at any and all chances to turn “blog friendships” into real ones (anyone want to meet? Let’s plan!). It’s more of the kind of thing you go through if you stop to think about what you see in the mirror. What does my hair tell you? What do my clothes say about me? Probably anything anyone would ever want to know, actually, is summed up in the chipped red nail polish that’s been bugging me for a week, ever since I let Mimi paint my nails before I remembered I don’t have any remover and every single day I’ve meant to stop and get some, have walked right by it in the store, and still haven’t bought any. So I’ve been picking away at it and it looks awful but I mostly notice that when I’m typing which means I am nowhere near a store.
So that’s me outside blogworld. Inside blogworld, I’m trying to clean things up, so if my blog looks goofy for a few days or has links to nowhere, please come back… I’m working on it!
Take care,
Robin
Filed under: Recovery is hard
That’s what my friend John opened our conversation with yesterday. He was referring specifically to the fact that I haven’t talked to my treatment-roommate, Theresa, in two weeks. But in general, I haven’t been good about keeping up with my treatment friends since returning to California 10 days ago. In recovery, they call this isolating.
Recovery folks live by many sayings. Some of them I like, many I don’t. One I really do believe is that “Meeting makers make it.” I haven’t been to a meeting in 6 days. All the usual reasons: Jon’s working insane hours, we had to relocate to a hotel during our sewer issue. I started my job again. Mimi started school again. Isn’t of this enough???
No. It isn’t. It’s time to settle life down and get back to living like an addict and an alcoholic (hey, did you hear that Naveen Andrews from Lost is a former heroin addict? He’s been sober a long time. Now he’s even cuter than he was before!).
I have been keeping my toes wet at an online chat group started by this wonderful lady and this lovely lady. John was a little bit skeptical. He’s right that it can’t substitute for the real meetings I go to. He’s wrong that it isn’t a good thing in itself. I’ve exchanged messages with the most amazing women, in all sorts of places in their lives. And especially the women who are scared, just starting to think of recovery, afraid to go to a meeting but willing to open up, even if it’s just a little bit, in the comfortable anonymity of the web.
The group is right here . Please stop by if you’d like.
Recovery can be so hard. It’s so much better than the alternative, and I know it will just keep getting better, so I am hanging in. At least for today. John was being a bit melodramatic, I think, in his do-it-right-or-die stance, but he’s lost two acquaintances in a week. So he’s right; this is serious business. But it also remains true that rarely laugh as hard as I do at meetings. Drunks are hilarious. We’re also mothers, fathers, childless, pet owners, doctors, nurses, and Indian chiefs. We’re regular people battling a powerful affliction.
Speaking of regular… right now, my daughter is actually asking to take a nap. Wondrous things can happen in the most regular of settings. Happy sleepies!
Take care,
Robin
Filed under: daybreaker, Life on Life's Terms, NaBloPoMo, Recovery is hard
…but not quite yet. We don’t know each other well enough and, frankly, I’m afraid of what you will think of me. Put another way: I think I know what you will think of me, and I am afraid I could not handle that.
Yesterday, I found a note in my toiletries bag. I “heart” you, B-Day Girl! was scribbled on a piece of hotel notepaper, the kind they stick under the phone. My heart recognized the note first, and my stomach took a flip. Then my head caught up and I broke out in a cold sweat.
Last year on my birthday, I was with someone I loved and who loved me. Perhaps this last wasn’t quite true, but I fully believed it — so it was my reality. And I was happy. Content with my vision for the future, with Mimi, love, my career, a lovely home, and liberal doses of family and friends.
At the time, I didn’t have a single one of those things, not really. I was clinging to each by a gossamer thread, begging the wind to not blow too hard and pull it all apart.
Of course, it did. Three months later, my marriage was in shambles; my career destroyed; my home — well, I was living in the hospital by then; my daughter was with my sister, separated from both me and her father; my only contact with family was on one of the two phones made available during three tightly controlled periods a week; friends — none; and my love?
Let’s just say, for the moment: things had changed greatly from when he’d written my birthday note.
I’m not sure why I found the note yesterday, the day before the last day of the last year of the decade. This is the decade for which I can probably count the number of nights I went to sleep without a sedative on two hands. The days, in the last few years, don’t number many more than that. So it is safe to say that it was much easier to feel happy and content… or “happy” and “content” — before this past May.
For right now, it’s enough to know I handled finding that note without drugs or alcohol. And even more: I know there won’t be anymore notes like that, notes with sweet words tethered to nothing.
The solstices are my two favorite days of the year. They’re quiet favorites, usually passing without great celebration or notice. I just like them. The longest and the shortest; one day when dark nearly takes over the light, and one day when the sun stretches deep into the night.
I noticed again today. Didn’t do anything. Just noticed.
She’s sleeping, so quietly and so peacefully. A candle is lit. The fan is turning slowly and soft jazz is playing on her lullaby tape.
They’re in the living room, enjoying drinks. When we all together in the living room in the early evening, they sit on couches with crossed knees and grown-up laughter, while she and I roll around on the floor and spill our water.
Then we eat our supper at the kitchen table. There is some overlap as they get their suppers ready to carry into the dining room.
She and I shuttle off to the bathroom, her into the tub and me to sit close by and keep watch. It is a quiet together-and-not time, as she plays with her toys and I skim a magazine. She often sings to herself, nonsense rhythms in her lilting voice.
We go to bed in our room. She always calls it “mama’s room,” but it’s every bit ours. I remind her of this several times a day and she says, “Okay, mama.”
We read storybooks and hear them talking. It reminds me of times when I was young and my sisters and I would gather on the bedrooms side of the door listening to the adults in the living room at their party. Tinkling, light, happy sounds.
And now? I need to get my head back right. I want to join them at drinks, it is true. It should help, should make me feel powerful and strong, to remind myself that this is a choice I am making, a decision of mine, not theirs, that they are in no way bound.
After all, do I slow down my eating when a tablemate announces she is on a diet? No.
So why do I feel so separate from them?
This magic first night of winter. It appreciates a little more childlike wonder, doesn’t it?
What a stunning year it has been. [Cousin] and [fiancee] got married. [Niece] and [littlest sister] are in their one-and-only senior years of high school (and each is an officer in her school, may I add?). Dawn launched a new career. Mimi received her final, can’t-take-it- back American citizenship. For some of us, the changes have been broad; for others, like me, they have been more intrapersonal, but no less instrumental. I am deeply grateful for everyone’s generosity toward me this past year.
I am sharing now because when I did get help, I realized how little I knew. While statistics strongly argue that addiction touches every family on the planet, I couldn’t think of anyone to call in our family who shared my situation, and I really wished I could. So, I am offering to talk to anyone who has a question or is simply curious.
My particular problem is with a class of prescription medication known as benzodiazepines: valium, xanax, and their relatives. I first took them a while ago, to make a long plane flight more palatable. Over time I took them more regularly, to help with sleep (Ambien is in this class of medicine), long flights, stresses… the all-too-typical reasons.
I always got the prescriptions from the same doctor, who assured me I was taking them appropriately; I point that out not to excuse myself, but to illustrate how easy it is to get such things and to underscore the importance of not assuming that doctors can stand guard. I understood what “potentially habit forming” on the label meant, but it wasn’t until I decided to stop that I fully grasped how dependent I was. Trust me here: as custodian of a career, a house, pets, and most importantly, a child, I would never have done this intentionally, and I am all too aware of how insidious this can be.
For me, this has also meant adjusting my ideas of who and what an addict is. I never though about this much, and when I did, I pictured heroin-addled skeletors or cocaine-amped movie stars or bums under bridges clutching brown paper bags (alcohol is the most widespread addiction). I certainly never thought I’d have anything in common with Lindsay Lohan (of Michael Jackson, for that matter). Addiction has a strong genetic component, but heredity alone certainly isn’t responsible: as the saying goes, genetics loads the gun, but environment pulls the trigger. We are not all dirty and dissolute; we come in all ages and with all sorts of bank balances, hobbies, religious views, and degrees (even PhDs, incidentally).
Despite how common it is, it would be disingenuous to pretend that addiction no longer carries a social stigma (so, needless to say, conversations are confidential!). My phone number is 555-555-5555, and my email address is itsownterms@gmail.com. I am happy – eager – to talk, if you’re curious, concerned for yourself or someone else, or just want to write a term paper about it or impress your friends with addiction trivia. Or just want to hear the enthralling story of how I spent my summer vacation.
That story could have taken such a dramatically different turn if I hadn’t landed in a family full of the most amazing and delightful people. There have been many gifts in all of this. For me, the most marvelous gift has been the power of the love our family harbors. People drove for hours to visit me, sat through lectures to learn about addiction, wrote cards and letters of encouragement, prayed with me, and listened to me talk for hours about the same old topic. These are gifts of the most valuable sort, ones wrapped not in bright paper but in the very best kind of love. Most, most, most invaluable: Mimi spent a secure, fun-filled summer with her aunts, grandparents, dad, and cousins. I hope these treasured connections stay with her forever. I feel blessed.
I have decided that the best thing for me is to face this head-on and to not be too ashamed of the basic fact of it, while taking responsibility for where I go from here. Many things in my life will change. Addiction is about so much more than the physical dependence, although that is the first, very hard hurdle to overcome. I do not know exactly what the details of my life will look like from here (and really, who does) but I do know that the textures of life and my daily habits have changed: what I find important and how I nurture that. The rest involves the usual advice we get, and which I never really heeded, to live as healthfully as possible (I sleep more now that I ever have, and I like it), have more fun, deepen spiritual practices (for me, this means a closer connection with God), and attend to friendships and relationships. It is these things, after all, that fortify me against the environmental factors that led, in my case, to medication; addiction thrives on the stressed-out soul.
Step one, for me, is to reach out. You all know me well enough to know that I have made this as academic an exercise as possible. So, I am loaded with addiction frippery, from the ridiculous to the sublime. I think I’m drawing dangerously close to sounding preachy and didactic, so I’ll stop here. I’ll pitch my offer and look forward to any conversations that come my way. Please, the door is open. Take care. Love, Robin
So. I slept like a rock last night. Surprisingly, when I’m not waking myself up coughing, I actually sleep well normally, odd for such a nervous nelly as I. But I can think of maybe two or three nights in recent months that did not afford good sleep. So the upshot is that the cough medicine helped me sleep only by helping me not cough all night, which IS EXACTLY WHAT IT IS SUPPOSED TO DO.
On the other hand, I did have a pretty vivid dream last night — what they call a using dream. That’s a dream in which you use substances of one kind or another. It’s instructive to remember the dream and what happened as a result of using. I am glad that my dream had me getting in all sorts of trouble for using: much better than positive associations would have been.
And then, tonight… wham. I was already feeling run down and ready for bed, and Mimi was in rare form, and my parents were settling in with their cocktails. First thought: I’d really like a cocktail, too, please. Second thought: I bet a swig of cough medicine would be relaxing. Third thought: ARE YOU NUTS? That is known as a course correction, which is good, but the previous two thoughts are not so good. And I really was caught off guard.
I was a little uncomfortable the rest of the night. Mimi pitched a fit because she wanted to sleep with Mom again tonight. I said no and then Mom said yes (she didn’t know I’d already said no) and Mimi was in full-blown, shin-kicking, pillow-punching meltdown. I just did not have the energy or good humor to ride it out with her. She bounced off with Mom (who really is working way too hard, both my dad and I have asked her to slow down, it’s helpful-bordering-on-overbearing). I came to bed hoping that tonight wasn’t one that will become an indelible memory. Lets save those for the good times, shall we?
Filed under: Dawn, daymaker, Monthly Record, NaBloPoMo, Recovery is Fun, Recovery is hard
To My Disease:
Still winning. Sometimes it seems pretty bare, but I am still winning.
It’s been a tumultuous month. We left Arizona. Mimi started preschool in Florida. My husband said he is ready for a divorce. I’ve thought about taking something for anxiety a million times. I haven’t taken anything. I’ve crawled over every inch of the emotional spectrum, often several times a day. I’ve looked at jobs. I’m aghast at just how far I have sunk professionally.
This morning she blurted out, “Family. They are my family. Dawn, Edward, Becky, Thomas, Abby. They are my family.” Her aunt Dawn had taken her three cousins home the day before, after a weekend of playing and fun.
Not only was I glad that the notion of family held resonance for her, but I was especially glad she so happily linked us all together. She knows we all belong to her, but we are NEVER in the same place. This is my biggest sadness.
When she and I dragged up on my mom’s doorstep just about a month ago, she instantly recognized the house. She spent much of the summer here. I was glad for her comfort, but my mom was visibly nervous the first time I went out without Mimi. The last time I did that, in May, I disappeared into rehab for four months.
I’ll never know the extent of the impact that had on her. Never. It seems worlds between the stances of “she’ll never remember something that happened when she was two” and “a child’s most important emotional development happens before she’s five.”
I do know that her life here, today, at this moment, is much better than it ever would have been had I not gone in. The unknown haunts me so, and there is much of it: I don’t know what is going to happen with my marriage, my home, my job, just for starters.
But I DO know that today, at this moment, I am doing all I can to be sober and emotionally healthy. I do know that if I do that this moment, and the next, and the next, and the next, that eventually it will add up to a sober and emotionally healthy mom. And I know that’s all I can do.
Work on more lovely days, and the months will follow.
So, I’ve attached a new button to my template, one asking for ‘reactions.’ It lets people read and offer a one-click reaction, if they don’t have time to leave a comment (or don’t have anything in particular to say). It’s kind of like the ‘likes this’ button on Facebook.
That made me think: no sense asking for reactions if I don’t put the truth out there.
I haven’t been untruthful, but I haven’t been full disclosure either. A big part of that is that I don’t have any clue what my own reaction to my story is yet. Most times I feel too messed up to begin anywhere, and that scares me, because I don’t want to be THAT messed up.
Look through my blog roll and you’ll discover what I did: everyone has something to worry about, but no one has the plate I do right now.
First, let me be clear that I am being pecked to death by ducks. I have no tragedy to lament. I have food to eat, a roof over my head, people who love me, and a healthy daughter. I know this. I do. I also know that I am overdrawn at the bank; I don’t own — or even rent — the roof over my head; I have no job prospects; my marriage has failed; and my daughter needs eye surgery. There are lots more complicating factors than that but you get the point.
I only have to go to sites like Stephanie’s, or Alyssa’s or, dear God, Heather’s for a much needed reality check. And I do go there often. I do not claim such territory, not at all.
But being pecked to death by ducks does hurt.
In rehab, when we had earned weekend passes, we had to provide an exhaustive itinerary. On pass, we had to stick to it, phoning the counselor on call to approve even the smallest deviation. Once we returned, we were grilled on our detailed report, which included any encounters with triggers and cravings.
I get, now, why I’m struggling here. Mostly, it’s because it is one big trigger. My parents moved into this house while I was in college, and I’ve sat on the living room couch more often with a drink in my hand than not. We gather there nightly (these days, with tea and Perrier). Their wine cellar was always lovingly stocked (now it is conspicuous, like an empty open mouth). My sisters and I always noted that we drank more here than in our own lives – it’s cozy, conducive, and no one has to drive.
In the last year, I got to cradling a wine glass in my palm as I went about nightly chores. I sipped while I supervised bath time. I sipped while I read next to my sleeping daughter. Sometimes, I sipped to pass the time during naps. How relaxing naptime came to be. My glass tended to stay full — and not because I was a slow sipper.
But that was very much now.
Then, for a very, very long time, I was an appreciative, lovely, controlled drinker.
Not only do I have those later, troubling memories (although, to me, here they never became hangover-or-throwing-up-or-causing-danger awful, just quite unacceptable, so they are even harder to quell) to deal with, but I have a long history of pleasant ones to overcome.
Rats.
