I was tooling around the internet this morning and I stumbled on this post by Jane, who wrote:
Wow, 8 lbs lost since the summer! My head was full of glee. I immediately thought, “Just 7 more pounds and I’ll be at my goal weight of 115. If I stop eating for a while I could get there!”. Wait, I’m going to go back and bold the key part of that sentance… Yes, I thought, “If I stop eating.” Not, “If I eat healthier” or “If I go on a diet” or “If I start exercising”. See CRAZY.
and this:
Not eating makes me feel powerful. And a little naughty. Like I have a secret strength that no one else has. Kind of like when I had my secret bottle of wine for strength and support? Hmmm, maybe. Looking back, I can see that my “pickyness” as a child/teen had a lot to do with control.
Yikes. I SO could have written this. Right down to the “intestinal problem” which she wisely declined to elaborate on, as will I.
When we brought Mimi home, by train (across Russia) and plane (across the Atlantic) and automobile (across Phoenix), I was overwrought, encountering more emotion in a few weeks than I’d probably felt in my whole life. Plus I always lose weight when I travel, choosing to subsist on bottled water and crackers. Jon, on the other hand, has a stomach of titanium, eating everything including the whole boiled fish we were served on the train. Seriously: the man can eat Russian train fish.
But this time the weight didn’t come back once I was home. Sheer terror, I think, kept it going down for a while. But reading Jane’s post up there helped me to realize how much of that weight loss was also about control. I’d never considered that becoming a mother would make me feel so out of control and powerless. I’d expected to feel powerful, now that I was responsible for keeping this little being alive, all by myself for hours at a time. I’d expected to rise to the occasion and flex my mommy muscles and lift up the world.
I didn’t. I shrank.
By Christmas, I looked awful, but my sick brain told me I looked fine. My clothes were falling off. I was close to 100 lbs, which at 5′ 6″ is not good. I preferred photos taken from a distance, like this one:
This morning when I was pouring my first cup of coffee, I realized how much I had been looking forward to it. The smell, the warmth as it slides down my throat, the little kick…
Uh-oh.
As an addict I am always looking forward to something, always anticipating the sensation that hits when the [insert drug of choice] first nuzzles our brains. Any addict or alcoholic can describe it for you, in brilliant detail. It’s as if the addicted brain releases just a fraction of feel-good chemicals to ensure that we’ll keep doing whatever we have to do to get the rest.
Recovery teaches the danger that can hide in this, the danger that we’ll find ourselves in a place where we’re never in the now, never experiencing a moment as it really is. Anticipation is most useful for the first few notes of the bridal march, the last half mile of the marathon. It’s sort of like trading in a roller coaster for a scenic drive: riveting ups and stomach-churning downs for steady and manageable and pleasant.
I never have been good at living in the moment. It’s too scary, too raw, too precarious to actually experience life as it comes, however it comes. It’s something I work on every day. I’m told that worrying about my morning coffee is overreacting (I am, after all, a founding member of Overreactors Anonymous) but it’s okay. Where I come from there’s a saying, advice to “arm for bear and hope for bunnies.” As with many things Southern it doesn’t completely make sense but the gist of it comes through.
So I’m trying. I’m working on it. I’m getting used to the scary, the raw, the precarious; learning to appreciate the quiet and known. The moments. It’s always about the moments.
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
I had pneumonia last December, and I shared here about my decision to take prescription cough medicine. I’d like to say I took it, it helped, life went on, and it did, but first the addict who lives in my head woke up and started running in the hamster wheel. One day, for no apparent reason, I had an impulse to grab a gulp. I cooked up a whole scheme in which I’d buy some safe cough medicine, pour it out, replace it with the … OH MY GOD. So I found a meeting, shared these impulses with a roomful of strangers, was comforted by their nods and smiles. Recovery, after all, relies on human connections. There’s a saying: to get better we have to change “people, places, and things.” A counselor at my treatment center used to say that what “people, places, and things” really came down to was “people, people, and people.”
So, people, people, and people, welcome to my accountability circle. I hope I can do the same for you.
This time, it’s a narcotic for pain relief. An old shoulder injury that usually annoys intermittently has flared up into real pain. The muscles around my shoulder tightened and have started to regularly spasm, and since it’s no fun to spasm alone they’ve invited my neck and back muscles along. Last weekend found me hunched over to the right, trying not to use any muscles from my waist up, my body shaped like a C. I was going from heat to ice and back, and I could not sleep. I got a massage, which went on for two hours before the therapist gave up trying to loosen the muscles. So we went to the doctor, who looked at my hunchback shape and asked if I had been under any stress. Oh, boy. Where do I start?
She handed me a prescription. I told her I was in recovery and she said it was up to me to take the medicine or not. She wished me luck. Immediately I felt lousy. Just knowing those prescriptions were in my purse threw me back to my bad old days when prescriptions were just the ticket. Plotting, hiding, hoarding, figuring out ways to get more, and counting. The ENDLESS counting. Do I have enough to get through the weekend? It’s a long flight, I’d better bring extra. How many here…. okay, put a few in the pillbox… it’s been two hours since I took one, hang on for another two…
But pain is a powerful motivator. We got the medicine, and I have taken it. Exactly as prescribed. I don’t hurt anymore and I can stand up straight. Jon keeps the medicine in a safe in his closet, which is awkward, he feels like a warden, but we both feel it is important that we do this. I am deeply aware of the dangers, of what I am capable of doing once I get a taste of my drug. I’ve done it all before, right in front of people — the special privilege of the pill-popper — so yes, I know.
I can’t claim that the hamsters in my head are quiet, no, not at all. I am glad that they will not let me forget what I am, what I can do to myself. I will see the specialist tomorrow. This is a new doctor and she will take a new history and once again I’ll tell my story to a new person. I’ll share: with the doctor, with you, in meetings, especially with Jon. We are a team, and together we’ll be okay.
Please take a look at this article about women abusing prescription pills. Switch occupations and hair color and this woman could be me. She could be anybody.
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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.
