Life… On Its Own Terms

Hello, and thanks for stopping by! This blog has now grown up into its own domain name and will be accessible directly through: http://www.itsownterms.com.

Please join me there.

Tonight, we’ll be watching the Help Haiti Live concert, streaming on the Help Haiti Live website. The country is beginning the long, slow, second wave of relief efforts; the ones that come after the initial disaster response. The longer term efforts often have more difficulty with funding than do the immediate efforts, and there is really never money “left over” to combat the huge obstacles faced as time goes on. So our habit is to give now as the country shifts into long-term relief mode.

Compassion International is our charity of choice.  We’ve supported secular charities as well but I’m particularly fond of the work these folks do. I know how some of us feel about faith-based organizations, but it works for me; I like their focus on children, it’s a passion we share, and my higher power aligns with theirs so we’re cool with each other.

I met some of them once and I liked them. It was during one of those middle-of-the-night layovers so familiar to travellers, when you can’t let yourself go to sleep because you’re in some random, dark, slightly scary airport and everything you own is in your backpack (everything that matters right now, anyway) and there are no gate agents so if you close your eyes you’re quite likely to wake up in an empty departure gate, in an unfamiliar country, 15 minutes after your plane left. So you fuel up on coffee and vending-machine food and you visit with your fellow stranded travellers.

I also like their profile at Charity Navigator. Over the years I’ve grown careful with relief organizations. I hate to be suspicious of a charity, for heaven’s sakes, but one we donated to once turned out to be a scam. So we’re glad there are groups out there helping us to spend our charity money wisely.

So please tune in. I am especially excited to hear Jars of Clay. Their song “Show You Love” is our theme song, of sorts, Jon’s and Mimi’s and mine. It’s just amazing and captures the essence of international adoption so perfectly. I still cry every time I hear it. You might, too.

I hope they play it tonight.

Take care,
Robin

You’d think someone who’d spent four of the last nine months in a hospital would take better care tossing around a term like “crisis,” but then again, if she knew the difference between a real crisis and something her head was only telling her was a crisis, she might not have landed in rehab in the first place.
     I haven’t yet shared much about resigning from my job. Perhaps that’s because writing about it would make it just too real, too soon. My contract runs through the end of the school year, so for now I have an office, an access key for the copy machine, a company email account. Of course I am terrified. I’ve known for a while that I couldn’t do my job and be the mother I want to be, at least not now, and my daughter is refusing to age backward — and for that matter, God isn’t letting me grow younger either — so it’s now. It has to be now. When I am really honest with myself I acknowledge that this has been a since the day our newly formed family stepped off the plane from Moscow, possibly earlier. It just took a world-class crack-up for me to quit trying. For no matter what appearances suggest, I tried. I tried so hard.
    I cannot remember a time when I didn’t have an identity, a uniform, as my mother likes to say. I was a dancer throughout my childhood and young adulthood, and active in a local acting troupe; shy to the point of illness in nearly all social situations, as long as I had on a costume and stage make-up I was fine. Outgoing even. Loud. Over time I hopped from uniform to costume to outfit. I knew how to be a cheerleader, a pianist, a singer, a writer, a student, a sorority girl, a debutante, even a paramedic; I knew how to be anything but Robin.
    I know that is, in part, why it’s so terrifying to leave a profession that may never welcome me back. The money is important, huge an scary in its own right, and then there is this. I will be a mother, and a better one. I do know that it would be unhealthy to pin all of my hopes and dreams on this: if I do this job well, after all, my responsibilities will shrink over time as Mimi matures and shapes her own life.
     And this blog. It’s new. Newer than my sobriety even. So I don’t yet know if I will be good at this. So I’m trying on different uniforms, buttons on the sidebars, affiliations and colors and art. I know that I want to join the voices of other mothers, to listen and to contribute. I know that I want to share about recovery. Mostly, I know that one can’t exist, for me, without the other.      So thank you for visiting. I would really love to hear your opinion of changes and plans. If you, like me, are a little shy at first, though, no need to feel compelled to come out from behind the curtain to speak. There will be plenty of time for that. I hope we’ll stay in touch.

Dear Disease,
     I have finally passed the date after which I can say I have been out of treatment longer than I was in treatment. Also? My first  (in two decades) completely substance-free holiday gauntlet is almost nearly finally just-about survived. I just might get through the season sober!
     I sat through itchy conversations: Are you sure it doesn’t bother you? Be honest. (No matter how I answered, no matter whether the asker went on to drink or to not drink, it was flat-out awkward. So, I  appreciate the courtesy behind the effort to pose the question, and leave it at that.) (I say it doesn’t bother me, even though it totally does.) (Actually, I say that I am in early sobriety and always bothered, just more so in atmospheres where drinking is even a possibility, so in truth it will bother me more if you don’t drink, because it’s out there and we can’t ignore it; we’re both uncomfortable here and at least one of us ought to have a damn drink and relax.)
     I argued, too. I never did much of that before sobriety. I am a classic “don’t debate, medicate” addict. I wasn’t right or sensitive or loving when I argued. I just argued. I’m still in training wheels.
     Relaxation has remained elusive. I can sit still, wake up early in the morning, reliably attend a 7 PM yoga class, and all sorts of other good physical things, but I cannot relax. It’s important, though, to differentiate this complaint from the paralysis of anxiety. Many days I have wondered when I’ll finally get a day during which I don’t once watch the clock, feel that don’t-know-what-but-something-is-wrong twinge, shudder at ordering yet another cup of tea or another glass of Perrier, or stand helplessly in the kitchen wondering what in the world might cure this craving.
     The holidays proved a perfect time to trot out all the coping strategies I’ve spent months practicing. I went to meetings, and I always felt better afterward. I thought it through and always came to the same conclusion: the only difference a drink could possibly make in my evening would be negative, so that’s that. I spent lots of time with my teetotaling sister and the under-21 crowd. They laugh a lot. So did I.
     This month brought emotions, joy, and connection like I never have felt before. I felt something new and endearing with every single person I spent time with this season. I may very well be addicted to three-year-olds at Christmas. I may very well seek them out in future years: Got a three-year-old? See you December 25. Early. I’ll bring coffee.
     Christmas not so much fun with the newborn? Just wait. It gets so good.
     It gets so good. 
     Seven months ago, I could not have heard that assertion no matter how loudly it was proclaimed. It had no meaning for me. Today? Not only do I believe it, I think I just might be beginning… just barely beginning … to feel it.
     And that? Is what I call a Christmas miracle.

Love,
Robin

This is it.

Back to Arizona. I came to Florida with Mimi in early November for a reprieve from the stress and pain of facing the shambles that remained of my real life. This has not been a vacation per se, with tensions of its own, but it’s been a blessing to reflect, sleep a lot, laugh, and play with Mimi while I honed the skills I’ll need so desperately when I get back.

Waiting for me are an ambivalent husband, a freezing house (we don’t have heat in our 100-year-old home), an empty bank account, friends who have either moved on to a better party or are bewildered and waiting for an explanation, and The Job.

I can’t think any more about this or I won’t get on the plane. I am a white-knuckle, panic-attack flyer. I’m never sure I’ll actually get on the plane, until I do. I’ve never been sure, when it comes to flying, even when I knew I had medication to cushion the ride.

Please wish me luck.

I remember when Heath Ledger died. I scoured reports for details about what he’d taken. How much. When. Had he drunk alcohol as well? While others tsk-tsked and shook their heads, I shook in my boots. I never learned specifics– and truthfully, I didn’t research it exhaustively — because I was taken aback by just the list of substances he’d swallowed. It included everything I was taking, but with an additional couple of drugs. All legal. All prescribed. I was really scared.
Not scared enough, however, to stop what I was doing. I was convinced, at the time, that I couldn’t stop. I was right.
But I was equally convinced that someday, when my job was less stressful, when my marriage smoothed out, when my daughter was a little less challenging … then I could stop on my own.
So I kept on. And got worse.
This summer, Michael Jackson provided a poignant case study to my fellow inmates and me. Through our doctors, we were provided plenty of details about exactly what he was taking. How much. When. With what.
We compared. We debated. We contrasted. We took it as an opportunity to measure our own toxic brews against one another’s.
Today, I know as much about Brittany Murphy as you or anyone else does. I know I enjoyed her in that movie with Dakota Fanning. I know I can’t recall a single other thing about her.
But I know she shouldn’t look like this:

This is from the New York Daily News, reportedly the last published photo of her. Dear God in heaven, but she looks sick. Sick to her bones. Sick to her soul.
How could anyone let her look like this? How could those who loved her watch her dress herself and walk out the door and hold her hand at events and sit across the table from her and do all the things our family and friends do… without doing something about this?
That is, of course, a rhetorical question. No one can stop an adult from doing this to her body. When I looked like this, I  heard about it all the time. People tried. Oh, they tried. An adult can’t be force-fed, not really, and unless under court order (which does happen, often) can’t be compelled to stop taking/drinking/smoking whatever. And that approach doesn’t stick for long. No, for all we know, everyone in her life was slipping high-fructose corn syrup into her coffee. If she was determined to do this to herself, or just too sick to stop herself, no one else could do it for her.
That’s the scariest of all.

I just arrived from http://www.itsownterms.blogspot.com. I think I am going to like this new neighborhood.

I think it’s a bit dangerous to carry on about the difference between abuse and addiction. If the percentage of the American population that actually gets addicted to something (and this includes alcoholics) is 2%, and only a portion of those get treatment, then there sure are a lot of non-addicts hanging around rehabs.

From Painkiller Addiction: A Smaller Risk Than You Might Think:

You can abuse them without being addicted
The chance of addiction is statistically low, says Frank Vocci, PhD, director of the division of pharmacotherapy and the medical consequences of drug abuse at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Vocci estimates it to be around 2%. However, he cautions that the line between addiction and opioid abuse is not always clear. Patients may find themselves more and more reliant on their meds and need to watch for this.

“There are cases when they simply have an increase in their pain. For example, with cancer patients. That’s legitimate,” says Vocci. “But there are other times when people start to take more than they’re prescribed because they’re trying to medicate something other than pain. They may be feeling stressed.”

Okay, so, today has been very, very blah. I’m still trying to figure out how I feel about it all (I learned a couple of treatment buddies relapsed, one nearly fatally; forcing Mimi into clothes and dragging her to a birthday party [that she ended up enjoying, after all] felt dangerously close to losing my cool, for very very real; this cough just WILL NOT go away; finishing my Christmas letter was bittersweet…) Those are just starters.

I promise to share all and sundry. Just not tonight.

…and I didn’t use or drink today so at least there is that.