On April 14, 2023, I was on the phone with my friend, Brian, who lives in New York. I call him Possum. He said he needed an accountability partner, someone to help him straighten up his eating and drinking habits. He asked me to be that person.
At that moment in time, I was not a model of nutritional, healthy living. When I was running around during an event and not having time to eat, I’d pull into McDonald’s and order a large diet coke and large fries. My drinking consisted of Aperol Spritz – which I blame Ann for introducing me to after her trip to France – those concoctions cost me about 250 calories each and never had I had just one.
But he pushed a little more, and I caved. Our birthdays were around the corner – we are both May babies, and usually birthdays are for splurging not for fasting. But I jumped in with him and on April 15, 2023, I began a daily practice of not drinking alcohol.
I dieted also and ended up losing about 27 pounds that I oh, so miraculously have put back on. But that’s another blog post. Me and weight – sheesh. I am trying to love my body because it’s a workhorse and it does a lot of my humaning for me. But loving it is a work in progress.
So I quit drinking. Around this time, my son was undergoing an existential crisis – he couldn’t live with the chaos in his mind so he self-medicated and our world was constantly tumbling down. I needed to be present. Even one glass of wine could tip me over to the “why are you doing this to me?” mode of thinking, rather than how could I help you mode I needed to be in.
My mother was alcoholic. I think I mention this sometimes but not all times. Her alcoholism caused her to disappear in plain sight. It’s a phenomenon I found in lovers and husbands – that far away look. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
I never called myself an alcoholic. I referred to myself as a lush. I was not that capable of having one glass, it was always let’s share a bottle glass of wine.
By the time I was entering my 50s, a glass of wine meant sleepy time for me. I have fallen asleep at dinner parties, at shows, pretty much anywhere I could cozy up and rest my weary head.
I quit drinking on April 15, 2023, and this has become my daily practice. It helped me be a better parent. It helped me heal my inner child. It helped me enter a world of sober living that my son’s recovery introduced me to. It helped me find Adult Children of Alcoholics, a group I should have joined when I was a young woman, but am so glad I joined now.
The Book of Alchemy by Suleika Jaouad – third chapter.
This writing came from the third prompt by Michael Bierut:
Write about a time when you began doing something daily
Loving your writing Rachel. I am loving getting to know you better through it as well. I, too, am the child of an alcoholic mother. ACA in Jackson was my salvation when I divorced my husband at age 37. As many therapists tell women, we become our fathers and marry our mothers. True in my case back then. We live and we learn and we learn some more – never ending lessons in this life. The most important is that we learn to love ourselves, to take better care of ourselves. Which gives us the emotional energy to take better care of those around us. We pass that on, because we have (sometimes feebly) stopped the negative energies from taking over.
The bow that wraps all this up is self-love and the over used word self-care. Why they didn’t teach this in school since none of us were learning this at home is beyond me.