Then & Now

A weekly look back on 10 years of recovery. This week: Thanksgiving 2013 & 2023

My First Sober Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving was a lovely day at my parents house. My brother and his family came down, all the kids (five boys under eight years old- my two and his three) got along. All the adults got along. Dinner was loud and delicious. We all agreed that the stuffing was the best, ham too was a great idea, and that we should feed the kids first next year so we could all actually eat instead of pop up and down for kid seconds and thirds before we'd had a bite. "Mom? I need more ham." "Me too! I need more ham too!" And so we could hear each other talk.

Around five or so we came home, built a fire and all piled up in blankets and pillows and snacks on the couch. Put on "The Polar Express".

Kind of in the middle of the movie I had a sudden thought. "Is this what we do every year? Wait, why don't we do this every year?"

Then I remembered.

This was my first sober Thanksgiving.

Usually I would have had wine with dinner. Then Jonathan and I would have wine at the house. I would have wanted to put the kids to bed on time so we could get our Thanksgiving drink on. I would have been bundled in my coat outside smoking and freezing.

I would be hungover this morning instead of popping open a can of cinnamon rolls and making bacon. I would be dreading this whole day instead of wishing it had a few more hours. I would have been upstairs asleep instead of making hot chocolate for the kids. Seeing them grin when I hold up the whipped cream so they'll open their mouths and I'll spray some right in. This delights them and me every time. I would have missed it.

The more time I spend sober, the more I realize that the alcohol industry has it all wrong. I don't have less fun because I don't drink- I have more. They have us all fooled into thinking that life is ho-hum OK, but if you add some chardonnay it will be somehow extra extra amazing. They want us to believe booze makes it better.

Liars.

They also want you to think you are missing something if you aren't drinking. That you are boring. Abnormal. I am of the opinion that having to add booze to an event or to a person to make it fun is just plain dumb. Totally dumb. 

Being sober has made me realize: I'm not missing anything. I see and hear and remember it all. I'm not waiting for the magical time to happen when the wine is right and the night is alive and I am suddenly, because of booze, the woman I was always meant to be. I am already her. I have all the things I need right here. I am not boring or uncool with my seltzer and my sobriety. I am fucking awesome. :)

My Eleventh Sober Thanksgiving

I remember when I was fourteen years old seeing the dancing in the kitchen after dinner scene and the football scene in The Big Chill and deciding that was exactly what holidays should look like. I have based my holiday expectations on those scenes for almost forty years.

I didn’t understand or even register all the adult dynamics, but I knew I liked it when Kevin Kline put on an album after a big turkey dinner. “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” started playing and then everyone was dancing, bumping butts and laughing together in the kitchen. Putting away food was fun and cleaning up was fun and this was how people were together. The laughing and playing football outside was what people who really loved each other did at halftime.

What I saw at fourteen in that movie was a group of people who seemed to want to be together, who did things like eat and dance and play and it looked so wonderful. It was only two or three years ago that I connected the fact that this group of people are together is because their friend Alex committed suicide and they’ve all gathered for the funeral. I was so absorbed in what I wanted to see that I missed the point.

My dream version of Thanksgiving lives on regardless of that point. In it we are family and friends happy to be together. We sit around a long table and laugh and share stories and fill each other up with food and love. I can picture myself at the table, eye crinkle smiling and laughing, looking at my beloveds and feeling so thankful. Feeling comfortable. I picture myself falling asleep that night with a full belly and a smile on my face, my heart glowing with love.

This year, the kids and I drove up to my brother’s mountain house for a couple days. My parents were there too. My old role in the family comes rushing back in and I forget that I am a 52 year old grown up. I go right back to being a powerless child who just wants to feel loved and for everyone to get along. My hyper vigilance goes into overdrive and I cannot settle down. I feel like I’m on a bed of nails most of the time- waiting for one of my parents to get upset, waiting for my mom to say some things rude and unkind, wishing I could make them happy and help them relax and enjoy things and knowing I can’t. My old need to save us all, to create the dream Thanksgiving, kicks in hard. I just try to mind my own business and deal with my own self.

It is exhausting.

The day after Thanksgiving my mom encouraged me to share pictures from my recent October trip out to Taos, New Mexico to visit my best friend. My brother and I figured out the Airplay on the TV and I started out. I could feel my dread, my nervousness.

“This is the airport in Raleigh, no Atlanta. No Raleigh, this is Atlanta,” I said as I showed a couple pictures of lighted cities taken from my airplane window seat at dawn. “Yes, I think that second one is Atlanta,” my seasoned traveler brother agreed.

My mom launched into criticizing the pictures with gusto. My friend dyes her hair- she’s not fooling anyone! It looks like hell out in New Mexico- HELL! In ten years you won’t be able to go outside there! I would never live there, it looks terrible. Awful! I show pictures of the air balloons that literally launch right in front of my friends house from the mesa across the Rio Grande Gorge almost every day. That must be old hat by now isn’t it? If you wouldn't go up in an air balloon why do you care so much about air balloons? Through my carefully curated album of trip photos she spewed her opinions all over the room. I rushed to finish and then called her out, stood up for myself. Said it wasn’t ok. But in the end I was the one hugging her, excusing her, soothing her.

I can feel myself as that fourteen year old child who wanted it to be The Big Chill holiday every day. Instead I was at the mercy of her mother’s opinions then just like I am now. I saw young me, excited about something, and heard my mother ridicule it and tear it down until I felt tiny, useless, and foolish. I hear what it was like to try to stand up for myself and then get made fun of for that. And then I saw myself see my mom hurting because I stood up for myself, and suddenly I’m consoling her. I saw her feel hurt that I’m telling her she hurt me. Instead of her doing the repair I do. It’s ok that you hurt my feelings mom. See? I’m fine. I love you.

I imagine it looks like this: Sally runs over Mary with her car. Mary peels herself off the road to apologize to Sally for being in the way.

I am still processing all this. It feels very unsettling and like a light shined on something and it went from blurry to clear. I saw something I can’t unsee that upsets my way of making myself feel better. I see how I abandon myself, how the patterns play out. How my mother’s family created this behavior in her. How terrible it is. How the coping mechanisms got formed. How she was me, the child, at the mercy of the adult. How she became the adult, and I am the child. How this pattern continues even though I’m 52 years old, far from a childhood, until I become a child when we enter the legacy dance of hurt.

I am so grateful to be sober. Knowing how many years I drank at these feelings to avoid them and seeing how I have gotten to where I am today- willing to be with them- is comforting. It is at times unbearable to feel and see, and yet, even in the scramble of my feelings I let myself go into the toss of them because I trust myself to carry me, to care for me. I talk myself through with my own advice. I listen. I encourage myself to cry, to feel. I still resist, I still avoid, and it’s better than it was.

The discomfort sobriety brings to me is tempting to avoid and at first I would still rather run than deal. But I don’t. Years of recovery have taught me how to stay.

Back at Thanksgiving 2013 I was really feeling the gift of my sobriety with joy and relief. It was shiny and new and amazing. Not drinking and waking up without a hangover was a tangible noticeable miracle every single day. That feeling has slowly evolved and has also not disappeared, my sobriety in 2023 is a decade long friend who is always with me and knows me and still has the glow of miracles. I trust my old friend, and my old friend trusts me. My old friend tells me the truth. The things I wanted to remember back in 2013 were simple details of the night- what we ate, what movie we watched. The things I want to know now are more complex- how to set boundaries with emotional maturity and care.

I’m not willing to peel myself off the pavement and apologize for being in the way anymore. It hurts my trust with myself and my sobriety, my old friend. As uncomfortable and almost impossible as it seems for me to break the pattern and validate my own hurt, I will do that, even if it hurts my mom. So often for me these days sobriety feels like being at the eye doctor trying to figure out what will make things less fuzzy. I look and if it’s hard or hurts to see then I go back to my old lenses because my old pattern is: clarity isn’t always better. Some days I’d rather squint into the illusion than see clearly into the truth. And the truth is, it is as it has always been- the thing that’s changing is the way I see it. The truth is, in the situation with my mom, there are two of us, not one. And if my wish is to have my mom in my life and to love her how can I do that in a way that is clear for both of us? I don’t want to miss it.

And yes, I am still fucking awesome. :)