Then & Now: Counting Months

Monday, April 8, 2013

Four Months Yesterday

How about that?

Yesterday I got up and went for a sunrise long run. I started laughing, out loud, when I remembered where I was four months ago: glued to my bed ashamed and Hungover unable to function. I have changed so much from that person. Thankfully, since that person was going to really wreck my life. So then I cried some, which is hard to do when running by the way.

I've been super emotional lately- reality setting in? Or just something inside me announcing to all my drowned feelings, "It's OK, you can come out now! It's safe!" And lord, everyone seems to be rushing the door at once.

Feelings: "It's OK! Woo hoo! We can come out now! YAY! Oh, look at that laundry!Grumble! Roar! AGH!!!! No one loves me enough to help with the laundry. Sob. Double sob. Help. Oh, wait. I think I'm OK again. It's OK! Woo hoo!"

Suffice it to say it's been a little bit like a roller coaster around here, except maybe not as exciting but with the screaming. Life is hard. Who knew under all that Prosecco and beer there were actual feelings besides guilt and self loathing? Now that the honeymoon seems to be over (although I will always love you sobriety- since we are soul mates) and married life is setting in I'm having a little trouble getting adjusted. Not I'm-going-to-have-to-drink kind of trouble, but trouble nonetheless. With a little "t".

But it's OK. Because even when it's hard, and I have so many feelings (Too many! That's enough for me thanks, I haven't even finished my first plate of feelings yet, no really. REALLY.) I am a thousand billion trillion times happier than I ever was living my life at the bottom of just one more. I'm so grateful to have reached the finish line- to have reached the end of that part. "Will it ever be over? Are we there yet?" YES. It is over, and we are there yet.

Four months sober. It seems like a gigantic huge chunk and then a little drop in a big ass bucket all at once. I am so proud of myself, and so grateful for y'all- this blog has helped so much. Sitting here at my desk in the morning sifting through things to tell you and how to tell them to you has made me less crazy. I sort through things so I can write them down and they become more clear. And then that helps. Hurrah!

I think that might be what sobriety boils down to for me: The Helps. All the little and big things you were afraid to ask for when you were drinking. Being able to say those two little words: "Help ME." Saying them to yourself, to someone else. Even the dog, or a tree. Or to God, or the sky. But asking. And then being grateful.

So thank you and me and God and the trees for my sobriety. I feel pretty dang happy. Even when I'm on the hard part of the roller coaster.

Sunday, April 7, 2024

135 Months Today

135 circles

My mom and I talk most Sunday mornings, she just started calling me weekly out of the blue a few months ago, and has just kept doing it. Sometimes she forgets, or gets busy in the early morning gardening and doesn’t call until later. Last week she forgot, so I sent her a reminder last night, and this morning we talked for an hour and a half.

I am so proud of us, how far we’ve come, especially since 2017, on a different phone call, she called me an asshole after I told her she was hurting my feelings. I hung up on her and we didn’t talk for almost nine months. It was a full eclipse time then too.

Our relationship has always been fraught, we are both strong willed, both fiercly independent, both raised without the skills and tools we needed to know how to have hard conversations, love with vulnerability, or feel confident in our own beliefs and skin. What she wasn’t taught she couldn’t teach to me.

She was a child, just like I was a child. Both of us without an adult around who knew what they were doing when it came to tenderness, understanding, care, listening, and support. I am deeply grateful that we made it, we stayed connected, that now she is comfortable showing her tender love for me, and that I am open to embracing it. We have come so far in our almost 53 years together.

Not everyone grows up the way we did, her with two alcoholic abusive parents, me raised by their traumatized daughter. She did what she could, and then I did what I could, and I feel incredibly thankful that somehow after 27 years of being a blackout drinker I found my way to sobriety, recovery, and healing so she and I both would know what it means to be a mother and daughter. To feel the love we have for one another, rather than it carving out anger and accusation, now comes in with care and careful words, each of us willing to back down so the other deosn’t get hurt. We no longer hurt each other and call that love.

It’s very sweet to read the post from 2014 about me discovering feeling my feelings. I have been working at that this whole time. It’s been what helped my mom and I come together, it’s what helps me come together with myself. When you have such big feelings and big burdens as a child, you have to learn how to shut down, shut things off. You become a cornered animal in the body of a child that grows into a walled off afraid teenager then adult medicating themselves with too much alcohol. Starting up feeling again is such a complicated task- after all, if you teach your system that feelings mean danger and off then getting it to trust you when you tell it the opposite takes a lot of patience and time.

One of the things I have learned to remember is that even if I have a huge emotional reaction it will not last forever. It scared me for so long, that if I started to cry I would never stop, it would overtake me, the sorrow was so big and I was only one me. I am learning this over and over as I practice falling into the sorrow rather than shutting it down, I remember how intense and amazing my feelings are and I feel glad to be a mostly emotionally healthy grown up now so I know what to do with them. My feelings are big and bright and strong and I like them that way.

I wonder if I will always be like this- that just when I think I have gone the deepest, things can suddenly get much deeper. And then I think, of course, of course there’s more than that, of course there’s this too. I also really wonder what it’s like to be other people, is life this much for everyone? Is there this much to learn for all of us?

Is that what life is?

My family, my ancestors on both sides, many were angry alcoholics. Many of them were abusive. Committed suicide. Mentally ill with no help. Sometimes I picture us all lined up for a family photo and I wonder if they’d be happy that I stopped the cycle. That I started out just like them and changed my mind halfway through. I wonder if my children will carry on the legacy I started, the legacy of therapy and mental health and asking for help. What if the past will reaches out and grabs one or both of them too?

I hope not. I hope my family tree is finished and knows better now. One of the hardest parts of recovery is that there are no guarntees- just because I am sober today doesn’t mean I will be sober tomorrow- I still say forever every day anyway.

135 months, damn. I am so proud of that, of how hard I work to heal myself and to share that healing so other people can find themselves in that work and my words and know that one day, 4 months can turn into 135 months for you, too.