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Archives from 2002-2006

The fact that it’s actually dusk-dark out at 4:30 PM now instead of pitch black gives me hope that eventually these short, cold days will come to an end and once again we’ll be able to go for walks around the neighborhood and visit playgrounds and sit in the backyard and I don’t know, do anything other than rattle around our house during the post-dinner, pre-bedtime zone each day. Just about every evening there comes a time when Riley is running around yelling and Dylan is crawling around whining and everyone is kind of bored and cooped-up but there’s really nowhere to go and our house feels cramped and annoyingly full of clutter and I find myself thinking what a grind this all is, WOE.

Then eventually there are bedtimes and goodnight kisses and almost immediately my little battery light starts going booooooooop! on its way back to full charge. It is brief, my daily moment of anti-zen, but it has surely become a regular 6 PM occurrence, and I’m convinced the weather plays no small part in this shameful fleeing desire to jump in the car, abandon my family, and set up a new life in Cabo San Lucas.

I got a welcome taste of sunlight earlier when I met Ashley and her kids at Cougar Mountain Park, which is situated at a high enough elevation that the cloud cover spread all around us. It was like peering out the window of a plane:

Riley managed to trip and fall facefirst into the dirt about a thousand times while we were hiking around and spent the majority of the outing howling and/or whining, but despite his lack of enjoyment for the fresh air and blue skies it was a nice break from the unrelenting Januaryness of January.

I have received several emails in the last month that all touch on the same topic, which is whether or not I’ve mentioned why I don’t drink. If you’ve been reading for a longish time, you know at least part of my story, although obviously I haven’t detailed every last sordid part of the tale here.

For those of you who have joined more recently, the short answer is this: I don’t drink because I was, or I suppose the correct term is am, an alcoholic. I spent years of my life drinking on a regular basis. Drinking for the specific purpose of getting drunk, for the most part. I never could have one glass of wine and I still can’t wrap my head around the concept that there are people in the world who can. You mean you don’t finish the glass and have another and another and empty the bottle then switch to mixed drinks and eventually wake up with a vicious, soul-destroying hangover, the only coherent thought in your head something along the lines of oh my god this sucks when can I have another drink? Huh. What’s that like.

Somewhere around 2003 things got downright pathological, and I was drinking a lot of straight vodka from bottles I’d hidden around the house. On a day in 2004 I started drinking in the morning, was drunk at work and made a complete ass of myself, and got a DUI when I drove home. I’d say that night was my rock bottom, but actually, it was probably the 24 hours I had to spend in jail several months later, as part of my sentence.

The DUI was a horrifying, shameful, endless (so many, many months of court appearances, fines, and court-ordered classes) wakeup call, and I stopped. I’d guess even that wouldn’t have kept me from drinking for too long, but then I was pregnant. And the months went by with no drinking and life became a thousand times richer and more real than it had ever been when viewed through the haze, and I was free from the self-loathing, the sickness, the endless cycle of when am I going to have that next drink, and while I can’t say there haven’t been a million times when I wished I could have a nice relaxing beer or something I know it’s never just one. Never.

People have sometimes asked me how I knew I had a problem and I don’t quite know how to answer. I always knew I had a problem, I guess, and in the last years before I quit it had become this terrible, hellish treadmill I thought I’d be trapped on forever. It was something a little more than a problem at that point, really.

There’s a great line in Anne Lamott’s Operating Instructions where she talks about wanting a drink when her baby is first born, just one to help with the stress of it all. And she says something about how she knows, though, that if she did go to the liquor store to buy the bottle for that one drink, she may as well put her baby on the counter along with her money, because if she has the drink, she’ll lose it all.

So there it is, the Reader’s Digest version of why I don’t drink. I own the mistakes I’ve made and I continue to think about them and deal with them, and I’ll tell you, as nervous as it makes me to confess all this to you, I can’t think of a reason why I shouldn’t.

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