Category Archives: Addiction

We aren’t “blessed.” We’re just alive.

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Reflections, Uncategorized, , , , , , , ,

Life can be pretty damn cruel to some of us.  Maybe, for some, it strikes infrequently, while for others, it’s every damn day.  From what I’ve observed, when life starts pounding a person every single day, it is opening the abyss, the rock bottom ending.

I’ve always been a little too sensitive when it comes to cruelty, be it human or other.  My father kicked me out of the family room one night when I was a teenager because I couldn’t handle Platoon.  It was that scene when the raged-out soldier shoots at the feet of a one-legged villager, forcing him to hop around in terror.  That scene prompted in me an uncontrollable crying jag, out-loud weeping, so woeful that my dad told me to “get out,” to go upstairs and find something else to do.  He never talked to me about that incident, just kinda acted like it never happened. Maybe I scared him.  Hell, if one of my boys did that, I’d sure as hell be scared.  But we’re living now in the age of mental illness, when parents are finally beginning to acknowledge potential problems in their kids and get them treated early.  I think Dad was just dumbfounded, or annoyed. Who knows.  Think I’ll ask the next time I talk to him.

Anyway, I once again thank Prozac for fending off my potential to go through life in a permanent state of bummed-out.  It, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, have provided me with the serenity to function, even thrive. But I still dedicate a great deal of time observing and thinking about the neighborhood downtrodden.

There’s the white-haired man who lives in his car.  He parks it in the afternoons in the Safeway lot.  And if it’s a cold day, he keeps it running.  I worry that the car will eventually give out from being run nonstop for such long stretches of time.  I am not entirely sure he lives in his car, but all the signs seem to point to that.  He’s always there, just reclining in the driver’s seat, with the radio on and the engine running.  He wasn’t there tonight, though.  I looked for him like I always do.  No late-model silver Subaru sitting in a pool of its own coolant or whatever is dripping out of it from constant running.  I admit I’m a little frightened.  What can he do without that car?

The white-haired man is a new one on my radar.  He seemed to emerge with a whole group of people with cardboard signs who have stationed themselves on all the busy medians in recent months, distracting me from the old guard:

There’s the prostitute who used to walk up and down the highway, and hang out in parking lots, smiling at everyone going by.  She had a big, welcoming smile.  Her features and her demeanor led me to believe that she might have been West African. For about a year, I watched her stroll about.  She started out beautiful with her flawless coffee-colored skin and her dazzling smile and her bright, revealing little dresses.  As time went on, her skin lost the glow, her hair matted up, and her smile started to look a little simple.  Last time I saw her, she was jaywalking through traffic at a stopped intersection, her right breast hanging out of her top.  I don’t think she noticed.  I stopped seeing her around, and I like to think she found a better place to be, a safe place. But who knows?

And there’s the other lady who I also suspect to be West African (my metro area has the largest African population in the U.S.).  She sits every day–in a long, black dress and a white cap—on a bench at the bus stop outside my gym.  On hot summer days, she sits on the nearby bank under a tree.  She’s there every day except when it’s raining or snowing.  And she’s gone by evening.  I don’t know where she goes.  I hope she has a bed to go back to.  She piles loaded shopping bags all around her.  Once, I saw her speaking to I-don’t-know-who, maybe the cars going by.  She was animated that day, looked like a preacher delivering a sermon.  Most of the time, though, she doesn’t say a word to anyone, just watches them as they walk by or wait for their bus.

And I can’t forget the old couple, the one my neighbor got kicked out of the tent they had been living in behind the nearby Walmart.  I can’t really begrudge my neighbor.  There was an entire colony of homeless people and transients back there for awhile, and their trash was everywhere.  What do you do when you don’t have sanitation facilities?  Well, you know.  My neighbor told me that the man had refused to go to a shelter, but his wife went. So they got split up.   I have never seen them together.  I used to call him “Homeless Santa” because he had a big white beard, and he wore so many layers of clothes that he looked kinda pudgy and wobbly.  He wears a lot of fatigues, and a yellow bicycle helmet.  He seemed to get a lot of his meals or coffee at the Wendy’s on the corner because I often saw him sitting there on the grass embankment by the parking lot. Then, sigh, the Wendy’s closed down to make room for more condos that we don’t need.  I only see Homeless Santa once in a while now.  Last time was in the pouring rain, he was just trudging down the sidewalk, bent over, definitely looking like the elements had taken their toll. He’s a tough old guy to live on the streets at his age.  He must have been fierce when he was young.  Somehow, he and his wife ended up living in a motel that got torn down to make way for more condos that we don’t need, and that was beginning of worse, the abyss.

His wife is a slight and lovely lady with long gray hair that she wears loose.  She, too, wears a lot of layers, always dresses.  Her presence is so unobtrusive that she can hang out in places where her husband can’t—Panera Bread, Starbucks, the Safeway.

I can’t help but wonder about this couple.  I see a flower child and a Vietnam vet.  I have nothing but speculation, but that’s what I see.

I heard recently that more Vietnam vets have committed suicide than actually died during the war. And I wasn’t surprised.

So these are a few of myhomeless, just a few.  I call them mine because they are as much of a part of my neighborhood as the homeowners and the apartment dwellers and the Uber drivers. I knowthem.  They just don’t know me.  I don’t go and sit with the gray-haired lady when I see her in Panera.  There are rules, unspoken rules about how we should interact with people who have fallen into the abyss.  And I think those rules are there for our own emotional protection as much as they are to protect our delusion of personal safety.  Life doesn’t get easier.

It’s only been about ten years since I would have admitted that my biggest fear, beyond spiders and torture and the like, was financial destitution.  There were years when I could see it on the horizon.  The whole pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps, self-made man bullshit is just that, bullshit.  So many of us, of my peers, have done what we thought we were supposed to do—work hard or go to college, buy a house, get a credit card.  And despite all that, some of them right now are on the verge of homelessness, of living in their cars.

So many desperate people are outside my window.  I don’t know what to do with them at the moment because I’m still trying to secure my own future.  So many of them just got buffeted with life’s cruel jabs and didn’t know how to fight back. It takes resources, savvy, a warrior mentality, and a whole lotta luck to make it to the end these days.  No one is “blessed” as the vanity plates on gaudy Lincolns I see on the highway try to claim.  Go on, tell the world you’re blessed.  See what happens.

Addendum:  There’s a new guy.  He also has white hair, and he tries to be upbeat.  He wears a fading t-shirt that says, “Normal People Scare Me.”  We chatted about that t-shirt months ago, before it started to fade.  I think I want to buy him a new one.

Better than a Bag of Smashed Assholes

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Reflections, Second Acts, Social Media, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I haven’t written a word in months. I’ve passed up so many great quips, so many interesting topics that apply to the New 40s—career crossroads, friends who make bad choices, crazy relatives, ex-boyfriends, and the perennial cycle of drinking and weight management. Ah, me.

I heard a great expression today (read, rather, on Facebook, of course—the 40-and-over social playground): “He/She looks like a bag of smashed assholes.” I laughed as loud and as long as I had when I first heard my un-PC friend tell someone to go “suck-a-bag-a-dicks.” Love the imagery, the pure crudeness. I have an affection for shocking manipulation of language.

In grad school, I did a presentation for my “Exploring Voice in Nonfiction” class on sex columnist author Dan Savage’s crude manipulation of language for propaganda and for the practical purposes of communicating in the alt-sex scene. One of my favorites, I explained to the class, was his invention of the word “santorum,” that frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is produced during anal sex. Yes, while my classmates dissected Joan Didion’s and Truman Capote’s prose, I discussed made-up words about butt sex. Perhaps that’s why my classmates never seemed to take me very seriously… But I digress. Savage’s use of “santorum” was a direct hit on Rick Santorum, a former PA senator and arbiter of the Workplace Religious Freedom Act, a proposed bill that basically allowed businesses to discriminate against employees on the basis of religious principles. Santorum, the man, not the frothy mixture, wasn’t a favorite with Savage or the bulk of his readers. In his column, they used the word “santorum” as defined above so many times, that, when one Googled the word “Santorum,” Savage’s definition would appear first, instead of the senator that bore its name. Now, that’s what I can an excellent “smear” campaign!

But anyway, back to our “bag of smashed assholes.” While this term might not have the intention of making political waves, it certainly gives me a chuckle. I also appreciate the context in which I first encountered it:

One of the guys in my Facebook exercise group, the members of which have been destroying me in exercise challenges for over a year now, posted his thoughts on weight obsession. To support his claim that weight is a poor measuring tool for self-confidence, he said that two people could be the exact same height and weight, but one could look fantastic and the other could look like a “bag of smashed assholes.” It’s not about weight, he contended, it’s about fitness and liking what you see in the mirror. Thank you online exercise buddy I have never met!  I can get behind that philosophy, especially since I’ve been lifting weights, running, and riding a Peloton almost daily for the past month (not all on the same day, of course), and my weight hasn’t budged.

There’s a reason for that, and that is I’m still drinking copious amounts of beer. Last weekend, while staying in a town renowned for its craft breweries, my hubby and I discussed allowing beer as my only alcohol because it doesn’t make me crazy or black out, and because it doesn’t make me wake up with crippling hangovers. That’s progress. A little. But the more I work out, I’m discovering, the less inclined I am to want the beer. All it takes with me, sometimes, is a goal to distract me. I’m going to complete a half marathon with my FB exercise group in September. This will be my first half, and my first race other than a zombie 5K, in over ten years. As I train for this race, I am happily reminded of my old running days, of those incremental accomplishments that I made out on the trails or on the pavement every time I went out. It’s a craving like no other—getting outside, pushing up a hill, sprinting down one, feeling my heart beat, sweating it all out. I crave that sleepy peace I feel about an hour after a good run, and that slow settling soreness in my tired legs. I want this, almost as much as I want to drink.

I think my progress is on the horizon. I can’t say that I look fantastic and fit right now, but I’m getting there; and I certainly don’t look like a bag of smashed assholes. Most importantly, though, I have more on my mind than simply losing weight and what I look like. I have that craving for movement and wind and sweat and sore muscles. I crave the burn, which could be my saving grace.

 

“Earth Day” Still Exists!

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, good reads, Reflections, Social Media, Uncategorized, , , , ,

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” –Ray Bradbury

Happy Earth, day, Darling. We love you very, very, very, very, very, very, VERY much.

An MSN poll this morning asked me how I would rate the state of the environment today versus ten years ago. I expected my choices would be some kind of range between “catastrophic” and “meh.” I guess I expected too much from MSN. The choices offered to me this Earth Day on the state of the environment were these four: “better,” “worse,” “about the same,” and “I don’t know.” 46% of respondents think things have gotten worse, which means the other 64% of them are delusional. Perhaps they watch real news instead of that “fake” stuff. 24 fucking percent of these morons think the earth is doing better. REALLY? Out of this 64% roasted nut mix, I have the most (not saying “a lot,” just “the most”) respect for the 3% who admit that they just don’t know. Thank you. Thank you for your honesty. You, my 3%, have just admitted that you don’t make any great efforts to stay informed about the environment or the state of the world, that you probably click out of your MSN home page if the content gets too heavy, and that you’re not afraid to admit that. I’ll take an “I don’t know.” It’s the only genuine choice among those pitiful three.

I say this with no sarcasm intended: Shit like this is the reason why I became a drinker. Morons aren’t new to this earth. The Internet didn’t invent them. I thought so many people around me were tedious and annoying when I was thirteen, long before smart phone distractions like Twitter and Snapchat. I say “thirteen” because it was around that time I started swiping beers and replacing liquor with water. I think my first drunks were like revelations to me—people could be funny, I could make light of things, s’all good! I never drank to make a story (yes, I’m still hung up on the Jamison memoir). Life itself was an absurd, dark comedy.

While we’re on the subject of environmental devastation, Husband and I watched Downsizing the other night. I’ll watch anything with Jason Sudeikis and Kristen Wiig. Plus, as a kid I used to fantasize about what it would be like to be a tiny person as tall as a blade of grass. The movie turned out to be much more than a comedy about people voluntarily shrinking themselves to get more for their money. It made a pretty obvious statement, in fact, about what people choose to do with technological and scientific breakthroughs that have the power to make lives better or worse. There’s a dark side to every invention. On the one hand, you have the visionaries, those with the foresight to think globally and imagine the very best outcomes of their labor. On the other hand, you have the hustlers who seize on the rich, but short-term gains offered by the technology. Anyone with the ability to think critically can weigh the pros and cons of both hands. Our future kinda depends on critical thinkers to maintain a balance between the two.

I think today’s Earth Day MSN poll provides some evidence that the scale is off-balance. Nevertheless, I’m gonna enjoy this Earth Day—the sunshine, the smell of freshly-mowed grass, and my relative privilege in the world.

The Absence

Addiction, Aging Parents, Reflections, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I started reading Leslie Jamison’s The Recovery and got to page 18 and put it down. All I know about the author so far is that she had attended a graduate writing program in Iowa, that she had felt she needed to make stories to tell and so she used drinking as her vehicle, and that she had rehearsed her first confession at an AA meeting. Within those 18 pages, she included other bits about adolescent insecurity turned adult insecurity and the usual stuff that alcoholics and probably everybody else has experienced in the middle class world. I could keep reading with an open mind. Maybe tomorrow, though, not tonight. At the moment, I just don’t care about this particular woman’s recovery story or about what she has unearthed on the subject through research. Alcoholism, as a topic of research or conversation or reflection, as a personal struggle and a source of embarrassment, is beginning to bore me. Tonight, I am as bored with myself as I am by other alcoholics.

My addiction counselor asked me to journal about my habits. The purpose of the exercise was to determine what triggers a binge. Since I already know my triggers, a week of journals went like this:

April 4

Drank beer. It was a nice day.

April 5

Extra beer lying around. Drank that.

April 6

Another nice day. Drank more beer to celebrate our tax return.

April 7

Drank wine.

April 8

Brunch with J and Bloody Marys.

April 9

Met a new shrink. She prescribed Naltrexone. H went on a work trip. Drank the leftover beer. Bought more. Drank that. Bought 2 bottles of wine. Drank half of one.

April 10

Came home from work by 1:30. H still gone. Finished off the wine. Passed out. Woke up at 7:22 and thought it was morning. Made coffee, fed the dogs and went to my 8:00 am appointment with Dr. M. Didn’t realize until I got there and knocked on the door and waited around that it wasn’t morning. A new low.

Triggers? Well, where do we begin. This rhorshock splash of a journaling attempt ended two days later when I used the book to plan out a speech for my mother’s official memorial. The next morning, when the pastor asked me if I had brought a book for attendees to sign, I tore out those first few pages of scribbles and opened the diary to the first unripped page and set it on the podium. Got 44 signatures, but there were at least double that in attendance.

So, yeah, it was my mom’s memorial this weekend, six months after her death. I ended up ad libbing that speech since I couldn’t find a quiet corner of the hotel to write it out the night before. I would go to our room, and I’d find a bunch of kids in there. I’d go outside to smoke, and people would join me. I’d go into the lobby, and the front desk attendant would be watching news about the Syria bombing. So I inferred that my mom didn’t want me to go up there and read off of a piece of paper, so I didn’t. My speech began where the pastor left off.

I’ve written eulogies before. I wrote one for my grandmother, even started it before she died. I wrote one for my uncle who died shortly before my mother did. Somewhere in my files is an unfinished benediction for my father. But I couldn’t write one for Mom. I had a whole week before her service to do not much more than think about what to say when I got there, and the inarticulate scribblings above pretty much sum up how I spent that time. I thought about her a lot, but those thoughts usually ended in drunken blubbering and a long nap on the couch in my clothes with all the lights still on.

I still contend that Mom wanted my speech to be spontaneous. How do you say in five to ten minutes who and what your mother meant to you, and to everybody else? How do you defend and honor the direction of her whole life? You really can’t. The young pastor had it easy because he was new to the church when Mom got sick, and he only had one poignant memory of her. I had a lifetime. But I managed. It came to me.

Then my brother, my shy, soft-spoken brother, decided to say something. And he took a different approach. He didn’t try to sum her up or tell people something that perhaps they didn’t know. He just talked about little things that are no longer there, like dinner at 5:00. My mother’s day revolved around dinner time, and my father put it out there for her. If you showed up at their house any time between 4 and 6, you’d see the table set, smell food cooking. All the lights would be on. Dad would be busy in the kitchen, and Mom would be warm in a chair stalking people on Facebook or watching HGTV or All My Children. Since then, Dad has stopped thinking about dinner. I had to throw something together for him on Sunday when I realized that it was 6:30, and the kitchen was dark. That kind of absence is a real kick in the ass. It’s even worse than the little objects lying around in memoriam, like a beat-up pair of slides she used for gardening still sitting on the back porch or the little glass and ceramic things she collected, arranged meticulously in a display cabinet. It’s less a reminder as it is a void. A big question. What goes here now?

Babies and Grief

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Aging Parents, feeling old, generation x, loss of a parent, Uncategorized, , ,

OK, my cousin is temporarily staying at her sister’s house where she can play with a baby, and where her puppy can interact with another dog, and where she can be around other people and their normalcy for a time. I’m satisfied that she’s taken care of, at least for a week.

Babies are living antidepressants. The day my Mom died, a ragtag group of people descended on the house. There was my brother, of course, and my aunt and my nieces and my nephew and his wife. And there was the guy who owns the auto body shop down the road, the one who has been friends with the family since he and my brother took auto shop together in high school in the seventies. He’s plowed my parents’ driveway in winter, fixed their cars whenever they hit a deer or a traffic cone on the highway. Sold my oldest brother more refurbished auction cars than I can count on my hands. He’s always been there. And so there he was, at our house on the day my mom died, with his wife and his daughter and his little baby granddaughter.

This guy. This guy is one of those people who doesn’t have the words. He’s kind. He’s affable. He’s witty. But he doesn’t do speeches or drama or serious. A week before my mother died, when I first got to town, I stopped over at his shop to say “hi” like I always do. He just stood there and looked at me. No dumb jokes, no silly banter. I would have found it awkward, except that I’ve known this guy, literally, for as long as I can remember. So we just stood there in his shop for awhile, amid the dirt and oil fumes of gutted cars that brings me back to my childhood, hanging around my brothers while they tried to resurrect vintage Chevy products in our driveway. And then I left. This guy only has one channel—friendly and light. If he can’t be tuned to that channel, he just slips into quiet. And I am grateful for that.

I told my cousin this story. Because sometimes there are no words for tragedy and grief. I’ve told my cousin she’s young, and because she’s young, I’d like to see her feel better, eventually. But I never assured her that it would get better. I never told her to get back out there and start over, or to start dating again. That’s absurd. In the face of grief, you have to choose your words carefully, or just don’t say anything at all, like my brother’s loyal friend, the guy with the auto shop down the road, and the cute grandbaby that he brought to my parents’ house on the day my mother died.

There we were, a distraught family that was feeling some weird kind of relief and release because the suffering was over, at least for Mom.  And then there was this baby, a little thing in a tutu and a bow with big brown eyes, a child who was just beginning to comprehend the world around her. She didn’t know any of the yucky stuff—sadness, grief—she just responded to sounds and lights and color and smiles. Her granddaddy made goofy faces, and she smiled and laughed and shrieked, and he imitated her shrieks. And I enjoyed this baby, and I got FUCKED UP.

Later, after everyone left, my dad said, “I never understood how people could laugh and have fun in the face of tragedy. Now I think I get it. It’s a release.” It’s catharsis. It is. It’s like taking a long hike in the woods. It’s like hanging out with a baby. It’s like being with people who want or need nothing from you. They’re just there, like they’ve always been, with nothing new or profound to say.

My poor cousin. My cousin who gave up everything—her community, her friends, and even her family—to follow this dreamer (or maybe con artist) into the wilderness. She needs something. She needs the guy who owns the auto body shop down the road. She needs community, and she needs a baby. I hope this week she gets it.

 

 

Gen Xers–Are We Sages?

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Aging Parents, cancer, feeling old, generation x, loss of a parent, Relationships, Uncategorized, , , , ,

My hiking buddy and I spent the early afternoon scrambling along and up and over miles of natural rock formations, pausing along the way to take in some of the most gorgeous views that our part of the U.S.A. can offer. She and I make a great hiking duo. We choose a different trail every time we go out, so we always encounter a surprise or two. The fact that we needed to use our upper bodies to traverse this trail that my app labeled “moderate” was today’s surprise, a moderate surprise as compared to some of the other situations we’ve gotten ourselves into. In the end, though, we always laugh. We laugh at ourselves and whatever behavior the hike inspires in us. And we laugh just to laugh, I think. I love days like today.

I talked to my cousin last night. She’s a mess—walking around in a daze, wearing her dead husband’s clothes and shoes, sleeping with her arms wrapped around his urn. Grief has taken hold of her and isn’t letting go any time soon, especially since she drinks all day. If she were working, which she isn’t due to a ruptured disc or something, I think she’d be a bit more in touch with her surroundings. She might have a chance to break out of the depression spell. As it is, she spends all day, every day, alone with a confused puppy that her husband bought her shortly before he left this earth, and drinking.

What can I do? I’m forty-six. I am also plagued with grief and troubles, but of a different breed. I recently reviewed a series of journal entries from 2012 in which I discuss my struggles with drinking, my worries over my cousin, and my fear that I might lose my father. Six years ago, I was where I am now, except for one difference—I was preparing to lose a parent. Fast forward to now. I’ve lost the parent, just not the parent I expected to lose first. While I circle the wheel of same-old-shit-different year, the unexpecteds sometimes throw me off my course, wake me up. I need that. Who woulda thought Mom would go first? I didn’t, but I was prepared for something big. Ultimately, I was prepared for death. My cousin wasn’t.

My hiking buddy told me that this same-old-shit-different-year scenario that I am stuck in is a result of unwillingness to compromise.

“We wanna be able to drink when we want to drink and eat what we want to eat,” she said, “yet we also want to be svelt and fit.” It just doesn’t add up. We gotta compromise. Then she joked about how we can’t say the word “svelt” without feeling like a Jewish mom: “Oh, she’s so svelt!” And we laughed like we do.

That’s what my cousin doesn’t have anymore—the laughter. She gave her whole self, her whole identity, over to that husband. He, in so many words, told her where to live, who to hang out with, how to behave, and what was funny.

“You got Netflix?” I asked her. “Watch GLOW—great eighties soundtrack. Marc Maron is hysterical. It’s a fun distraction.”

You know what she told me?

“I don’t watch anything anymore that would make us laugh.” US. Us. What does a woman do when there is no more “us”? Is it wrong to think ahead? To sit down with our spouses and hash out life insurance and wills?  Six years ago, I was thinking ahead. I was forty, and my parents were in their seventies, and my husband and I hashed out our wills, and we discussed life insurance, and we discussed moving to a place where my mom could live with us… if the situation required it. Six years ago, I was struggling with my weight and with alcohol, but I was also preparing for this shitstorm that is life after forty. My cousin. She’s gotta get there.

I just don’t know what to say anymore. I wish I had sage answers to life’s questions. Maybe I do, but no one’s asking.

Takes a lot for this to be OVER

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , ,

Diet Diary 2018 3:

I weighed in this morning. I am bigger than ever. How DOES one who spent her whole life a size six get that big? I know. Booze.

I have a new rule: I am no longer allowed to go to the store. I am adding this rule to the no-cooking-wines-in-the-house rule. Slowly, I will weed out the demons.

I love the store. Going shopping at the grocery store is actually a pastime for me and my father and, once, for my uncle. Our grocery shopping trips, over the years, have become a conversation topic and a place to bond. Our phone calls always end with an assessment of the recipes that we intend to make, maybe some suggestions, and a “let me know how it turns out.” In my geographical region, however, I can’t grocery shop anymore.

My state allows beer and wine sales in any grocery or convenience or drug store or gas station, so—basically—I can’t buy my prescriptions or stop for gas or go grocery shopping without being confronted with aisles and end displays of wines and craft beers.

I love to cook, and I go to the store with pure intentions, but I always end up straying into the booze aisles and sliding my fingers along the bottles, studying the labels, noting alcohol content or vintage or state or country of origin. I spend more time lingering around there than I do in the produce aisle. Booze is so… interesting. Yup. So it is. And that’s why I am going to hand over my shopping lists to my husband. He doesn’t know this yet.

My husband only shops for school lunches, and he doesn’t cook at all. He’s the guy who will bring home flat leaf parsley instead of cilantro when I send him on a mission. Putting him in charge of grocery runs will save us money. He won’t linger. He’ll bring home what he thinks I want, and I’ll cook it, whatever it is. That’s the way it’s gotta be for awhile.

As the first week of January bleeds into the second, I am taking note of every trigger that will keep me here, at my heaviest weight EVER. I need to eliminate those triggers because without them I can eat right. If dieting didn’t mean kicking one of the hardest substances to kick, and if dieting weren’t linked to addiction, I’d have had this down years ago. I’ve read so many health magazines and experimented with so many fitness apps over the years that I can plan and prepare any type of diet without consulting resources or experts—you want high fat, low carb? Got it. Vegan? Sure, I can do that. Paleo? It’s a pain-in-the-ass, but I know what you need to survive. Vegetarian, Vegan, Keto, Paleo, and even poor old dead Atkins—I got it. I know how many Weight Watchers points are assigned to an orange and how many calories and carbs are in a lowfat cheese stick. And I like knowing that stuff.

But it doesn’t help me to spend the whole day monitoring my sugar and sodium consumption just to knock off the remnants of the cooking Marsala after glazing the pork. I can’t pay a fortune to go to some cognitive behavioral rehab resort. I have to make my own limits and establish my own reasoning. This is not over. I am not screwed. And I will not be a size twelve forever.

The Bad Choices Flow Chart

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Relationships, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My cousin is not handling the sudden death of her husband very well. I should have known. My initial feelings of pity for her, yet quiet relief that the man who controlled her, alienated her from her friends and family, and psychologically abused her, didn’t last too long.

I had always secretly hoped she could free herself from his clutches and go back to being the woman I used to know. That woman wasn’t perfect, and she had a few screws loose, but she could take care of herself. She was a good hustler, once upon a time, and I envied that. My little cousin was the stereotype of the girl who rose from ruin—kicked out of her house at age seventeen, she scraped by on waitressing wages until she taught herself a trade. Then she took it to the next level by doing what Sheryl Sandberg says more women should do in their fields—she applied for a job that was beyond her skill level, and she won it with her confidence, and she figured it out from there. And the rest could have been happy history, except for a glitch that I didn’t clearly recognize as one until it leveled her—alcohol.

Now, before jumping to the conclusion that I think alcohol is a problem in itself, and not a symptom of a deeper issue, I will add a caveat that alcohol was her way of managing whatever it was we couldn’t see. Maybe all of us on the outside couldn’t hear the voices in her head, but we could certainly see with our own eyes what her self-medicating did for her, the flowchart of bad choices. It’s easy to blame the alcohol for that, and for sake of brevity, I will do it.

But back to my original point: my initial reaction to her beloved’s death, a sense of relief that his absence might provide her with an opportunity, faded quickly into fear and helplessness. I haven’t hung out with her in nine years. I haven’t seen her in three or four. I have been absent in her life, at first involuntarily, then it just became the norm, and I made myself stop caring. Right now, I have no power over her reaction to losing the love of her life; and even if I did, I’d be walking on eggshells in my effort to help her regroup. She’s on her own once again, but can she hustle her way back from whence she strayed? I don’t know. All I can do is send weak texts, letting her know I’m around if she needs me. She won’t. I must simply have faith that her mom will help her out of this, go and visit her, keep her from using of those many, many firearms she’s got stashed around her apartment. Damn. Guns, grief, alcohol, and loneliness. Can there be a stronger concoction for disaster?

I want to get in the car and go to her. She’s only a couple of hours away. But my husband and my father fear for my own safety.

“Don’t get sucked into drinking,” said my dad.

“The two of you drinking in a house full of guns… that’s just what we need,” said my husband.

They both have legitimate worries, but I have legitimate worries, too. One of my aunts likes to say that when you love someone, you love them regardless of their behavior, or whether or not they love you. You just love. And that’s true. I know she wouldn’t listen to me—she never did—but maybe she’d just let me sit next to her on the couch. Maybe I wouldn’t be tempted into a few whiskey toasts or some other last hurrah that won’t end well.   But probably I would.

I’m gonna let my brain override my heart on this one and stay the fuck home.

 

Peace through poetry?

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Aging Parents, feeling old, loss of a parent, Reflections, Relationships, Uncategorized, , , , ,

It’s a new year. I spent a quiet Christmas Eve with my dad, endured nightmares in the haunted guest room. On Christmas night, I visited my brother and his family—my sister-in-law, their three kids, my nephew’s wife, and my niece’s boyfriend. I woke up many hours later still drunk with a bruised knee on the futon in my niece’s room, my last memory of the evening before was looking up into the crying face of my nephew’s wife. I don’t know why I was looking up. I don’t know why she was crying. I don’t know what kind of advice I gave her and if she remembered it. Probably not. I hear I fought with one of my nephews. Asked him what about the next morning as I teetered on my own two feet in the kitchen, my shaky hands cupping my coffee mug.

“I don’t know,” was all he replied. No one knows, cept for maybe my sister-in-law, the one person in the room who looked really pissed that morning. My dad was pissed, too. He’s a weaker man this season—weak, sad, and confused. He didn’t even know how much I drank right in front of his nose the day Mom died, never noticed that my coffee mug was full of red wine. He never knew I replaced his Jim Beam twice, once getting a speeding ticket while rushing home to shove it in the cabinet before he returned from a doctor’s appointment. So when he noticed I wasn’t in the house on the morning of December 26, he called the cops.

“Sir, was she drinking?” asked the 911 respondent.

“She doesn’t drink,” he said, right before I sent him my text message that I been done-in by whiskey. It certainly wasn’t the first time, but this time it was public. He was so shocked.

“And a HAPPY New Year!” my mother and her friend used to sing over and over, especially after they’d been drinking, on every New Year’s Eve that I can remember while growing up. My parents have spent every New Year’s Eve for forty years with the same couple. I and their daughters enjoyed the freedom of doing whatever we wanted—playing with candle wax, sampling the sweet liquors, snatching food, and playing Atari games into the wee hours—while our parents got drunker and drunker. This friend died in May, Mom in October, so Dad and the remaining widower spent New Year’s Eve together last night, just the two of them going through the motions—shopping for snacks in the morning, eating out, retiring to one house or the other to watch a video. It was the saddest evening I could have imagined for my father, but he wanted to do it. And he even told me today that they had a good time, he and his friend of forty years, eating out and watching a movie by themselves and mumbling from time-to-time “and a HAPPY New Year.”

This is how 2017 ended for my father is his long-time friend. Not with a bang, but a whimper.

A friend sent me a poem today, and I realized, as I read it, that poetry is the thing I need to keep going. I haven’t sought refuge in poetry since I was in my twenties. There’s something about it, about how it explains the inexplicable. Although the theme didn’t capture my sadness entirely, this poem fed my soul today:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48597/burning-the-old-year

I think tomorrow, or later, I will try to write one. It’s been decades since I wrote a poem, but during these days of loss and sadness, I think it’s the only way to find peace.

Love now; look forward; live with grief

40s are the new 40s, Addiction, Aging Parents, generation x, Life in the Suburbs, loss of a parent, Parenting, Reflections, teaching, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

I canceled today’s visit with my shrink because I didn’t want to pay him. He kindly offered to meet with me now and bill me later, but that would have defeated my intent to not spend money at all. I rescheduled our appointment for next month. In the meantime, our new insurance will kick in, and I’ll go and find a psychiatrist who can prescribe my meds at a fraction of the price. He’s a great guy, my psychiatrist—old-school shrink and counselor all rolled into one. Four years ago, the old man put me on the right path. Now, I’ve outgrown him.

I outgrew many things this autumn. Amidst the grief and the sadness, opportunities have presented themselves. It just took me some time to read the signs.

My husband and I take “signs” quite seriously. The week after I met him, I sent him a goodbye email on a Saturday morning, only to run into him later downtown on his way to a free concert. Ten or eleven blissful hours after that, I warned him not to read his email. We’ve been together ever since, thankful that, at that time, he didn’t have an internet connection at his place, and I didn’t go out of town that day like I had planned. What would our lives be like now if he had read that email, if I had left town? I shudder at the thought. These are the signs we reflect upon when life doesn’t work out as planned.

Over the years, more signs came our way, inspiring bold decisions. Big changes in our lives came in clusters. 2011 was a pivotal year. During that year, we moved to a new city, thus solidifying fifty-percent custody of his young children who had moved there with their mother three years prior. I became certified to teach ESL, opening up a new path of career possibilities for me in this new city. And I got my Master’s degree in Nonfiction Writing, something I didn’t necessarily need in my field (most teachers went for the subsidized M.Ed.s), but something that I wanted, and something that allowed me to teach at the college level. It was a big year, marking a complete shift in my lifestyle and my thinking—I became a parent, for real, not just on Wednesdays and every other weekend; I set myself up to leave public school teaching for good (big sigh); and I made peace with the suburbs and a quieter life.

Just as everything changed after 2011, this year looks like it’s gonna be another big one.

In the fall, four things happened: my mother was diagnosed with and quickly died from pancreatic cancer; my husband started a new job; we bought another house; and I was offered a full-time position at my college.

My husband’s last job was going south quickly. He was unhappy, and he took a risk with another company doing work outside of his comfort zone. Because he knew that the first six months of this job, at least, would require tons of travel and training and meetings, he told me he was thankful that I had a light and flexible schedule at the community college where I teach ESL. He would need me to be around more often to help him get the kids to one of their many lessons, practices, games, or activities. I was secretly happy to put off looking for a full-time teaching job to help out at home.

When I taught full-time, I did it because I needed to. I didn’t want to arrive at work at before the sun rose and stay until it went down again. Even when I could get out of there on the earlier side, I paid the price by taking the work with me. While a full-time community college position would not demand as many physical hours of my time as a public high school, I’d been part-time too long to appreciate the difference. Some people, when they’re underemployed, don’t feel busy enough or whole enough, or (I don’t know, I’ve never felt that way)… something… when they’re not immersed in their career. I’m not one of those people.

Then there’s the house. We didn’t buy it to move into it. We bought it to be an investment property. For nine years, I have been stalking real estate as a hobby, watching prices rise, noting flips and changing values. I tried to get my husband on board with the real estate thing after we moved, when the prices in our expensive suburb were comparatively low, but he thought real estate was a fool’s game. Suddenly, over the summer, he became obsessed with real estate investment (Note on his personality: He has two extremes—all in or all out and nothing in between.). I won’t go into detail on how that happened, I’ll just say that now, he relies on my time and my interest to legitimately pursue this risky venture.

These days, when I’m not teaching or cleaning, working out or cooking, or writing, I’m learning about licenses and inspections, tweaking leases, new software for landlords, value-estimating spreadsheet calculations, gleaning private money. And I like it. My work with this house, with establishing new social networks of real estate investors, and with researching the business has felt like earning another degree, except this one is hands-on, complete with the debt and the with the potential for financial growth that come with conventional degrees.

Finally, that opportunity I had thought I always wanted came my way—a full-time teaching position at my college. Full-time positions at the college-level, even non-tenure-track positions like this one, are rare these days. And even more rare is one invited into the position. I’ve spent four years at this college demonstrating my worth. My students respect me. My colleagues respect me, and for at least the past two of those four years, they have encouraged me to try for full-time. That is why I got the TESOL degree—it was the one last step to a full-time position in this field. I was finally getting what I had said I wanted for six years. Except I didn’t want it anymore.

For twelve years, I worked long hours and lived for a paycheck. Then I moved here, and I began to explore life outside of constant work. The new path that I have chosen by reading the signs this fall is a riskier one. I’ll be doing all kinds of work from now on—teaching, raising the kids, writing, researching investments. I won’t have a single career to point to when people ask me “what I do,” which I think is a stupid question to begin with. So much more defines us than our careers—the opportunity, for instance, to watch our oldest disappear through neighbors’ yards on his way to the bus stop as the sun rises; or to drop our youngest off at school in the morning because his cello is bigger than he is, and he can’t manage it on the bus. That’s what I signed up for years ago when we moved away from my urban life as I knew it, to this quieter, slower suburban life. No more excitement, no more regular happy hours and foody hotspots with tattooed waitstaff and disturbing art on the walls. And no more road rage, no more anger and prejudice, no more living only for the weekend, and resenting the kids for ruining it. These days, I look forward to our weekends with the kids as much as I look forward to those weekends without them. I just look forward to being here, period.

When I received that full-time job offer and realized that I had the opportunity to turn it down, to pursue anything that made me tick, I felt very, very fortunate. Since then, I’ve gone to bed sober every night and awakened every morning without a headache, feeling optimistic instead of rundown. Because I can be happy.

Yes, I still burst into tears at random when I, say, look at the Christmas gift list that I had started for my mother, or even when people ask me about her. I still can’t keep it together if I really think about her. But grief can’t define life, just affect it. And while it affects my life every day, I believe I can live with that. I wouldn’t want to forget mom, and I wouldn’t want to stop feeling that sense of loss. It’s a tattoo. And while my father would think I was crazy for turning down a full-time job, security, benefits, to be a part-time housewife, part-time teacher, part-time writer, and part-time investor, my mom would toast me with one of her special alcoholic drinks that she only drank on cruises or on New Year’s Eve, a “Dark and Stormy” or something else that’s more sugar than booze. She never had to articulate it. She was always in my corner.