Sitting on a school bus today with my students, I am sweating and feeling like general crap. Perfect-trapped with a bunch of middle school students on a bus twisting through country roads to the “city” and career day. So many twisting roads. I want to puke I wonder if this is part of getting all the toxins out of my system. It has been SIX days. Toxins? I wasn’t really drinking that much right? I wasn’t that bad…

I hear the lies start to creep in. They are good. Super good. “You were just stuck in a rut. You are out now-don’t worry.” “It wasn’t so bad-that thing on Beloveds birthday was a fluke.” “You are fine. All teachers drink A LOT because teaching is freaking stressful as hell.”  But, I am sweaty.  I have promised myself to be truthful. My students are settling in. I open my phone and look at my notes to self.  I sneak quick peeks between trying to manage the chaos of preteens high on the possibility of the day and my internal feelings of shakiness.

The words are stark, raw and real. I wrote them SIX days ago. They are the truth.

“List of Why I Need to Quit”

Hiding vodka is a bad sign-I have bottles still hidden. Drank empty, but still hidden. Lots.

Drinking alone feels really good.

Planning drinking times is starting to take over my day. My internal “calendar” of when it is okay and not is just getting out of control. Friday and Saturdays are givens. Sunday just slids in there because I am on a roll. Monday off because there is just too many place to run my kids, but Tuesday and Wednesday are fair game if i can get home from the runarounds early enough. Thursday is off because by then I am tired and guilty, but also know full well that Friday is one day away.

Drinking and slipping into bed before Beloved comes to bed in hopes he doesn’t not know is just getting old and every night I end my day lying to the one person I know who loves me beyond measure. Lying next to a lie. That is what I am making him do. I hate it.

Finding reasons to drink is getting ridiculous. The dog’s birthday should not be a reason to get hammered!

Drinking and then having “family” time-that’s a laugh…but, and this part is making me tear up…it is the only way I can feel relaxed around THREE and since she is always around, it is the only way I can feel relaxed around my other children.

I am beginning to not be able to get past a day without a drink. What if it soon becomes a half day?

I fucked up. I fucked up a business email that actually was really important to me because the person I was writing is really important to me and my success. I wasn’t rude, did not misspell anything, but what I wrote was cringe worthy the next day in retrospect. I wish I had not sent it. Honestly-this may have been the biggest tipping point of them all for me. How fucked up is that?

There are lots more reasons. I had only written a few down. I wish I had written more to keep me going. I will have to think about my reasons before they fade.

For now, dinner is ready.

 

 

 

When I was a kid, I rarely cried. Crying got me nothing but the comment, “Ya want me to give you something to really cry about?” This was followed quickly by the slithering sound of my dad’s belt racing out of its loops. No crying for me. It wasn’t worth the release.

I do remember crying once just for the sheer emotion of it all. I had come home from a church retreat where things had just felt magical-all love all peace-filled and strangely enough-not a lot of God-talk. I wept. Hard. I had been moved to a place I did not know existed.  “Why couldn’t the “real” world feel this way?”  Of course my mother told me I was being overly dramatic. Hell, I probably was-I was thirteen and sang the song “True Colors” by Cyndi Lauper for the rest of that summer in memory of that retreat and the sweet release it had given me.

A desire for my true colors to be seen AND loved has laid quietly in my soul since that summer long ago. Sometimes, my Beloved can tease them out. Sometimes he has to boldly remind me they even exist. Most of the time we are far to busy in life to see anything but a blur. My blur slowly has greyed.

Night four of sobriety, we snuggled with our wees and watched “Trolls” when my song came on. I stopped and really listened. I thought of the look in my Beloved’s eyes when I told him I have been drinking way too much (God! Half a fifth a night-what does my liver even look like right now?) for over a year. I needed help. I needed love.

I told him I was killing (drowning) every emotion I could surrounding my irritation and sheer annoyance with Three (one of our adopted daughters). I am an am amazing mom to my other four. What is it about Three I cannot quite get synced with?

I shook in that hot snot running way in his arms as I confessed the darkest most intense of feelings that I am horrified by, exhausted by and utterly confused by surrounding the utter nails-on-chalkboard visceral reaction I have toward Three. “What the FUCK is wrong with me?!?!” I screamed it. I snotted it, I sobbed it, I let it all out. It was gross. I felt gross. When it as all done, I felt cleaner. Grey, but cleaner.

He took it all in, pulled back and just looked at me…like he saw my true colors. I am not grey in my Beloved’s eyes.

The only thing at this moment I know is that I am determined to soberly unpacking all that is me surrounding the emotions I have about Three and why it is that since she has become part of the Crew, I have been drinking in ways that remind me of my own father.