The Ball Breaker

Every year, my little darling’s ballet class dutifully performs “The Nutcracker” for an audience of adoring families and friends. Every year, but this year.

This year, her dance teacher, who we lovingly refer to as the Ball Breaker, canceled Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker due to bad weather. This decision, we parents all agreed, was rash. Beyond rash. Some of us muttered how we would pull our children from the school in protest. It was cruel to the children who had practiced so hard for months to be ready for this hallmark of Christmas in our coastal village. It was insensitive to the grandparents and aunts and uncles who were arriving in droves to see their little darlings perform in their precious pink tutus and crisp red soldier suits.

Canceling the Nutcracker was like canceling Christmas. This being a quote from one of the performers. He announced to his parents that Christmas was ruined and they spent the whole weekend doing backflips, trying to bring the Yuletide glow back into his sullen cheeks.

The Ball Breaker is an alcohlic.  This is not just a town rumor, this is a fact. She drinks too much and everyone knows it. Even her students. Because of it, many of her students have left her program, even though she is a gifted teacher who knows her stuff and can make her students soar. She has an alcoholic’s personality. Unpredictable. Mood swings. Control freak. Life is a moving target.

Canceling the Nutcracker because snow was forecast in a place where we rarely get snow was the decision of an alcoholic. We parents called each other and used words like rash and ridiculous. I blamed her alcoholic personality. When I called her to find out why she would make such a decision, she answered the phone gleefully and told me how happy she was, oblivious to the heartbreak she had inflicted upon her students. I assumed she was drunk. Seniors who finally had their chance to be the Snow Queen and the Sugar Plum Fairy had the wind sucked from their sails. Poof, gone. Can’t redo this year. The Ball Breaker said they would do an abreviated version during the spring show.  This woud give them more time to perfect their variations on point. So not the same.

My little darling has been dancing with the Ball Breaker since she was five-years-old. Yes, I have sat through seven Nutcrackers, in most cases all three performances of seven Nutcrackers. No regrets.

We have contemplated removing our little darling from the school, particularly the time when the Ball Breaker actually came to class intoxicated. The kids all knew it and the oldest student made the decision to cancel class and ushered the younger ones home. (She happens to be my sponsor’s daughter.) But my little darling loves ballet, loves to perform, and loves the Ball Breaker. And so she stays.

This morning, I had coffee with an old friend, someone I haven’t seen for a while. She has lived in this town for 30-plus years and has history that I lack. We reminisced and I told her that my little darling was still dancing but that we were all aghast by the Ball Breaker’s bad decision. The forecasted snow never even came.

My friend told me that years ago, before my time, a little girl was killed in a car crash trying to make it to a Nutcracker rehearsal in a snow storm. What?

I remembered what the Ball Breaker said to me when I asked her why she canceled. “I don’t want anyone to get hurt trying to make it to the Performing Arts Center. We have too many students who live outside of town.” I thought she was being dramatic. But now I know that she was being cautious, putting the safety of our children ahead of the show.  That she was making a sound and informed decision. That she was determined not to let history repeat itself. No wonder she was so gleeful when I called.  She had conquered death.

If anyone can pull off the Nutcracker in the spring, it’s the Ball Breaker.

Happy Birthday to Me

Today is my birthday. I’m eight. They say that when you start drinking alcoholically, you stop growing emotionally. Since I started at 13, I guess I now have the emotional intelligence of a 21-year-old. (Hey, I’m finally an adult.) 

I quit drinking right before the holidays — the masochist in me. I went to meetings, called my sponsor, read the Big Book, prayed, and remembered that I didn’t want my child to grow up with an alcoholic mother. That’s how I did it. I remember making it through that first year and thinking I was home-free. The first year of anything is telling. A new marriage, a new job. You go through all of the holidays and birthdays and ups and downs of daily life. Once you have a year under your belt, you can look back and say, “I can do this; I did it last year.” But four years into my sobriety, my 20-year-old nephew was killed. He crashed his car into a semi-truck after drinking all day. All I wanted to do was drink. I went to an AA meeting and it was someone’s first birthday. She talked about how good it felt to get that first year behind her. When it was my turn to talk, I broke the celebratory mood with my grief and, through my sobs, I said, “Don’t get comfortable.” Never pretend that the party is over.

Recently, I was having a bad day and I told my Little Darling, “I think I’m just going to smoke and get drunk.” (Joking, of course.) She said, “I can’t even imagine you doing that. It would be as out of character as a kitten weilding a machine gun.” At that moment, I realized that I had succeeded. I wanted her to have a stable, loving, nurturing, sober mother and that is how she sees me. Wow. It’s amazing when life works out the way you want it to — so far.

Of course, eight years of sobriety have taught me that you are not home-free once you make it through the first year. That’s why AAers are always saying, “One day at a time.” That’s the key. If you try to imagine that you will be sober for the rest of your life, it seems daunting (and unfair). So you just say, I will not drink today and that is good enough. I don’t have to think about whether or not I will drink tomorrow or November 4, 2009 or ten years from now. What matters is today. That’s enough.

Recently, I had a health screening through my place of employment. You fill out a questionnaire and they take your blood, weight, blood pressure, and so forth. The questionnaire had all sorts of questions about alcohol and tobacco consumption. I proudly answered zero when asked how many alcoholic drinks I ingest or how much tobacco I consume. When I received my results, I was low risk in every category (except I am six pounds overweight — all those sweets). Other than advising me to eat a little less and move a little more, the report said to just keep doing what I’m doing. It didn’t say, you are healthy, so go ahead and start drinking and smoking again. It said, keep doing what you’re doing. In other words, “Don’t get comfortable.” I won’t. Someone pass the cake, please.

A Sobering Vacation

Travel advice. Don’t go to Dublin, Ireland, on vacation, unless you want to be reminded that you would love nothing more than to get drunk. Mr. Supportive identifies with his Irish ancestry, as does our 13-year-old daughter, who will from now on be known as ”Little Darling.” I haven’t a drop of Irish blood, but when they both said that they really wanted to go to Dublin on vacation, I went along. This was an insane decision, even if I wasn’t an alcoholic, considering the state of the US dollar compared with the Euro, but I have to let that go. What’s done is done.

All I can say is that I should’ve gone to Dublin when I was 22 instead. Actually, when I was 22, my sister and I were traveling in Italy (heeding our ancestral yearnings) and Spain (before the dawn of the Euro and when you could get a room for the equivalent of $10 a night). We planned to go to Dublin for St. Patrick’s Day but got too drunk the night before we were supposed to head out and slept all day instead. Sounds about right. So we celebrated St. Patrick’s Day in Torremolinos, Spain, on the Costa del Sol. Didn’t really matter where we got drunk, now, did it?

Pubs really are a big deal in Dublin and people cram into them every night, spilling the smokers out onto the sidewalk, where they swill beer and drag cigarettes until 4 or 5 a.m. I know how late they stay up because our hotel was adjacent to Grafton Street, the place for partiers to party. They don’t tell you this on the hotel website. They also don’t tell you that there is a bar connected to the hotel where they play Abba music until 3:30 a.m. The bar’s patio happened to be just beneath our open window, where the drinkers were drinking and the smokers were smoking. Although the night was warm, we had to keep the window closed because of the noise and smoke. My Little Darling said, “It’s not that they’re keeping me awake that bothers me. It’s that I want to be down there with them.” Ditto for mum.

When we left Ireland, we stayed with friends in England. One of these friend was my old drinking buddy. She still drinks and asked me why I couldn’t have just one sip of her beer? “What will happen? Will you explode?” No. I’ll just finish half of yours and then order my own and keep ordering until we leave and then have something to drink when we get back to the cottage and then go to sleep and wake up feeling like a stuffed cabbage and hating myself for wanting to do it again.

The problem with alcoholism is that it doesn’t go away when you stop drinking. So it’s best not to put yourself in positions where you will be tempted. Truth be told, if my Little Darling was not with us, I would have gotten drunk in Dublin (and then, of course, in England as well, and my friend would’ve been happy). There is no doubt in my mind. The thing about this method of sobriety is that my Little Darling is not always going to be with me. If all goes according to plan, she will grow up, move out, and create a life of her own. She will no longer want to go on vacation with her parents (not that she wants to now, but she has no choice). She will no longer be my excuse for staying sober. I can no longer say, I need to be sober for my daughter because she won’t need me in the same way. Of course, if she has children, I can use them as my excuse. But alas, at some point, I have to decide that I want to be sober for me. That I want to be clear headed and healthy. That I want to feel good about the decisions I make knowing that they are the best I am capable of making. I have to decide that I never want to lay in bed at 2 a.m. again hating myself for getting drunk, feeling swelled up like a sausage with my head about to pop off and stomach churning.

And so where did I go wrong? First off, it’s best to travel with people who do not imbibe. This is difficult, when your spouse drinks, even if he is not an alcoholic. But he wanted to go to the pubs and hear music, as did I. I would’ve been better off letting him go to the pubs alone and finding a theater where I could enjoy Irish entertainment without waiters asking me what I would like to drink. This permeates life. You need friends and acquaintences who do not drink. I find that people who drink really don’t want to be friends once they find out that I’m in recovery anyway. It’s no fun for them. I do have friends who don’t drink at all and those are the people with whom I share my time, celebrate my holidays, and go on my girls-only weekends. Otherwise, it is just too much of a struggle.

Secondly, I should’ve found out, in advance, where the AA meetings were being held in both England and Ireland and I should’ve planned to attend those meetings even though I was on vacation. No, especially because I was on vacation.

People in AA say, “I know I have another drunk in me. I just don’t know if I have another sobering up.” That should be reason enough for me.

Be Good to Yourself

Drinking heavily used to be the way I took care of myself. Chasing away the anxiety, depression, and stress with a few tall, cool ones was my “self care.” When I finally made the decision to quit, I knew I had to replace my spa-in-a-bottle with something that relaxed me and allowed me to escape from my life now and again. Self care is not a temporary state to get you through the first year. It has to become a lifestyle. Some women are not particularly good at taking care of themselves, especially women with partners and children. We tend to make sure everyone else’s needs are met first and then serve ourselves the wilted, lukewarm leftovers. This is nothing new. We’ve all heard it before but how many of us take it to heart and actually put ourselves first once in awhile? 

Of course, I needed justification for putting myself first, so I calculated the tremendous amount of money I’d save the family budget by discontinuing my consumption of alcohol and applied some of those dollars toward two-hour body massages once a month. They were my reward for maintaining my sobriety. I scheduled the appointments for Fridays after work, thereby creating a whole new version of Happy Hour. Having the toxins rubbed out of your tired, stressed-out muscles once a month with herb scented oils in a quiet, warm room with the sounds of nature playing on a portable CD player feels really good.

So does getting out of debt. So I put the rest of my monthly savings toward paying down our credit card bill. We only have one card but had reached the $5000 limit (how’d that happen?). I created a chart with colored markers and “happy” images that I cut out of magazines. Every time I made a payment, I charted the graph downward and affixed one of those jolly pictures next to the amount so we could visualize our progress. It made me feel good to look at this artful chart, as nerdy as that sounds, and it reinforced the benefits of sobriety.

I found that when I stopped sedating myself every evening and weekend, I had a tremendous amount of nervous energy. I took advantage of it and cleaned my house. It was OK that I couldn’t sit still and that I wasn’t comfortable in my skin yet. There were plenty of drawers and closets that needed cleaning out and reorganizing. We all know that clearing out the physical clutter has a tremendous effect on us mentally, spiritually, and emotionally. It feels great to throw away those stained clothes from the 80s with shoulder pads on steriods. And don’t try to donate them to your local Goodwill. If they are clean, stain free, and in good shape, even out-of-style clothes can be of use to someone. But I can’t tell you how many charitable garage sales I have helped organize where people drop off their stained clothing in various states of disrepair (or used underwear — now honestly!). Don’t kid yourself. The next guy will toss your favorite t-shirt from the 10th grade right into the trash, but curse you and it first. So cut out the middle man and throw away your own garbage.

For escapism, I unapologetically turned to romantic comedies, self-help books, and girls-only weekends. You could easily do 90 romantic comedies in 90 days. As for self-help books, I went for the spiritual (Caroline Myss is a favorite), financial planning (gotta love Suze Orman, the common woman’s money guru), and health (Andrew Wile’s Eight Weeks to Optimum Health got me started). I got my books and many of the movies from my local library — still working on that credit card bill. As for weekend getaways, I still take an annual pilgrimage to a hot springs resort a few hours from my home with a friend. We do yoga, soak, sit in the natural sauna, eat wonderful vegetarian, organic food prepared by someone else, and lounge. It’s heavenly.

In the early days of sobriety, there is a tendency to want to fix everything that is wrong with you and your life. Fight the urge. First of all, you never will. And secondly, if you start to stress over trying to be perfect, you are likely to go back to drinking. Pick up a few gems from the books you read. Don’t try to do it all. Only do the things that make you feel good and reinforce your sobriety. Be gentle. Not drinking today is the kindest thing you can do for yourself. So if you accomplish that much, you are practically walking on the moon.

A Love Story

A couple of days after leaving my first AA meeting, the one where I said that I wasn’t sure if I was an alcoholic, I went to the library and typed “alcoholic” in the electronic card catalog. (Is that what the computers catalogs in libraries are called?) Now, any fool could figure out that a person who has been fretting over whether or not she is an alcoholic for 20 years is most definitely an alcoholic. But to admit that meant that I would have to stop and as any alcoholic knows, stopping is not an option.

So I key “alcoholic” into the search line on the library’s computer and up pops a title that I am drawn to like gravity to the earth. “Drinking. A Love Story,” by Caroline Knapp. I’m hooked. Walking home from the library, I am thumbing through the pages. She is writing about me. I heard that Roberta Flack song in my head. “Killing me softly with his song. Telling my whole life with his words.” Although she wasn’t killing me; she was telling my whole life. She described a young professional caught up in her work who gravitated toward colleagues who liked “Happy Hour” as much as she did. She described her heady successes during the day and her love affair with Harvey Wallbanger at night. And what really got me was when she described those little quizzes that we all take to figure out whether or not we are alcoholic. Usually, they go something like this:

Have you ever lost a job because of alcohol? No

Have you ever slept on the sidewalk because of alcohol? No

Have you ever blacked out for days at a time because of alcohol? No

Have you ever spent time in jail because of alcohol? No

Do you no longer bother pouring your alcohol into glasses with ice? No

Do you ever drink cough syrup to get a buzz? Well, maybe.

Those quizzes didn’t describe me or Caroline Knapp. They don’t describe half of the alcoholics out there. Caroline wrote that she would’ve admitted to her alcoholism much sooner if they had asked questions like the following:

When you go to a dinner party and there are six places at the table and only one bottle of wine in the middle of the table, do you worry about how you are going to get drunk? Yes

When you go to someone’s cottage in the country and discover there isn’t a liquor store for 50 miles, do you worry about how you are going to get drunk? Yes

During the day, do you always make sure that you have plans lined up for after work that will ensure your ability to get drunk? Yes

I’m paraphrasing but you get the idea. Getting drunk was very important to me. I finally realized that that was the definition of alcoholism. People who are not alcoholic don’t care about alcohol. They don’t think about it, plan for it, or buy it in large quantities. I went back to that women’s AA meeting at my little New Age church and said, “Hey, I read a book that finally helped me to see that I am an alcoholic.”

They said they knew it all along. It turns out that nonalcoholics don’t wander into AA meetings wondering if they belong.

Self Loathing

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the night full of self loathing, feeling hungover, dehydrated, swollen, head throbbing, nauseous, and fretting over why you keep doing this to yourself? In the morning, you swear that you will not drink that day. You’ll take vitamin C and drink lots of water. You’ll have a salad for lunch and exercise after work. You are not a bad person. You’re successful in so many ways. You do everything that you swore you would do and by the time you get home, you’re feeling pretty good. Headache’s gone. The swelling has gone down. Appetite is back. You have proven that you have what it takes to be a normal person. You are a normal person. Normal people unwind at the end of the day with a drink. And so it begins again.

I road that roller coaster for 25 years. Some people never get off. For others, it takes a few months. For many of us, it takes years but eventually something snaps. The choices become clear and then the universe aligns to stop the ride and deposit you safely on the side of the road. My perimenopause symptoms got my attention. Night sweats, insomnia, and anxiety were new to my addiction and they scared me.

My husband, daughter, and I were fairly new to a rural town where I thought I could make a new start. We’d been here a year but not much had changed regarding my alcohol consumption. Attending a little New Age church that felt safe and comfortable, I learned that a women’s Alcholics Anonymous group met there on Thursday evenings. Twenty years prior, I had attended an AA meeting where the group told me that I was not an alcoholic. I hung tight to those words every time I hated myself for getting drunk again. So I was a little gun shy about going back. I didn’t want to offend anyone or be presumptuous by showing up with my little problems to a meeting with real alcoholics. The kind who drank their booze straight from the bottle, lost their jobs and families, and lived on the streets.

Doubting myself, I went to lunch with a new friend from the church and for some reason, I just blurted out that I thought I might be an alcoholic and I wanted to attend this AA meeting. Without missing a beat, she said, ”I’ll go with you.” We hardly knew each other but it turned out that her father was an alcoholic and killed himself when she was only 16. This is what I mean by the universe aligning itself when you know the time is right. I learned about a meeting that felt safe. And then, I tell someone I hardly know that I think I have a problem and she makes it even safer for me by understanding the problem and offering to accompany me.

We went to the meeting that week and, of course, most of the women were just like me. They had jobs and families and pasts they’d rather not talk about (except in meetings). After telling them my “story,” I said that I just wasn’t sure if I was an alcoholic and I’d come there to find out. They said the right thing. They couldn’t tell me whether or not I was an alcoholic. Only I knew the answer to that question. Now I know that it was really a matter of whether or not I was willing to admit it.

Ice Clinking in a Glass

Eight years ago, I stopped drinking alcohol. I didn’t want to stop but I was afraid of dying. After spending the day and evening drinking vodka before, during, and after a friend’s wedding, I woke up in the middle of the night drenched in sweat. This was a new experience for me and I just knew that my liver had finally shut down. My daughter was five years old at the time and it felt unfair to orphan her for a seabreeze buzz. Besides, I didn’t want her to think of me every time she heard ice clinking in a glass. I said that to a fellow recovering alcoholic once and she said, “Wow, you were still putting it in a glass?”

That was my problem. I was “still putting it in a glass.” I was a civilized drunk, mixing vitamin C enriched juices with chilled vodka only after completing my eight-hour workday or household chores. I was a ”functional” alcoholic, whose bills were paid and child was well cared for, so I didn’t think I needed to stop. My resume proved that I didn’t need to stop. An advanced degree. A solid work history with increasing responsibilities and longevity. A pristine credit report. A mortgage. No arrests. No DUIIs. Although I did crash a car once after drinking all day and night but the cop who showed up at the scene must’ve been in a hurry because he never questioned my sobriety. It was OK, though. My insurance premiums were current.

During those years, I also thought I was a great mother. I stayed sober throughout my pregnancy and long enough to breastfeed for six months but found an excuse to ween her in time for the holidays. I couldn’t imagine celebrating one more holiday without doing shots of exotic liqueurs. My daughter’s third Christmas found me sipping White Russians all day long. By the end of the day, I had drunk an entire fifth of Kahlua and half a fifth of vodka (not to mention all that cream). Lying in bed that night, I felt my heart race, working as hard as it could to pump the poison I drank throughout my body. I was afraid, but not scared enough to stop.

But still, I knew I was a great mother. I read all the books about parenting and got down on the floor with her to build puzzles, make towers out of blocks, and show her how not to force square Playskool pegs into round holes. We went for walks, played in the park, visited friends and family, kept our “well baby” appointments, and ate healthy meals together. All to the sound of ice clinking in a glass.