Triggers in Your Home Environment

There is a bottle of rum in my laundry room.

I found it yesterday morning while I was putting in a load of towels.  I picked it up, read the label, turned the cool glass bottle around in my hands.  I watched and listened to the brown liquid swishing around and thought about how it would be so warm in my belly with a hot apple cider or some egg nog.

I really don’t want any…I swear…I think?  My husband is a self-proclaimed normie and really wants to continue to drink.  I’m trying to respect that, while respecting myself as well.  Clearly he has been working on this bottle lately, and although I’ve smelled the alcohol on his breath now and again, I didn’t really know until now what he was drinking.  I am glad it isn’t in totally in my face, but….it is still in my laundry room…which means it’s still in my head…24 hours later while I’m sitting at work blogging instead of working because that damned bottle won’t get out of my brain.  It will still be there when I get home, and I will pay attention to the level of liquid, whether I want to or not.

My darling husband has respected my boundaries in this new-found sobriety enough to not have my favorite beers in the fridge.  He only rarely has a bottle of red wine sitting on the counter or white chilling in the fridge.  Other times there is this bottle, hiding in either the garage, the back patio, or now, the laundry room.

In my last six months of drinking, I posted this meme on my Facebook page:

Somehow it isn’t as funny now.  How many people who posted this really are raging alcoholics?  I mean, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck, it’s probably a duck, right?  I look at my recycling now, and it certainly doesn’t look like that anymore.  My husband being the only one drinking in the home, coupled with the level of restraint that he has been able to employ, has drastically reduced the sheer volume of alcohol related recycling we have.  When I am the one to take it, which I try to avoid honestly, I wistfully look over every bottle that held alcohol at one time.  I really don’t mean to, but I count them.  Six bottles of a local wheat beer, 12 cans of shitty beer from husband’s fishing trip, two bottle of Malbec, three bottles of white-two Sauvignon Blanc and a Pinot Grigio.  Ughhhh stop torturing me bottles!  Go the fuck away!!  Clink clink clink…gone.  Thank God!!  Like I said, I try to avoid this experience.

Every day I do my best to make my environment a safe place for my sober self to flourish, but clearly there are many things I can’t control.  Today I’m 92 days sober.  Really, I’m sober mainly because I could justify failing myself in life, but I couldn’t justify failing my daughter.  I can no longer stumble through motherhood drunk.  This is not a job that can be half-assed.  Deep down, I knew I was blowing it.  Deep down, I felt like someone could do it better than I was doing it.  Deep down, in a place I started to go more and more, I sometimes thought it wouldn’t be so bad if I died (by accident?) and someone replaced me.

I am grateful for my daughter being so hilarious this morning when she woke up.  Her sunny blonde curls were going every which way and she had the biggest, joy-radiating smile you could imagine.  She literally woke up and started jumping up and down with joy.  I took her in to see her daddy and she repeatedly kissed him and laid her head on his, cooing, “Daddy, daddy.”  I mentioned the warm oatmeal I had waiting for her downstairs and it was as if I had just told her there was a pony waiting for her downstairs.  She nodded yes and smiled exuberantly looking forward to that bowl of oatmeal.  How lucky am I to have this little ray of sunshine in my life?

I’m also grateful for the fellowship I’ve found in AA.  At lunch, I ran into a member who I haven’t spoken to much.  I stopped and introduced myself to him.  He ended up giving me the number of another mom in the program.  What a blessing.  Just what I’ve been looking for.  Is it a God thing?  Maybe.  I’m just grateful for it.

Wishing everyone a peaceful, sober Monday. xo