![]() The nurses lay her on my chest after they freed her from the umbilical cord that had wrapped itself around her neck three times, and her right arm immediately reached for my neck when our bodies met. Leta Elise is my wondrous green-eyed first born whose birth bore the hallmark of every cascading trauma a woman can experience, minus the emergency c-section. Hanky Plankton loved me enough to help me forgive myself for all the parts of motherhood that began to haunt me after I took that last swig from a bottle. And I am going to give myself credit for having raised a woman who more than anything else possesses a ferocity for life so unparalleled that her grandmother, The Avon World Sales Leader, started taking notes when she saw the ultrasound. I have always been present for my kids and, good lord, you can say what you want about how I should not be dragging either of them into a post about their alcoholic mother, but there is no coincidence that I got to witness my child prepare herself for college with this much clarity. Shame for an alcoholic is a language in which we converse with expertise, and the fact that I got sober the year my older kid became a senior in high school was its own blessing and curse. And I will never forget the metaphor she gifted me:Įarly sobriety resembles living life as a clam without its shell. I’ve never met her in person - she lives just outside Atlanta, Georgia with her young children near the site of a Mormon temple where I used to travel with the youth group at church to perform baptisms for the dead (yes, that is a real thing and it might explain the Mormon fascination with Halloween) - and here I will refer to her as Hanky Plankton, the name she signed to an anonymous note in response to what I was writing during those first few months of being sober. I need to express gratitude today for the one sober friend who helped me understand this non-mystery, she who laughed and cried with me on Saturday. It was simply looking at all my wounds and learning how to live with them. Sobriety was not some mystery I had to solve. All of this is just a physical reaction to psychological pain.” I was forced to stare this wild-eyed savage straight in the face, and now I look around and think, “Oh, this. The core of my body absorbed the shock of it all, and it brought me to my knees. I often felt like I was being electrocuted for hours at a time. 22 years of agony I had numbed with alcohol had come alive and transformed itself into an almost alien life form. I now understand that “what was happening to me” was a physical reconciliation with pain. I couldn’t handle the idea of anyone else knowing just how bad I felt about myself. Here, two years into this often frenzied and wandering dance with life, I understand that I couldn’t hold anyone’s gaze because everywhere I looked I saw nothing but my own worthlessness. I had isolated myself entirely from the outside world because I didn’t understand what was happening to me. For a few hours I found it hard to breathe. The grief submerged me in tidal waves of pain. There was no one in my life who could possibly comprehend how symbolic a victory it was for me, albeit it one fraught with tears and sobbing so violent that at one point I thought my body would split in two. On October 8th, 2021 I celebrated six months of sobriety by myself on the floor next to my bed feeling as if I were a wounded animal who wanted to be left alone to die.
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