Love

Hi Friends,

Tuesday night. The last week has been really hectic. My Dad is in the hospital and (once again) I feel totally powerless and stuck in fear. I have been talking about it as much as I can but I admit that is not that much. I hate talking about it because I hate thinking about it. I want to pretend it is not happening but the truth is that cant. I try to pretend by sleeping or eating or not sleeping or not eating or wasting time on facebook or pinterest or even reading bad book but it is always there. My pain is always with me. My sadness is with me. My fear is with me. I spend so much energy trying to push it down and I only end up tired.

Last night I sat at a meeting and talked about Scotch. I was not a huge Scotch drinker but I oddly seem to equate this particular drink with total and pure annihilation and therefore seem to think of it when I want that. So there is my Scotch idea, picture, dream lingering in my head. I drive home considering how much work I do to not have this idea and yet, here it is. I quickly establish this is not a good thought. I pick up cell phone. I put down cell phone. I put on radio. I drive. I drive home thinking about why I am not calling anyone. I think about why I am thinking about a drink. I am sure of this one. I am thinking about a drink bc I am a recovering alcoholic who is scared and sad. That was simple.

I drive home. I know I will not have a Scotch, buy a Scotch, or even get close enough to one to smell it. Not today and hopefully not tomorrow either. I know there is no solace for me there, not really. I know that the simple solution I crave, the escape, the instantly better, the no more pain, the everything feels fine moment is one giant mirage for me. A mirage that leads me to pain, loneliness, shame, and a bottomless pit of self loathing. I know this all.

I think about how I need conscious contact with a higher power. I need a spiritual solution. I look at nature. I look at my kids. I think higher power. I feel not that much of anything. I talk to my sponsor later that night...I say I cant feel conscious contact and I am scared or I do feel it but not enough, not the way that I should, not the way that I want to feel it. I want to feel so much God or Higher Power that I dont feel anything else. I want a God binge. I dont think it works this way.

My Sponsor says that Faith is believing even when you dont feel it. It is remembering that you have and hanging on. I think this makes sense. It is anticlimatic but it makes sense. I have faith. I believe. I know I will feel again. I know my kids break thru my sadness. I know their smell and hair and skin is like my own special religion. I kneel down before them, before this warm house full of food, before this life full of love and sadness too. I kneel down and pray for an open heart, for love, for acceptance, for compassion--not just for me, but for you too. xxK

3 questions

Hi All, I heard these 3 questions last night at a meeting and I just had to get them down before I forget. Someone was suggesting that we write these three questions down on a paper and keep them with us at all times. Here they are: 1) Does it need to be said? 2) Does it need to be said now? and 3) Does it need to be me that says it? I thought these were such interesting questions to ask ourselves. Why? So often it seems I get myself into trouble by saying things that I later realize I ever needed even to be thinking about--let alone talking about.

What is my business and what is not? Where does it make sense for me to put my energy and where am I wasting my time? These three questions really distill this down. Why? Because it is true that often we do need to say something about our own feelings or thoughts. Often it is important to do this for our own process and so that other people can relate to us, but the key here is that I know that when I speak about my own experiences then it only can be me talking. Once I start getting involved with my opionions/comments/and theories about other people's lives and choices then I am defintely entering some murky waters.

The truth is that I am not sure I belong in those waters at all. Often times I fear I end up there bc my own waters are not looking terribly appealing and so rather then clean up my own water--I dive head first into your water and start figuring out what you need to do in order to get things back the way that I want them. It is funny thinking about it this way. It is funny to think how easy and quick it is to judge other people and get involved in their lives when really I have enough to deal with just handling my own life.

I am left to consider the realities of life and recovery. To me, the very essence of recovery is taking responsibility for my life and my choices. It means that I do not get to point the finger at someone else and blame them for my life. I just don't. I gave up that option along with the six pack and joint that went with it. I admit that sometimes I miss this safety blanket--I remember how comfortable it was for me there. All wrapped up and comfortable in my victim blanket. Warm and cozy. Safe from all of the introspection, thought, and growth that comes from taking responsibility for my life--I could have easily stayed there stuck and alone.

I admit it, it has not been easy to learn how to own my life. It has been hard and more often then I like to admit I find myself sliding easily into the blame someone else thinking. The only difference now is that I dont stay there so long. I get there to my victim place--look around and realize that I dont want to be there. I know better now. I hope you do too. xxK

smile and know you are taken care of

Hi All. I have been getting some really good advice lately. The title of this blog is not advice I received but it really fits in with some stuff that I have been thinking about and considering--namely faith. My faith in something divine-like in divine order or in a power greater than myself is both strong and sort of cloudy and fluffy--like I cant quite get my head around what I think. Add to that this sort of background skepticism/ logical side that I have and things get muddy, quick. It has been hard for me to accept a higher power as an integral part of recovery and of life for a long time. I have always sort of felt that yes, I believed in something but no, I dont think I need to in order to be sober. I almost hate writing that because I dont want to mess anyone else up but it is my truth. I always have depended so much on my mind to think me out of things, come up with the words, figure it out.

The really funny thing is that my mind never helped me get better. My mind generally keeps me sick. The changes that I have made that have really helped me, that have changed me, are the ones that I made from my heart and my gut. The deep part of me that just said--do this or dont do this anymore. My head was too busy saying things to me like--dont worry about it, everyone else does it, and telling me to just relax and have a drink. Addiction is a mental illness, this is something I would never deny or could never. Once I quit drinking, I got to take a look at the obsessive nature of my mind (even away from my drinking) and to begin to attend to dealing with that--as the fundamental source of the problem.

You can see in this crazy blog that my mind just rattles on sometimes forward and often around and around over the same worries, anxieties, and insecurities. Round and round like a hamster on a wheel my mind goes. It takes so much work and time to do things differently, to think different. Sometimes I feel as though it is futile and I will never really change and then something happens and I realize I am actually thinking about things different, behaving differently, and I feel hopeful.

A few days ago someone told me that I should "invite god into the room" before an important meeting. That I should go early and just be in the space by myself and invite the presence of my higher power or divine spirit or whatever i believe into the room with me. That I should remember that no one has that much power in my life--unless I give it to them. what they didnt say but I thought was that I need to remember that I am being taken care of--because I do believe that I am--I do believe that there is a divine order and purpose to the events of our lives that we dont always know but that is real. I know there are a million reasons to shoot down this idea but as I sit here, I do smile. I do feel as though I am taken care of. I am ok. I am finding my voice and I am realizing who I am and what is really important to me. Maybe I am not who or what I thought I would be, but I am not disappointed in who I have found either. I am exactly as I am supposed to be and exactly where I am supposed to be--just like you are. xxK

nothing changes until we do

hi all. today is saturday. yesterday, i got my hair cut and my hair dresser gave me a manicure on the house. i now have dark dark green metallic looking short nails and an updated tousledish bob like hair cut. i am sitting here drinking my first coffee (ouch, it is 1:49p) and attempting to wake up from working my overnite shift--again. this job is one of those jobs that i have enjoyed but also seems to have taken as much has given in terms of my life and the lives of the people close to me. working residential is not family friendly. a few days ago i had the thought (again) that it might be ironic if i was neglecting my own children to help heal someone else's--that maybe one was cancelling the other out and that i might need to really look at who is important to me and needs me and who is important but also could be helped by other people too.

my kids need me. not all of the time, of course. they have great and amazing teachers at Discovery PreSchool, amazing friends there, and a nice set of parents who are always around too. we are so lucky there. my kids have their amazing father, their mima, their nana and grandpa, their aunt kristin and uncle marc, cousin cora, grandpa Bud and lots of other great people in their lives but none of those people can take the place of me, their mama and how they do need me--for real and not someone else. they say it takes a village and i am the first to agree but the village cannot replace the mommy. we all know it. it is true. kids need their parents. and this mommy needs a job that does not cause her to miss out on weekends and week nights with them while they still like me and want to be around me. i realize this is a situation that i cant take for granted. so when i am all grown up and ready to spend "quality time" with them and not distracted and impatient--that they will say ok good mom, we've been waiting for you, lets hang out and read and snuggle. kids dont wait for us that way. life doesnt wait for us that way.

if i have to work at this job because after looking--i cant find another then that is one thing. sometimes we have to make hard choices for our family. i am not saying all mothers, in all situations need to make changes, our choices are in many ways limited by many things outside of our control. but we do need to see what our choices really are...each of us. to look at our options and take responsibility for what we've chosen--for better and for worse.

i interviewed for a new job at (gulp) a health insurance giant a few weeks ago. this is after countless applications to other rehabs for day positions. i realized i need to work to make money and to (maybe) have benefits if we need them. right now, i need to work for my family not for me. i am passionate about helping people and about recovery, but there are more ways then one to do both of these things. and maybe the universe wants me somewhere else right now--like home with the kids who really need my help--my own.

it takes humility and a certain amount of self sacrifice to make a step away from what i think i want professionally but i also have some added insight that i am taking a step towards what i want personally--to have time with my kids. to have enough money to not spend the time i am with them, worried about how to pay for things they need or want. (i admit they need way less then i think btw.)

the health insurance place called last week and left a message that they were looking forward to talking to me. the interviews went well. i am interested to see what will happen next and where i will end up in a few weeks. i know that things that i was blogging abotu at work a few weeks ago really opened my eyes up to the simple truth that i was working hard for people who didnt appreciate it and who had no idea how to be professional. not to me and not to anyone else either. i had a choice to make about where i want to be and who i want to work with. i think i have made my choice. enough being the victim of my job. we all have choices. xxK

trusting in the process?

Hi Friends. Today is Wednesday. Usually I work on Wednesdays but things at work have been strange and I find myself with a different schedule--interestingly this schedule seems to work a little better for me--so this is a good thing. Anyway, today I start out over sleeping because I was so excited to sleep in and not get up before 6am and then dropping my kids off late at preschool (not a new thing for me) and then feeling bad about myself already and the day just started. I realize a few things that I need to work on for real...organization and time management. Both of these are areas that really dont interest me at all but I can see that my lack of interest in them leads me to be lacking in skills in both. If I want to be on time then I need to make that a priority and work on it--after 38 years I should know that just expecting things to be different w/o work is not so realistic. Ok, that said I will now try to let that go and move on with my day. I am going to organize my closet after this post and I am hopeful that this will give me a little extra help in my morning dash.

The work situation that I wrote about last is still lingering in my mind. I guess it was sort of resolved but what I learned was that I am not working at the right place for me. I can see that it might be the right place for someone else but I need a place that is more flexible and that invests more in their employees. This experience showed me that there is a fundamental disconnect between what I believe and my vision and what some people around (and above) me believe and their vision. I think it is easy to fall into the trap of working solely with the goal of avoiding making mistakes. While this may be a safe way to work it is not a great way to work nor is it the way that I want to work. I want to think big and bold and make a difference. I dont want to focus solely on avoiding errors. No, no thank you. Mistakes are inevitable. It is what we do with them and learn from them that I want to count in my work not how cleverly we avoided an error or covered it up.

Enough on that.

So, I find myself in flux again. Trying to have faith and see what the Universe has in store for me. Am I supposed to be where I am and if so, what am I supposed to be learning? Am I supposed to be somewhere else and if so, where? and doing what? I hate to think about not working with teenagers but I also hate to think about continuing to work in an environment that is not healthy for me. I am torn. I feel sort of lost and floudering and (to be honest) my ego is not really loving the idea of taking another entry level job in a new field. I feel like I have "paid my dues" in both advertising and social work and the addictions field. I am feeling a little done with dues paying. I know this attitude is not helpful though and I am trying to work on it. I need humility and faith to get me out of myself, my fears, and my projections.

I am feeling better emotionally though and this helps me be able to see things more clearly. To not personalize other people's issues and to not make my work environment about me. It is not. I also need to try to avoid the trap of making what I do for a job define who I am as a person. I need to peel this stuff apart and look at why it is so easy for me to make my career define me. I have some theories about why I do this or why anyone would but I'll save that for another time. For today I am just going to focus on being able to find my black leggings in my closet when I need them and not beating myself up about my tardiness.

Thanks for listening--again.
xx
K

turning it over and over and over

Hi All. Today is Tuesday--I am supposed to be at work now but my kids had a 3 hour delay at school. I cant tell you how hard it is for me to sometimes make these minor adjustments in my schedule. Even when I know the weather could be bad and school could be closed or cancelled--I still struggle to be flexible and to accept the day as it unfolds and not as I had planned. Also, despite my new Zoloft I am still anxious about some work drama that is going on and feel sort of twisted over what will happen. I sort of just wanted to go to work and get on with dealing with it. The delay could be torturous if I let it, so I thought I'd write instead of worry or at least do both.

My work situation is a strange thing since it involves me behaving in a pretty unusual way at work which is to be someone who becomes so angry that they have to leave a meeting or risk saying something inappropriate or unfixable. Having never really experienced this level of anger at work I am trying to sort out how I contributed to this situation and what I can do to fix up my part without taking over responsibility. Mostly I can see that what I did was engage with a sick person and expect them to respond to me like a healthy person. I was being ration with someone who was not in a rational space. I know better, usually. Upon further reflection and with some help from the 4th Step I can see that I had some resentments building with this person that I had left unaddressed--thinking it was better to just let them go--which might have been true if I had actually let them go but holding on to them and doing nothing about them is not a good plan for resolution or healthy and direct communication. I learned that in the future I need to address issues when they happen--even if that means being uncomfortable.

For today, my goal is to stay connected to my highest self. The part of me that is confident, safe, and spiritually centered. I cannot let myself go to the fear place because when I act from there--weird shit happens. I end up ANGRY or weak and scared. Someone very high level where I work accused me of being fragile--in a public forum when I was not present. I was so mad when I learned this that I was back in the situation that I had to leave all over again. I need to stay in my safe place or I react instead of act. I want to be in a place of quiet confidence, stable, humble, certain. I hope I can do that today and not fall into the trap of getting scared and then angry. I am smarter then that.

My fourth step showed me that I was giving people I work with too much power in my life. That I was not trusting in my higher power or really connected to it. Blah, what a mess I got into. Here it is though, I am committed to learning from it and to hopefully learning more about some of the areas in my life that still need work.

I hope you are all trying to see your "mistakes" as opportunities too. It is not easy, but it is rewarding and so much better then staying in the anger and carrying resentments around. xxK

Mommy, You said to remind you if you start to yell at us...

Hi All, I am back on the blogging. Now I cant stop. So this entry is a sort of parantheses to my last blog about my story and my drinking. I am writing this because I just reread my blog description and realized I very rarely write about motherhood. This is laughable since I seem to have so many different thoughts on the topic. You can see tonite's topic based on my title.

So a few posts ago I mentioned that I started taking Zoloft because I was tired of yelling at my kids. This is an over simplification but is also essentially the truth. I started a month ago when in my rushing to get my kids (already late) to PreSchool I yelled at my daughter. She wasnt listening and I was not in the mood to debate the finer points of getting in the car now or playing a few minutes longer in the first snow dusting we had on the ground. I yelled her name and then some other stuff and then her name etc. After this I picked her up and put her in the car and was pissed. I was pissed nearly the entire ride to her school. I was thinking: What the fuck do I have to do to get my child to listen to me? I thought: other moms do not yell at their children like psychos because they are running late to PreSchool. I thought this is just another area of my life where I am underachieving AND this is the most important area...shit.

Then we get to PreSchool and my baby girl draws me a picture of our fight and tells me to take it home. We make up. I drive home. I get home and sit and look at the picture. On red construction paper my stick figure self can be seen with mean eyebrows and a nice big thought bubble above my head yelling her name in all caps. Point taken. I pick up the telephone and call my Doctor. I make an appointment to see her in 45 minutes. I go.
I tell her about how I dont feel like myself and I am so irritable and it is terrible and I dont like myself and I just want to crawl into bed and I cant. I tell her that my husband is worried bc I am seem so frustrated (true) and that I really wouldnt even care except I just yelled at my daughter (who is actually really good) again and while I do not mind hurting myself--I will not hurth my kids. My pride is not that big. My ego is not that big. If that pill will help me be nice to them and sleep and not freak out--fuck it, I'll take it.

She writes a prescription for a new SSRI (having tried Lexapro last winter and having given up on it because of yucky side effects despite feeling better). I realize that it is all ego and pride and other people's opinions about meds but that none of it is important if it can help me. I take the meds. It has been about 3 weeks now. I will say that I began to feel less impulsive with my yelling and started to feel calm enough to play with kids and enjoy it. I have recently found myself feeling like me--the me that I was before I was not me. This is not a perfect person...I still feel frustrated, tired, pissed etc but I do not feel so irritated I cant think or so frustrated I want to scream. I feel ok. I will say it again. I feel ok.

Having felt not ok on and off for a long time, feeling ok is pretty fucking great. I am open to other opinions on this but let me say that if an anxiety problem fueld my drinking then taking meds for that anxiety problem is fueling my recovery. Please know that I always only speak for myself and dont assume to know what is right for anyone else. I also know that a month from now I might be writing abotu how I stopped taking this because I changed my mind but for now this is where I am at.

Being a working Mommy of small children (age 3 and 4.5) is not always easy. I often find myself having to make the sacrifices that all parents have to make between what is right for me and what is right for them. In a perfect world these are the same. In the real world they are not always. For today, I am trying to do both and make the time I am with them be time that is good for us all. Not perfect, but good. Someday I will tell my kids about my struggles and how I want to be the best parent and person that I can be. That I want to be honest about what I am good at and what I need to work on. I feel this is important. That is why I told my daughter to remind me if I start to yell because Mommy is working on not yelling but sometimes she forgets. It is a bad habit that Mommy started and now needs to stop. No worries though kids, Mommy has some experience with breaking bad habits. xxx K