If you're taking good care of your children, sleeping with your husband, feeding everyone well and keeping your house clean, your friends and spouse will not consider you an alcoholic.As long as I was holding up my end at home, my friends were clueless and my husband wasn't bothered that I was knocking back a couple of bottles of wine each night to kill the fear that my life was going nowhere and I was nothing.
I'd had big plans. I'd gone to journalism school envisioning myself reporting news stories from war-torn regions. Instead, I was folding mounds of laundry, wiping dirty butts and writing about television commercials. I hadn't even tried to achieve what I wanted to do.
Out of college, I took a job as a feature writer at a suburban arts and entertainment paper, became an advertising scribe, got married, got knocked up. I was crazy in love with my children, but I felt like I'd given them my right arm. And that was a lie. I hadn't given them my right arm. My children were my underachievement scapegoat. My fears of inadequacy sacked my dreams.
I drank away the cloud of mediocrity. I drank away my plans to write a book because it probably wouldn't get published. I drank away my scowling husband stomping around the house spewing toxic vibes. I drank away the guy on the highway who cut me off and gave me the finger. The best part about drinking was how it allowed me to feel like I didn't give a damn.
One summer, I watched two women die -- my grandmother of old age and my mother-in-law from lung cancer. They withered down to helpless skeletons and died a week and a half apart from each other. I got wasted. I missed them, and the certainty of my own death slapped me hard.Shortly after, sometime between my nightly first martini at 5 and last glass of wine at 11, it hit me that I was plastered or hung over all the time and I was figuratively and literally urinating my life away.
I'd made attempts to quit drinking before because, on a physical level, I knew it was unhealthy. This time, disgusted with my zombie life and hurting from a weekend of heavier than usual partying, I walked into a recovery meeting.
I didn't spend time in the loony bin, pimp myself out for mind-altering substances or get HIV from drunkenly screwing someone other than my spouse like other people at the meeting. I didn't drink around the clock or hide my bottles in toilet tanks either. I didn't believe I would ever become like those people and I wanted nothing to do with them. But I couldn't stop drinking on my own so I kept going to meetings.Day after day I convinced myself and re-convinced myself that going to meetings and staying sober was the right thing to do. Feeling unconnected to my alcoholic peers, I went to a bookstore to buy a memoir I could relate to but didn't find one. I figured there had to be thousands of people struggling like me, so I started keeping a journal and began blogging it. People began writing to me, and Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife became a book.
One of my readers wrote, "I couldn't believe my HUSBAND watched me pile the kids in the car and drive them to hockey practice night after night. ... I still don't understand how he watched me do that, but that sounds like he is to blame for letting me be an idiot, and how I loved blaming him as I lurched down the road."
Another wrote, "I want to quit. I want to feel normal. ... At the same time, I am afraid. I am scared of not being able to sleep, wanting a drink and not getting it, what I might FEEL if I don't drink, and I am afraid of what my family and my husband's family might think if they find out."
"I worked full-time and (am) the mother of two daughters," another wrote. "I would only drink on the weekends because I worked during the week. So if I didn't drink every day, I didn't have a problem, right? Wrong! I guess I was trying to escape my life and my weekends became blackouts."
"What a relief to finally find someone to relate to!" someone else said.It's a relief for me, too. During the eight years I've been sober, it's gotten easier to relate to other alcoholics regardless of how they bottomed out. I have a large and diverse circle of friends, I'm my authentic self, and life is a cool, interesting ride. I'm living!
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