Day 49 - the art of keeping quiet plus TWO tests at free bars and my appy-appy-joy-joy

I have been busy-busy with work and family and tbh a few times I was wobbly about wine and deliberately didn't blog because I wanted to see if I could manage it just inside my head.

Jog on, cravings, I said.

Take a hike.

I don' need you no more.

And tickle me sideways if those dumb thoughts didn't just pack up and GO.

Free bar test #1

Last two nights I've stayed in a hotel with a mini bar in the room and a free bar in the reception lounge.  I've work-traveled for many years and this would have been my idea of lush heaven.  Get merry on the free bar then head up to my room for night caps (probably after a boozy dinner out, too).

After my daughter went home last night I opened and closed the fridge door about five times.  Thought about the ginger beer, decided against it, as the soft drink would have led to salt-and-vinegar kettle chips, and the chips might have led to the lovely crisp looking beer in the fridge door.

So I WALKED out of the room, headed up to a little Vietnamese takeaway near the hotel. Ordered a sparkling water with my papaya salad, and headed back refreshed, clear of temptation, and pretty damn pleased with myself.

Free bar test #2

Qantas Club - my spiritual home for work travel.  Here I am, at one of my favourite spots with a powerpoint, view of the departure board, and close proximity to the open bar and food.

I'm here early for my flight and would normally be mainlining the wine by now.

So how has it gone? 

1: lime and soda

2: lemon, lime and bitters

3: chai latte

(and a ham, cheese and pineapple toasted wholemeal pita bread, yum)

Worst moment? When the clock struck midday and the bar staff popped the first champagne corks on the self-serve bar.  That sound. Oh boy. I just love that sound.

But I am ok.  I am. 

Appy-appy-joy-joy

I've tried a few apps but the one I keep checking is this super basic one called I'm Done Drinking.  What I love most is the six decimal places on each measure because they constantly tick over, reminding you that the difference you're making isn't by the day or the week or month, but in every second you don't drink.

 

MTC
Bec

Day Fifteen - in which not drinking is like not hitting your thumb with a hammer (and a puppy in MUD)

Builder's tricks

I don't know how common this saying is, but in my little world we sometimes talk about walking away from a bad situation as being like no longer hitting your thumb with a hammer.

I'm a builder's daughter, and correct hammering and sawing were some of the few useful things my father ever taught me (most of my paternal lessons were observational and involved learning how not to be a functional adult, but more on that another day).

So if you aren't familiar with the hammering scene, the saying conjures the need to keep doing something even though it hurts.  You can't leave a nail half-hammered and you can't let pain get in the way. You are totally focused on the job in front of you and you come to associate the job with the pain as a necessary thing.

It's only when you either become really good at hammering or you stop hammering that you might recall, with a flood of relief, how good it is to not be hitting your thumb with that bloody hammer any more.

Don't examine the analogy too closely, it has all sorts of holes (boom tish), but trust me: there are times in your life when you only know how great something is because you stopped doing the awful thing that had become your very focused normal.

The path to peace, and unbruised thumbs

And here I am, two weeks' done, and the bruises are fading from my metaphorical thumb.

Yesterday, for the first time in a fortnight (let alone pre-sober) I woke up without a dull headache.  It took me an hour or so to realise what was different.  This morning I was a bit headachey again but I had a late (dry) night and sleep was a bit broken so I was not on top of my game anyway.

BUT, here are some things I'm noticing about not hitting my body, brain and spirit with alcoholic hammers every day:

• hints of inner peace. I would think it's anything like the vaunted 'pink cloud' but of course it's very early days for me yet.  There most obvious thing is a slight slowing of my Popcorn Brain.  Ideas stick with me a bit longer and don't bounce away before I really grasp them.
• my skin feels about a hundred times softer.  Maybe that's about hydration, as I'm drinking about four litres of extra water and tea every night.
• flavours. I'm enjoying flavours more and using less salt on my food.  To be fair, this is partly because a month of sub-tropical downpours and humidity have rendered every salt source in the house unusable, but without the grog I find I mind much less!
• reading non-fiction. I have been reading pretty much constantly since I was three years old (47 years ago) and apart from text books I reckon I've read perhaps six books of non-fiction, total, including biography and autobiography. At first it was falling headfirst into The Sober Diaries and Mrs D Is Going Without, then trying (and rejecting) similar stories but of car-crash style alcoholics who I can't relate to, like the journo in High Sobriety and others.  But now I'm into a looong book called Lost Connections about the nine major non-chemical causes of depression and anxiety (not as grim as it sounds)  and absolutely relishing every page.  I can only reason that this is connected to the aforementioned inner peace and being willing to delve into my own thinking without having to hide from myself.
• self care not self denial. Friend J called back after the disrupted puppy call and we talked at length about the why of not drinking.  This handy phrase was how we decided to describe the difference between past attempts and my current mindset. In some ways I'm still a long way from traditional self-care (you DO NOT want to imagine the stains on the toenails of a 50 year old woman who can go barefoot most days but is suddenly surrounded by mud), but by not drinking any more, I'm also fully and permanently immersed in caring for myself. And it feels good.
• time to do things. For a long while now I've been (blearily) wondering how I ever found the time to do more than work and slump.  How did I ever have enough hours in the day to bake cakes, sketch and paint, crochet, read magazines, clean things, garden, visit people and places? Turns out that needing to ensure you get and wallow in your daily alcohol fix takes a lot of time and mental energy.  I'm no DIY dynamo yet, but there's a gleam in my eye and a vision of a gorgeous acre of garden that will outlive me and bring joy.

Muddy puppy

If you've made it this far, you deserve a treat xx 

(Also you've seen too much of the clean, cute and fluffy side of Ms Maggie, here's her inner grot shining through.)

MTC

Day Eleven, and a good old sob.

I'm curious about other people who just quietly stop drinking like I have.

I will have to look for more stories in blogs, I think, because so far most of what I have read has been quite dramatic.

I know I said on Day Minus-One that I was stopping because we were getting a puppy, but the step before that is the more important one.

I stopped drinking because my dog died, but it was not an immediate decision.  It's really only now that I see it as cause and effect.

Something big had to change in my life so that I was not quite the same person, because that person was the one who vested so very much in the fact that her dog loved her without limits and wanted nothing more than to be with her.

That sounds soppy doesn't it? You need to know though, that I am country-tough about pets and this was the exception that proved the rule.  We just found each other, that's all.

She was the only creature, human or animal, who - at least in the last five years - made me feel unconditionally loved and worthwhile.  That isn't to say that I have not been loved, but with teenaged children and a long running marriage, and a thankless job followed by a struggle to work out how to run my own business, it's pretty easy to believe you're just a utility.

Of course, the alcohol wouldn't have helped with the worthlessness either...

But May was always there. Always. And there was nothing I could do or say that would ever dent that devotion.  And when I woke up in the middle of the night I would feel for her with my feet and within a few minutes I could fall asleep again.  She was my calm.

After she died I didn't do very well.  Perhaps strangely, I didn't really drink more than usual, but I also took less and less pleasure in it.  Everything was sour. Nothing was lively. I began to sense self-destruction and the seeds for sobriety were sown.

I wrote something, about three days after she was gone, because my heart was breaking over the space beside me where she should have been. I'd just seen one of those A letter to... articles in The Guardian and it felt like the right thing to do.

A letter to … my dog, who saved me.

I’m country born, and so were you, but we met in the city when your family lost their farm and you needed a home.

We had a dog already, always one. My mother used to say, ‘if you have one dog, you’ve got a friend, but if you have two dogs you’ve got two dogs’. Like many clever things she said, it turned out to be wrong.

You were meant to be pack for our slightly anxious dog, and to chill with the kids.  

But instead, you chose me. 

I didn’t encourage you, but perhaps you could tell that no one else was choosing me then. Not my weary husband; not my fight-to-be-free teens; not my former career. 

You, an outside dog for your first five years, landed your 30kg at my feet in bed on your second night and never left.

“She’s a woman’s dog,” your first owner told me, “she’ll know when you’re sad”. I believed her, because she’d known a lot of sadness, but I didn’t really understand until it happened.

The tap of your toenails, the jink of your name tag, the huffle of your evening sighs. Big Labrador eyes watchful for cheese or a carrot end flipped your way. For four years I immersed in your sounds, sight, smell, and snowy drifts of hair. I had to accept you actually wanted to be with me. I couldn’t resist the peace you gave me, you were my calm, my flow, my other self.

My younger daughter declared: “I’m going to fall in love with the man who looks at me like that dog looks at you, Mum”. Everyone knew there was an affair going on in our house. You tap-tap-tapped behind me on the wood floors, never far off.

I called you Silly Old Lady, I called you Great Big Dope, I called you My Love, and My Loyal.

And so: you were lying behind my armchair where you caught the fan’s breeze but knew immediately if I got up. 

Only you weren’t, really, because an unknown number rang my phone and when I ignored it my husband’s rang and he answered and I was running before he hung up.

“Yes, she’s ours,” I’d heard, and, “Yes, we’re on the Connection Road too”. I passed the mailbox chanting no, no, no, because that shape on the road in the headlights couldn’t be you.

There was blood below you, dark shine on the lit bitumen, coming from nowhere I could see. You were clean, soft, and the man said, “She’s gone I think”, but you were still breathing.

I cradled you, your eyes on me. You breathed three, four more times.

I don’t want a plaque, or your ashes, or to plant a rosebush. You weren’t my baby. I wasn’t your mum. I won’t keep your collar in a box.

All I want to keep is the peace we made together, but I am broken now and it has all spilled away.


MTC