If alcohol is ruining your life or the life of someone you love, I implore you to get real about it and find help to overcome it. I promise you there is an abundance on the other side of drinking to excess. There can still be trips to fancy bars and fun holiday drinks to order. But there's also human connection, real engagement and a healthy, joyful life.
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The wisdom in his eyes
Of all the things I'm grateful for, and that list is lengthy!, the fact that I was so distraught I never made a concrete decision about the arrival of this little unplanned person ranks right up there. That decision was made for me when Quinn arrived and there was no alternative plan in place.
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A ripple effect of being married to an alcoholic enjoying sobriety
I can see in retrospect, and with so much more knowledge about Mazz in particular and alcoholism in general, that I was making my own sets of excuses. I was desperate not to believe what this person was saying about Mazz. In re-reading these exchanges, which I haven't looked at it in nearly 10 years, my stomach is tight, my anxiety is ratcheting up and I am immediately back in the swirl of knowing something is desperately wrong but not being able to articulate it. I don't know this because I haven't spent enough time with spouses of addicts or those in recovery to prove this theory out, but I…
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Change is inevitable; how you manage it is up to you
This weekend, seven years ago. I thought my heart would break in two and never recover. It was a time I had dreaded for a number of years: the weekend I took Quinn to college. I would never have chosen for Quinn to leave. I loved having him across the hall; I adored seeing him everyday, and our 18 years together flew by all too fast. But the thing is, my life, all our lives, couldn’t grow, evolve and get even better, until we accepted that first hard change of moving Quinn to college. Let me tell you a story from Quinn’s drop off day: Freshman weekend there were a…
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Now I gotta cut loose, footloose…
I didn't do anything particularly incredible yesterday, minus start to articulate my performance art piece to Laura—that is going to be incredible, but more on that as it develops. Yesterday wasn't for dong anything incredible. Yesterday was for stopping to mark the transition between a life of "have to" to "get to." It was a day for reflecting on where I was 25 years, 6 months and 27 days ago and where I am now.
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Springtime despair
In many ways, I regret the surge of frantic energy around work, as if we have to make up for the past 15 months right now. RIGHT NOW! There is no making up for it. It was both a lost and a blessed period of time. I want to hold on to the gentle, quiet pace. My safe little bubble, where I joyfully lived for these past many months, is being forced open. I'm watching my hopes and dreams, routines and patterns dissipate out the open doors and windows, and try as I might, I'm afraid I'll never catch them and bring them back close to me again.
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Now I’m married to an American?
I hurt his feelings terribly one day when I said, "Become a citizen, but you'll never BE American anyway." What I meant was that he will never have our Manifest Destiny propaganda, I mean spirit; he'll never tromp through the world with our sense of clueless, boisterous entitlement. He'll always have a sense of empathy for the underdog because his dad had to sleep on a park bench when he first arrived in England because no one would rent a hotel room to an Irishman. He'll always be comfortable with multiculturalism because, for all their ongoing struggles with race, England does seem to better embrace it than America does. He'll…
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Life Lessons from afternoon tea
You will find yourself reflecting often on that three-tiered platter of exquisitely designed sandwiches, scones and desserts. Engage in small shifts in thinking, intention and action and you will find the same thing: these are experiences that change you, in small ways at first but, taken as a whole, in ways that stay with you long after you've moved on.
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I double dog dare you…
And I had that awful, slow dawning of understanding that I have been holding on to this for the entirety of my life because it has "served" me to cast myself as a victim. When I use an oft-repeated phrase that I heard growing up as the reason why I can't do this or that; when I allow it to hamper the deep intimacy I have ever had with any man, including my husband; when I give it more credibility than my intellect, my accomplishments, my spirit, heart and dreams, then whatever failures I have had or might have if I take too big a leap can be passed off…
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6 months, 182 days, 4,380 hours ago…
So the Hamlet analogy can only go so far since the ending is not something to aspire to, but the point of hesitancy is something very real to consider. How do other people make bold moves with so little certainty of the outcome? And what is it about the potential of success or failure that I'm afraid of?
