pathways

Life feels nuts and wonderfully delightful. Summer camps and circles of women and tarot readings and reiki and thoughts about when and where we will be in our life. My vision board keeps catching my eye. "WHERE TO LIVE NOW," it screams at me.

I just don't know, Vision Board.

There are pictures of dirt in our hands and our feet, mindfulness, and uncluttered wisdom, no credit card debt, and a nice little nest egg. We think we have a state we'd like to move, something we have fleshed out through years of discussions and passionate arguing about it. Truth is I need a community who will be open to my particular brand of kookiness, and hikes of spectacular beauty, and a place we can build a huge garden to feed us, maybe some chickens. I welcome the change, and I love my home, my feet in this mud here. My community of drunks and kooks keep me sane. But things are a-changing. No moss on this old croney stone. And, amazingly, the changes feel deeply true. Finally.

I have finished all my coursework for my Crystal Healing Certification through Hibiscus Moon. Laying on of stones, and whatnot, and who's it. The work is so peaceful, so right. Reiki and crystal healing and tarot readings. I am working on developing the offerings of my practice. I followed this path laid out before me, just followed it. It unwinded, unfurled, like a fiddlehead become a fern. I doubted the moisture was good for me, but I walked still. I feared walking too far from what was familiar, but I kept walking. One foot in front of the other--taking classes, signing up for weekends, reading books about things that seemed so esoteric as to be nearly useless in suburban New Jersey.

When I quit drinking, it wasn't easy. I craved a drink nearly every day for eight months with the kind of craving that makes you cry and shake and wish you were someone else. IT was another refrain in my head, "Bourbon. But no bourbon. Bourbon. But no bourbon..." I was afraid to drink and afraid to not drink. I hadn't felt anything but anger and fear in a long long time. I didn't drink, instead I listened to someone with more sobriety than me. I did everything she said, and she told me to do all kinds of crazy things--pray. Meditate. Make my bed. Go to church basements. Call people. Stand in front of a room of drunks and tell my story.

Telling my story is part of my recovery. And sometimes my story coming out of my mouth hardly sounds like my story. It sounds like a novel I once read, a dark tome about sins and redemption. I had a baby once who died. It is only a part of my story. Until she was in my belly, I never knew true happiness. I was abstinent from alcohol then, but not sober. She was this light in my life that drew me to a holy place. I was finding my spiritual footing again, and feeling grounded, lovely, beautiful...sacred. When she died, I lost my spirituality along with my daughter. They were incinerated, and I was given a heartbreakingly tiny urn filled with something that no longer was my daughter or my God. My drinking became dark and overwhelmingly not fun. There was no illusion of social niceties, or the sophisticated sipping of wine. It was bottles of wine and bourbon. I wrote and read about death, breathed it into my lungs. I covered myself with black signs that read, MOURNING. FUCK OFF. Sloppy cries and a existence that can hardly be called existence, and I would know I had to stop drinking. It wasn't my solution anymore to the gigantic hole in me. I'd stop, but then the drink seemed like it had to be better than the pain. And this went on until I decided that I wanted another baby. And then I didn't drink, and my life got worse. My solution was gone, and I was bereft.

Grace. Amazing grace...that saved a wretch like me.

There is a path we walk that unfolds in front of us, like a palm opens in the jungle. Coiled in on itself until it is not. It is wide and broad and accepts the sun and rain in equal gratitude. I had no idea where I was going. Nothing seemed connected. I quit drinking and people told me to pray and remember that deep within me lay something Divine. In each person, they whispered, is the memory of God. And when it felt right, I did it, and when it didn't, I gracefully demurred. And suddenly, it all falls into line and makes sense. This is exactly where I am supposed to be, I realize later.I learned what I was supposed to learn. I walked the path I was supposed to walk, and for the first time in my life, I didn't fight it. I didn't fight me. I was unnerved at times, wanting to know how, when, who, where...and then it was over, and I was right where I am supposed to be, not seeing the end, not quite, but feeling settled in my own old bones.

I have completely upended my diet again. It is upside down--all meat and veggies. No grains. No sugar. No caffeine. Some nuts and berries.

GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRROWL~there is something distinctly bear-like about the food I am taking in. I have gone inward, taken a hibernation of sorts. I scratch against small trees, knock them over, moan loudly at salmon. Knock down beehives for a little sugah, and never really getting any anyhow. But I feel good, not so padded and slow. The grains make me lumber, on all fours, itchy and pimply.

I have decided to go for my healing business, and what I mean by that, is not wait for things to come, and maybe I get some clients trickling in, but to go for it. Advertise. Write copy. Start a website. Try. I've also begun the process to be ordained as an Interfaith Minister, so I can do spiritual counseling. It is such a strange thing to get an email addressed to Rev. Angie. This drunk. This grieving mother. I may start a religion for grief--it is a compassionate one, where we learn to cry and pray and lean on each other. One day, I realized, after trying all the religions I encountered, that they are right. I had tried to fit myself into one Church, one path, but what if it doesn't work that way? What if that limits God and the Divine? Maybe it is all the paths. Each one is right in their way. The Prophet of Pluralism, I once wrote about myself, like a self-fulfilling title. When I began inquiring, I wrote the ordination committee, and told them about Lucia. I told them about my writing and about the other women and about sobriety and about the circles of people I have joined, the way we sit and abide and speak and make sacred. And she wrote back, "WOW, what a perfect candidate for the ministry you are!" And I sat staring at the note, thinking "Me? Yes, of course, me."

I stare at this enormous black tourmaline in matrix sitting next to my computer, absorbed all the bad juju from my computer. And I think about nourishment and healing and how full you feel when you walk the path set in front of you, lined with berries and prayers. There is a soft candle always lit around my house--it started with her, and continued on a path of its own.

aromatherapy

Less is more. More kills everything. Think delicacy. Subtlety. Finesse.

I don't know HOW to do less, I think.

But of course, it is too much. Too much sandalwood. Too much patchouli. Too much ylang ylang. I misbehave and leave class and stand in the stairwell with someone talking about healing modalities and spirituality and awakening and protecting one's energy and reading people's auras.

What is going on right there? He points to my chest. I wheeze and cough and mention asthma from thick oils that hang in the aromatherapy class. No, the other thing, in your heart center, the broken part.

And I want to tell him everything that is going on there. The niggling little hurts, meaningless and important, gnawing at me. The gigantic metastasized maladies, hundreds of grey appendices attached to the pulsating green trying to grow through father-pain, boyfriend-pain, seventh grade dance-pain, like ivy choking the living love out of me. My heart center, broken and weeping, radiates for healing. It calls to the shaman in the back of the room. It is this thing I keep explicating and writing and examining three-dimensionally, like a foam core model made with pins, the broken heart of someone who loved without thought of age thirty-nine. And when I turn this poxed heart around, I can see there is something deeply flawed about me. Logically, there must be--to drink the way I drank, to grieve the way I grieved, to misbehave the way I misbehaved. But I cannot pull it out. I cannot find its cause, its source, its origin.

The truthiness of all that he says about my heart center makes me incredibly uncomfortable. I want to blow him off, leave with the broken parts of me jutting out of my chest, poking through skin and weeping infection and heartbreak, pretend it doesn't exist. The vulnerability is nigh-excruciating. I want to run or punch him, but I ground myself and open my heart center even more to his words. This massive ego and very little ego all mixed up in unholy unions in my heart center.

He tells me it is okay, and his name is the same as the baby we lost. He says we are all broken there. That we all seek validation and love and that I can clear it, heal the wounds on myself instead of everyone else around me. And I know what he is suggesting.

Later, I warm my palm chakras and pray for protection and reiki energy drawn up from earth, down from heaven, out my palms, and I lay my hands right between my breasts who feed no children anymore, since a month ago maybe, when Thor just decided that tetita is for babies. I don't miss it. I miss having that one thing that no one else could give them. Boobies and mama cuddles. Now, the children do not notice that I am gone. This weekend with two back-to-back eight hour days of class on aromatherapy. I suppose if I am doing my job right, they should barely know I am here orchestrating every meal and decision and activity and fun time and naptime and diaper change. It just moves swiftly, efficiently, through the day without one thought about what mama is doing, or who she is, or what she is going to have for dinner while the rest of them eat gooey cheesy pasta-y red meat with soy and chocolate and ice cream and bourbon. And I wonder if there is something massively damaged about me and my heart center to want to have someone notice more than my stealthy good mamaing. I hold up that model of my broken heart, and it is all ego, even as I preach about egolessness and hold it as an ideal, or at the very least, the enemy of enlightenment.

Ego. Ego. Ego. Condemned to this life of terribleness, shaking fingers at the eruption of it in conversation, the mention of yourself with more than self-deprecation. When I rant about my lousy, traitorous ego, my sponsor says, "There is a necessary ego when you are an artist. Check it." And that is the part I have been explicating, looking at with my damaged heart center.

Artists have to have a stupid, unconditional, irrational belief in ourselves and our capability. It may be unwarranted to others. They may think, "Who is this person?" Or "That art is not terribly good." And they are welcome to believe such things. Artists cannot concern themselves with that. It's none of their goddamned business honestly, how you engage with their art, or writing. Artists have to embrace that belief in themselves, regardless of what you think. In fact, during the process, I would think that "you" may not even enter their brain. It is a selfish, self-centered, important and necessary self-focused presence.

That doesn't mean artists don't have reservations or insecurities, it just means that there has to be a kind of blind optimism what they are saying is something important and unique. A hope that, in their desperate isolation, the artist belongs to a tribe of people, perhaps not yet known, who will get it, or most of it. That what the artist creates is worth the paper it is created on, or the performance art is more important than that massive ego of theirs. Because this thing the artist creates ceases being theirs the second it is seen, experienced, felt. It is a Zen koan of sorts. The ego must be big so the ego can be small. Another Zen koan of art is, if art is not seen, is it still art?

So, on one hand, there exists this confidence, bravado, arrogance, selfishness, self-centeredness, this large necessary ego. Then the artist releases the work. The same self-consciousness any human being, artist or not, possesses in his or her daily life rises up. More so, now. This thing created without thought of the Other. The entire process strips one bare, raw, open. The experience attaches to your heart center, creates a pock, whispers that you've never been loved enough while at the same time illuminating it. Such a process is the height of vulnerability. Suffering. Then it is a relief. A release from the demands of Muse and creative bedevilments. It forces one to be decisive, done, sure of oneself while embracing that part full of doubt, and fear and insecurity.

There are many things that soothe that self-consciousness--sex, love, conversation, alcohol, drugs, attention from other people, constant need for reassurance that we are worthy through sex, love, conversation, alcohol and drugs. There is no judgment here. No judgment on whether these are good things or bad things, or bad qualities or good qualities. But they work. At least for a little while, and then, your heart is broken wide open, and oozing out into an aromatherapy class for all to absorb and repair. You can rub a little lavender and bergamont. Not too much, just a subtle hint of self-compassion.

What do you think of ego? Artists? Heartbreaks? Is it ever necessary? Or is the ego always out of control?

winter

My hair twists in the night, wraps itself in curls that look like dread locks. I wake looking at this long hair beast of a woman--black streaked with grey, the wild unfocused eyes of the myopic, and a thirst for coffee that barks at those in the way.

I comb my hair into submission, spray some tamer on it, and sing it lullabies. Then I plait it and curl it around my head. Three years ago, I cut my hair less than an inch long, and now it is a foot and a half long. It covers me, gets into everything. Bathwater, and pillowcases. I find long black hairs on my children's tummies. As I pull them off, they giggle. My daughter stepped on a hair yesterday that went into her foot like a splinter, and I pulled it out with tweezers.

Even still, I am never cutting it again. I'll weave it into clothes around me and hide in the woods with my daughter. We will play rhythms on animal skins and collect herbs and wildflowers and sing the tales of our hairy people. We will raise a fox pup to be in our pack, and write poems to the ravens and wind. The boys will visit us with their long beards, and axes. There will be village tales of feral women with hair clothes cooking large pots of stews, which may or may not contain children, who play shaman drums to call you close, then feed you herbs and roots which make you see freedom. We are free, the four of us, and you too.

+++

We search for feathers in the wild. And by wild, of course, I mean that we walked on a paved path near a tidal lake a block from our home. The geese think this is south now, what with global warming and the welcoming lakes that rarely freeze over anymore. They honk and call to each other.

"I speak geese."
"You do?" I look at my daughter, dried flowers poking out from behind her ear. She looks like a winter goddess, cheeks tinted a fierce pink and her nose glistening with cold wetness.
"HONK!" She leans toward the geese, who turn to her. She looked just as surprised as me.
"What did you just say to them?"
"I don't underSTAND geese, I just speak it."

I sometimes feel the same way about humans. I don't underSTAND them. I just speak their language. We find feathers by the lake's edge. They are white and Beatrice claims they are from angels. I tell her she may be right, even though she just had a conversation with a white goose. We hang the feather in a nature board with leaves, dried flowers, Palm Sunday crosses, and even an evil eye protector. All of it reminds us of the life we could be living in the wood, hair to our feet, tying feathers in our hair, and herbs for our stew, and warding off domestication.

Winter suits me. The cold. The crunchy grass, the geese, the hibernating animals right below my feet, the large socks I use only for sleep. My husband's chunky, sexy, unkempt beard. The baby, who I can hardly call a baby now, is at that age where he wants nothing to do with me, but doesn't want me to leave the room. His mood reminds me of January. And I whisper, "My love for you will not change no matter what you think, say, or do." I mean that for all of them, particularly January. I wear crystals to protect me from winter's cold and the work I do in hibernation. They hide under my sweaters. My engagement ring and wedding band had been boxed and put in our safe since before Beatrice was born. They always fit wonky, maybe a little tight. But weight and edema and then weight and edema again forced them to be hidden symbols. A few weeks ago, we went to a jeweler, and he is remaking them for me. Thinner, more delicate, but stronger. It is a way of being I'm trying to embrace.

Everything is going to change for me in a few weeks. Winter changes always stick for me. I wrap myself in winter, blanketed in crisp grey skies and remember the drinking years. Winter was warm then, or rather I was numb. Now, every snowflake and wispy breeze breaks through my woolen cap. I freeze and shiver, and hurt, sometimes, but I am grateful to be alive and feel pain. Tomorrow, I am sober two years, and in a few months, home with the kids for five years, and just perfectly suited for everything changing.

mother and fawn

I read this Buddhist adage that says, "The cause of death is birth."

Yeah, unless someone isn't born yet, then the cause of death is sex.

I have this outpouring of appreciation for the support we received this year around Lucia's birthday. There is no rhyme or reason to grief. It stalks, pounces on its time, not yours. I reached out and said I wasn't doing well. That act itched me. Eczema stretched the length of me. I jittered and rubbed myself against old bare trees. Scratching the vulnerability away, but it stayed. I needed to feel it to remember my strength.

One Thursday in the middle of the month, I was cooking arroz con pollo for a friend, which is very much like paella, except with chicken instead of chorizo and seafood. And the thought occurred to me that I need wine for the rice. Wine goes in paella, and arroz con pollo and my mouth. At least it did before I quit drinking. Back then, I began drinking when I began cooking. I was alone with the children, and I searched the cabinets and found a bottle of unopened pinot noir.

My heart opens like a lotus, calls for vulnerability as her food. There are moments when only faith stands between me and a drink, or me and an angry word, or me and my death. Grace surrounds me as I stared at the bottle. I don't know if I would have drank a glass or the bottle or nothing. But it caught me up, suddenly afraid of slipping. Suddenly aware that wine is not necessary in any dish I cook now. Cooking and drinking. Drinking and cooking. They are all tied together for me.

Later in the day, I went into a church basement, too overcome to speak, I cried, buried my face in my hands, deeply grieved and full of want.

My daughter is dead four years.
My daughter. My sweet sweet girl.
And sometimes there is nothing to do but drink. And I cannot drink.

Women held me. All week I cried into women's shoulders, in their hair, on the phone, in their inboxes. This year the grief lessened. I felt a lightness of being that seemed so far away in the last three years. There is magic in my life now. A seed of connection to the Divine, a moment of breath between declarations of her state of mortality. Then the week of her death and birth came, and it was like it happened yesterday, or perhaps even that very day. But I feel protective of me right now. I mother myself now. Care for me, allow me to rest, give me the space for solitude and vulnerability and bad behaviour, yet let me curl up and weep. I feel worthy of protection and grace and connection to the Divine.

January 10, I will be sober two years. My daughter dead four last week, and my body creaking into year thirty-nine on the fourth of January. It all makes me feel old and brand new, like a fawn, spots like code across my back, and my legs not quite strong enough to hold my own weight and yet hours away from running.

new moon.

The new moon quiets me, wrings me out, challenges me to be a better person in thought and deed. I want to bathe in salts with smelly herbs and burn incense on small charcoal rounds. And yet the children are underfoot, and a FB video of father-daughter wedding dances has me weeping in the afternoon, head in my hands, missing my father, even thought I see him every week. I miss the father he could have been. I miss dancing with him, even though he never danced, even when he could. I wonder if he regrets that.

I have a disease. I share it with my father, and crying in the afternoon after wedding videos makes me remember how important it is for me to care for it, treat it like a volatile thing. I underestimate it sometimes. That never does me any good. I respect it. Fear it, sometimes. Think I will be struck drunk, as my friend says, like bourbon will come into my home and pour itself down my throat. I make dream tea and herbal remedies instead. It wards off the sudden surprise drunk.

I found a photograph at my mother's house. It is of an old Indian woman. I used to think she was my grandmother, since my mother told me that my grandmother smoked a pipe and cussed like a sailor. But I learned later that my mother's friend is a photojournalist and took the photograph for some tourist brochures in the late 70s. The Indian is Panamian and covered in malas. Her nose is pierced in the middle and she is smoking a pipe. There is a parrot on her fence. I dream of her. And others. They come on horses, and take me deep into the desert. I don't know what the metaphor is anymore. I sit with it and seek answers from oracles and psychics and astrologers and they always tell me that my heart knows what the answer is.

But it doesn't. The heart aches for what once was, some days, and we all know that is a crock of not-right. I was a drunk. I couldn't get out from under grief. Today, I am a free woman. I hang the picture above my computer, next to the sign that says, "EVERYTHING IS GOING TO BE OK."

The baby keeps turning on his fire engine's siren. Whee--ooo, whee--ooo. I read tarot for my cousin and feel  like I should warn her, even though the cards are all positive and lovely and point to love. "I hear an alarm. The guides tell me there is going to be a fire." Love is a kind of fire, and I drift off in thought as I order herbs to make teas, oils to anoint, salts to draw out impurities. I listen to guided meditations and see nothing, but a huge indigo orb. The truth is the herbs and tarot and meditation is such a small part of my day, it is hardly worth noting. I do crafts, and clean-up, and make snacks, and scold the children for fighting. The hours sit on top of one another.This full school schedule makes writing almost an impossibility, yet here I am writing, mid-afternoon, as the children turn on sirens, and use meditation cushions as weapons.

I just needed to take some time to think, and write, and order herbs and print out my novel. I vow to work on it after nine months. To just read it again, perhaps. I wore out an ink cartridge halfway through, so I changed the font to purple and continued until there was no more colored ink. I secretly wish I would have chosen dragon's blood. Can you get that for a laser printer? I would run my hand through the top, and print it in some medieval font that is only used for fake certificates. It would be written on my body, written in magic, written in myth and religion. I fear that is all it would ever be. It is a novel about UFOs, and ancient Greeks, and being a halfie and war. It is mostly about war.

Jess and I went to a palmist last weekend. He gropes hands. Studies hair. Sensually grasps arms for information, reading something no one else can see. His fingers go over tattoos, taking it in with no fanfare. His personal mannerisms and lack of spiritual connection made me feel sorry for him. I asked him if he wanted my hair down. I unfurl it from the stick that holds it up. Mass of curls come around my face, making me look feral and exotic. I would have draped it over his neck, in his hair, anywhere for more information. But he takes it in his hair, turns it around. "Oh, see, now I am cheating," he jokes. "It is clearly written right here in this curl. Wait, no. Yes. Of course."

What do you see? Tell me more. Tell me what I can't see. Tell me what is next. I feel so lost. Tell me what to do.

He told me I had a weak uterine wall, and when I asked about a career, he said I would be a soccer mom. I cringe, and nod and wonder if he's right. It's probably the first psychic reading I have ever had that is just a series of mundane things, probably much more accurate than anything I have had before. To many people, that is all I am. Jess gets indignant after.

DID HE EVEN LOOK AT YOU? NOTHING ABOUT YOU SCREAMS SOCCER MOM.

Oh but it does. I AM A SOCCER MOM! I drive an SUV! I buy clothes at TARGET! I watch my daughter play actual SOCCER! With SHIN GUARDS! I am a soccer mom! Albeit one that wears crystals, and gypsy clothes. I smudge my children before practice, and spray them with a reiki-charged spray to cleanse the aura. I commune with the angels, and hang onto dark crystals so I can tell your fortune. The local crystal shop asked me to interview for their tarot reading position. I stare into my fake crystal ball.

I see myself, draped in deep red fabric, nose pierced, smoking a pipe. There is a woman sitting across from me. She is wearing a high ponytail and a sweater-cardigan set. I kick the mini-soccer ball under my crystal ball. I sage her. She coughs a bit, and adjusts her Coach purse. I ask her if she wants to know everything, even if it says she is just a soccer mom. Then I ask her if she minds if I put my hair down.

sober

I haven't had a drink in eighteen months.

Last night, someone reminded me that I had eighteen months sober. It is funny to be reminded. I wrote on TracyOC's blog that in the past, my periods of sobriety I marked off my calendar with a big black sharpie, like I was in prison. I counted days like I was dying of sober. So to be reminded tonight of how long I haven't drank tasted delicious.


It seems like yesterday that I was wondering if I had a problem with drinking while simultaneously trying to figure out how to stop drinking, (which should have been an answer to the first question) and then later, if I should write about all these shameful revelations here. Being an alcoholic is not shameful to me anymore. I protect myself in my daily life from earth people finding out about sobriety, because many many people still believe that alcoholism is a moral failing. I happen to believe it is a disease, and don't blame myself anymore than I would blame someone for their asthma. 


On a day-to-day basis, sobriety is the most important aspect of my life. More than anything. It is ironic how little I write about recovery here, considering I am constantly speaking about it, talking in front of groups of people about my drinking, writing about it in other places. Oh, it is hidden in the words, woven into my narratives constantly. But I don't frequently write about sobriety as a way of life.


Last week, I visited my mother's house and found pictures of my sister and I as children. In every picture of my dad, we played spot the beer and cigarette. It made us laugh, and then I thought about that later in the night, and it wasn't so funny. I don't remember a day of my childhood in which my father did not drink. I no longer think of his drinking as a moral issue, or act like he had much choice in the matter. It just reminded me how important it is to not drink. If I can remain sober, my children won't know what it is like to live with a drunk. That keeps me going some days.

Someone said to me that I would never have gotten sober if Lucy hadn't died. I believe that. Lucy's death was the storyline of my drinking. Before that, my father's drinking and subsequent disease was the storyline, and in between there, cheating boyfriends and work and good times and bad times and there was always a storyline that had nothing to do with me liking the feeling of having all my emotions completely obliterated.

I said a prayer today. It was the most simple, most beautiful prayer.

Help me please. Thank you.

sick

The boy threw up on my neck. I hate being touched, or kissed, or caressed on my neck. I am a meats and potato lover. No tickling or fancy soft touching. I want to be unteased. When I have wet, warm, half-digested food on my neck, it is more soft and touching than I can bear. I hate it more than even puke in my hand, and not knowing what to do with it. Throw it away? Rinse it off? What I really want to do is scream, shake my hand, and run far away from these barfy little people.

There was almost no escape from the virus. It was ON! MY! NECK! And yet, in the day proceeding my sickness, it seemed to want me to feed it large quantities of food, like chocolate covered almonds and rice cakes. Mango nectar and tofu. Probiotics and quinoa. It lulled me into a false sense of security. The virus is a hippy. A smelly, stinky, stomach-churning hippy.

When I began throwing up, I thought about how long it had been since I vomited and how often I used to do it. Through my pregnancies with morning sickness and through my twenties and early thirties with undiagnosed alcoholism. My head rested on the toilet seat, knees tucked under me. I dry heaved, and felt the muscles all over my body tighten and release. The pain surged down my shoulders. The nausea, vertigo, stomach churning minutes before you know there will be a clutching from the inside out. My husband asked me if the vomit suddenly overtook me, and I said no. It was more like when you drank too much and could go either way, but know it would be a better morning if you just vomited before you went to bed. The feeling that you need to get the poison out of your body. So, you go to the bathroom, kneel, and wait. You think of disgusting things, like the inside of the toilet bowl, or the things clinging to the toilet brush. That was what it was like. He cocked his head. Then I remembered he was a normal person and had no idea what I was talking about.

I didn't miss drinking this week. I was reminded of that feeling in the morning, the feeling at night, the feeling in the daytime. I always felt bad--a low-level nausea and headache that I never knew was a hangover until I didn't have it anymore. I had vertigo and was shaking, like the early days of sobriety. And I was throwing up.

I miss drinking when I was sophisticated and free. Charming and funny. I wore snakeskin boots, had a flat stomach, and painted deep red lips. I had a bravado that challenged people to kiss me hard in a bar, then I would knee them in the groin. I smoked cigarettes, and belonged to no person. My drinking was victimless, if you don't count me. I twisted my hair up in chopsticks, and I cussed like a sailor, because I was a sailor and a longshoreman and a whore and a virgin. Actually, I don't know if I was ever that person, not really.  But it is the film that drinking played in my head, over and over, distant, mysterious, exotic, liberated, sexy, macho. Loading the docks, unloading the ships. I drank a whiskey and chewed tobacco and spat into the garbage strewn water.

I bought a sewing machine. It is the anti-drinking move. I am too impatient to be a seamstress, but it feels good to be able to construct basic things, like pillows and meditations mats, aprons and hems. Nothing is straight, or cute. I am adopting the idea of wabi sabi and calling it a philosophy.

I just wanted to write today.

I don't have a purpose, really. No larger musing on grief and viral attacks. I just feel stranded on this island of sick. I have a friend who always says when you are suffering or sick, it is all you can pay attention to. It is true. When I was first grieving Lucia's death, that sentence would bounce around my mind often. When you are grieving, it is all you can pay attention to. It demands everything. When you are sick, it is equally impossible to be giving. I thought a lot about being sick, and what that used to be like versus what it is now. And I thought about what like would have been like if I had quit drinking ten years ago, the first time I asked for help with my drinking. I thought about the friends that are gone. And whether they are cleaning up puke too, whether they think things could have been different. But that is a dangerous road to walk down.

What are you thinking about these days?

the hunger moon

I am hungry.

It scratches at my insides, and knocks on the enamel of my teeth. One bite tears through my face, up into my skull. Food cleaves right through the skull. Hi-Ho, right through the sinus cavity we go.

That will leave a scar. Or just an emotional chasm between pain and not pain. It is all you can pay attention to when you have it. The pain. I scream at the children to quiet down when they are chewing too loud.

STOP ALL THE CHEWING! IT IS SO ANNOYING! I AM HUNGRY! MY TOOTH HURTS!

My tooth has a heartbeat. I have been spitting blood. My tongue finds the pain over and over. Pushes at the pain. Bloody, cruel tongue forsaking the body behind her. I have terrible teeth, a mixture of bad genes and terrible drink-addled habits from spending my late teen nights in nigh squats and sweaty bars. My front teeth are cracked and yellow from being knocked out and gutted by dentists. My back teeth have pockets of carries and bruises, and large gaps from teeth that I don't remember losing.

Last night, I had two dreams. One I arrived in San Francisco and traveled by bicycle through the city as a courier. I saw my friend Charles. I stunk, but was happy. In the other dream, I cut my rotten tooth out of my mouth with a knife after drinking whiskey. Maker's Mark bourbon. There was a campfire, and a farty dog. I think this was a movie I saw once, but last night, in the middle of the night, when the fire went out of the woodstove and the over-the-counter drugs wore off, I was cutting it out. The tooth stunk. I was probably smoking rolled cigarettes, and had a holster for my boobs, like the tough broad that I am. But the bourbon was the first thing I saw in the dream. Maybe that is one of the only ways I would drink again, if I were removing my own abscessed tooth on the frontier with a buck knife. Once I saw liquor, I just wanted it on my gums, over my tongue. I'm still a drunk. No matter how brightly I try to see the other side. I could smell it when I woke up. The bourbon, that is, not the tooth. The tooth was just throbbing.

Give me, Bourbon. The deformed molar was chanting. Or give me death.

But I am hungry. For booze, or food. Mostly food, like a green salad with lots of pointy, hard things that I cannot eat right now. The drink-pulse comes every once in a while. I have to pray away the desire. I had to learn how to pray. I had to learn how to be trusting and ask for help. And say, I don't care how ridiculous this sounds to cool people, I want to live. And sometimes I want to be a cynical bastard again, kick shit, and say FUCKITY FUCK FUCK FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK! And then I do. I just say it. And it turns into a meditation. "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this." But it always goes back to something better than just fuck.

I am a joke.

I get it. It is funny. Jaded miserable miscreant figures out she's a sot. Gets gratitude. Finds a spiritual path. Now she is a corny motherfucker who oms and adores nature without irony and likes playing with her kids and thinks there is a connection between everything. I used to be a boozy, bitter cynic. I'd laugh too if I wasn't me. In my dreams, I am still a scruffy, miserable bastard slugging whiskey and cutting rotten teeth out of my jaw.

It reminds me of a party I once went to at my friend's house, and this dude walks in. Good-looking guy, suave, cut. My friend K said, "Is that Jon Secada? Tell that corny motherfucker that we don't drink his box wine around here." I get the feeling that I am Jon Secada and happiness is my box wine.

Ah, where was I? Yes, I am hungry.

Hungry for justice. Thirsty for liberation. I tattoo "BERSERKER" on my forehead and get pissed at people who stare at it. Don't you get that I feel a little crazy with all this oral pain? I slather on the Orajel, and someone asks me if it is alcohol-free, or if I prayed enough. I am praying for patience with them. I cannot use mouthwash, or vanilla extract, or cooking wine, or NyQuil, or cough syrup, but I'm using the damn benzocaine. It just numbs and doesn't get you drunk. It is safe. I slather it on, and drool. I pray again. Meditate. All the things everyone hates hearing about, except they saved my pathetic fucking life.

This afternoon, I am going to pay some cowboy to get me high, then pull my tooth out with some pliers and a knife. He will show it to me. It will be grey and disgusting and I will hope that he is mistaken, though I know he won't be. I am a nigh-Buddhist, after all. Nigh-Buddhists are supposed to have good teeth.

wishes

Technically, I spent the weekend with my children and my mother. Sam left for Ohio to collect the honor of his father being inducted into his high school's football and basketball hall of fame. He left Thursday, drove home today.

Mama came and told me to make plans with people, and so I did. So technically, I spent the weekend with my kids and my mother, but I spent less time than normal. I had breakfast with the ladies after a meeting, then Sunday, I met one of my closest friends at the diner between our houses. I love having breakfast with her, drinking shitty coffee with that lovely, natural conversational pace you only get with old friends. We ate fast, then went to a flea market, which ended up being more of a swap meet. I bought a huge fake g-force watch for eight buck. My mother told me I should have paid five.

Later another friend C. picked me up and we drove to a place where a woman channels spirit guides and angels. I sat on the floor, and my friend K. rested her feet on my thigh. The room was filled with women, a few men I had never met, most of whom I consider my friends, my confidantes, the people I laugh with, have called crying, who know a little bit about every little nasty bit of me. I know them the same way. We share something in common.

We meditated together, then the channel went one by one staring into our eyes. Some women saw the face of their mother as she stared at them. She looked like a holy woman to me, a wild, beautiful shaman surrounded by a golden light. She transformed. She oozed good medicine. As she came around, I felt a jolt of electricity and something like fear. My heart raced, and I saw flashes of experiences, like a film of a life passing before my eyes. I looked up to the Buddha above her head.

I am not my fears. I am not my weakness.

"It is okay. You do not have to be afraid, I cannot read your thoughts."

Thank you. Please say her name. Lucia Paz. Please say she is here, and if she is not, can you tell me if I should even be writing this book? Will it get published? Will I ever get published?Am I a fraud? Should I stop writing? I want to keep writing. I want to write books that people love, like the books I love.

She was still staring into my eyes.

"What you wish for, you will get."

Me?

"Do you understand? Do you know what I am talking about?"

I nod, tears welling. I don't know why I am crying. Her eyes move to K. She begins talking about being a woman in this lifetime. And how fucking hard it is to be a woman. I remember her saying, "But you already know that." K. tears up.

I play with the words in my head. What you wish for, you will get. It sounds like a Chinese curse. She stared at me with such earnestness, such surety, though I know it is not. It humbled me. Was she simply daring me to be responsible with the power to have wishes come true? I stretch the words...what you wish for, you will get. I turn them inside out. It is a mobius strip, you will wish for what you have. Did I wish something? I did wish in the moment she stared at me. I wish for peace of mind most days, serenity, sobriety, for a connection to God, or the divine, or other people.  I wish to know my destiny. To know if I should keep pursuing writing, or leave it along the road for another person to pick up. Maybe the answer was yes. Or maybe I really don't want to write anymore. What you wish for, now that is the problem.

On my birthday, I rose at 3:30a. It was coincidental. This was days earlier. There was a meteor shower, (I mentioned it before). At 4p, I made the plan to sit out in the night, watching meteors shoot across the sky. A whole two hours of wishes for my thirty-eighth year. According to my weather app, outside was destined to be 12 degrees F at 3am, perhaps cloudy and snowy. I couldn't bear to wake up in death temperature to make a wish or fifty, yet communing with night sky usually trumps practical concerns. I decided to not set an alarm and leave it to fate. If I wake, I will watch the stars from my bed.

I rolled over and looked at my phone. It was 3:30 am, so I sat up in the dark of my room. Fate wants me to see a meteor. The boy was snoring, uncovered. Leg draped across my thigh. The clerestory windows face the east. I see the stars framed by the three. I put my glasses on, propped up some pillows and waited. The sky seemed clear, but I was drifting in and out of sleep. Then it happened, a streak across the night sky, like chalk being drug on a clean slate. Three of them quickly appeared  in the windows. I made a wish, then another, then another. I woke three hours later, in the early dawn light, with my glasses on and a kink in my neck not sure if it all was a dream. I made three wishes. I remembered that. I held them deep inside me.

What I wish for, I will get.

Last year, on this very day, I had different wishes. I wished I could sleep all night, not woken by nightmares, or shame, or a constant refrain of guilt and shame. I wished I didn't have thoughts of wanting to die. I never wished to kill myself, just to die a quick painless death in my sleep so I could stop having so much pain and stop causing so much pain. I wished for friends that didn't abandon me in my worst moment. I wished to understand why they abandoned me, what it was about me that pushed people away. I wished for energy. I wished to see my body as a source of strength rather than limit and weakness. I wished for love--to give it and receive it wholly. I wished I had an answer. I wished to laugh until my cheeks hurt. I wished I had a community in real life, not just virtual. I wished I could be a better mother and wife. I wished I wouldn't drink when I didn't want to drink. I wished that alcohol wasn't the first thing I thought of in the morning and the last thing I thought of at night. I wished for peace, serenity, and calm. I wished to be of some use in the world.

What I wished for, I got.

Today, I have one year of intentional sobriety, that includes weekends.  My mouth still waters when I say the word bourbon, when I romance the booze. Over ice. Undertones of vanilla and oblivion. I miss it some days. Those days are fewer than they were. The without-it part is too good. Sobriety suits me. I came to sobriety gutted, lost, broken, willing to do anything. All of those wishes I had last year have come true, the psychic had that right. And not always in the way I imagined they would be granted. It has been a fucking hard year, but the saying, "Suffering is inevitable, but misery is optional." I get that now. I get it.

Today, I am not my fears. I am not my disease. I am not my daughter's death. I am not my righteous indignation. I am not a victim. I am not a bundle of wishes. I am not fixed. I am just a girl trying to do the next right thing. That sounded like the perfect wish.

the rain

The rain drummed on the roof last night, suddenly torrential, like the sky opened up, like it was summer. I had read on the weather website that the rain was coming, but then when I heard it, it felt different. I can't articulate it but it felt metaphoric, perhaps important. I would have highlighted that section of the book if I had read it. The rain continued steady and true all night and into today. I didn't mind it. I like the rain. I liked that it was more than a drizzle, and that it was either raining, or not. I stood in the rain for a while tonight talking to my friend. "I am getting wet," I kept thinking. "I am getting wet." I just noticed the wetness on me, but I didn't try to change it. I didn't move or mind it. I wanted to talk to R. He is struggling. We cried first together, over different things. We cried in spite of ourselves. Then we laughed at our crying, then we laughed at the rain. 

Earlier in the evening, I called out to her as she walked out the door. She stopped and turned toward me, waiting.

I love you. I said, You saved my life.

I love you, darling.  You can always call me. I'm not going to Mars.

And then she walked out the door. I wasn't sappy with her. I didn't cry often. It wasn't our relationship, but she heard my deepest secrets. The things I never told anyone, not even you. When someone hurt me, she was the first person I called. She told me to pray. She told me to meditate. When I was annoying the fuck out of her, she told me to read page 417. She told me I walked in God's grace. She told me I had twenty good things about myself and if I couldn't write what they were, then she would. And she did.

My hands went to my face when she left. I cried in spite of myself. She is gone. She walked out the door of the church, just like every night. Her life is blossoming. I want her to be happy in the new place, far away from me, but I am afraid to be without her. I am just a drunk, still learning to trust. I am so sad to see her walk into the rain.

My hands are wet.

The women rally around me.

It is a big deal to lose a sponsor. It is a big deal, honey.
It is okay to cry.
You are going to be okay, Angie.
Oh, honey, cry. It is a big deal.
Call me tomorrow, Angie. Call me.

She is the woman who saved my life by sharing all the dark, hurt parts of her, and then sharing the hope. She is the one who showed me how to recover, the one who guided me in meeting my demons, the one who loved me until I loved myself. She is my first sponsor. She was the first person I met where I wanted what she had--serenity. She said that it was okay to want that part of her. She told me exactly what to do with every minute of my day until I stopped shaking and moaning and crying, until I found serenity. She introduced me to God, and to myself. She listened to the worst I had to offer. She abided and then she said, "I have to tell you, Angie, you are a very nice person. I am privileged to know you."

The rain was not too cold tonight. It is the end of November. The leaves are all fallen. I don't even think we will have to rake again. The sky blushes a soft pink with orange streaks in the mornings without rain. Tomorrow there will be streaks in the sky. It will remind me of a watercolor. Tomorrow she will drive away from this town forever. She will close a chapter of her life, and I will begin a new one myself. My chapter will start:

There is a woman who drives through the rain. She saved my life once. 

Despite myself, I am soaked with tears. I knew they would come, but they are steady and torrential at times, but covering my face. The tears are warm, like gratitude, and puddle under me.

an arm

I have an arm. It is this long.

It is the length of you from me. It is the length of a bourbon from my lips.

Bourbon. 
Lips. 
*swoon*

When I hear the word bourbon, I get all misty-eyed. I miss cracking the wax. I admit it. I miss the smell. I miss the burn, and the vanilla aftertones. After all, I drank bourbon primarily until I stopped drinking. The expensive kind. The small batches. Don't get me wrong, I probably would have drank the Thunderbird, but times were never that tough for me.


I am romancing the drink. You are witnessing it. The old drunks warn you about it. "Don't romance the drink. A drink is only an arm's length away."

Everything is only an arm length's away, Old Man. Self-pity is only a chewed fingernail length away.

My ass is still tender and mostly asleep from the terrible chairs in the basement tonight. But the stories were good tonight, the hope. I feel inspired to stop whining about my beautiful life and the state of my old ass. Then I come here and write it all back. Another shitty day in paradise. When I talk about connecting with people, it disconnects me from others. I am awkward. My arm is straight out and I am measuring people's distances from me. I hold onto my magical deer horn necklace.

Help me know, Magical Antler, whether I should just stop now. The first step is to admit that I am powerless over blogging.

I put out my arm. It is long for a woman my size. I keep blogging. I shake a hand. This is real life I am talking about now. I try to draw them closer, but I don't know how without typing my words. I am friendly, but awkward. Most people don't notice the awkward, they are simply pleased about the friendly. I am good at hiding the awkward. The church basement people know nothing about my daughter's death, or any of the other stuff. Sometimes when I think I have had a hard life, I tell someone about Lucy, and then they tell me about how they lost their child, then another, and their wife, then after some years of grief drinking, they lost their home, their car, their job. There is a lot of grief. You hear it night after night if you listen. It is sandwiched in between normal drinking and suicidal. My particular story sounds like someone who hasn't ever really suffered.

My dead baby. Boo hoo. And my expensive liquor. Boo hoo.


I have an arm. It dislocates when I move it like this.

Ouch.
Son Of A...God, that pain. All I can pay attention to is the pain of that...arm...and the weight of its length.
Is there a wall to bang into? Or a floor? 
Oh, right, OUCH, I am standing on it. I feel the hole in my shoulder, and the hole in my soul. I don't like you getting close to my arm hanging uselessly by the skin, except I want you close because i need help with this blasted arm.
BANG.
Oh, that is better, Arm. You in socket is better than you out of socket. 

It is so painful out that the relief of having it in is worth the pain of the out.  It is the Catch-22 of masochism. I like the pain when it stops, perhaps because it stops, but then I want to go right back into the pain so it can stop again. Perhaps I am a masochist at heart. After all, I have a hole in my soul.  I fill it with things that hurt, including the not-you.  I fill it with self-pity and overindulgent grief and impatience and righteous indignation and justified anger. I fill it with booze and ice cream with sea salt and coffee. I have a hole in me, and I want to fill it with my bloody arms and my goodness and my serenity and God.

I sometimes stay up late and stare at her picture. It doesn't change. I have changed however. She is differently beautiful. I wouldn't trade her for a live baby anymore. I wanted that baby, Lucia, and that baby happened to come dead. I don't get to trade places with people, or get a different life. This is fucking it. She is dead. I am not. I will reconcile that for the rest of my life. Her death doesn't mean I am special and get special rules about the world. It means I now have to learn decency while narcissistically obsessed with my dead daughter. It is so depressing to keep coming to the same obvious conclusion, but I need to remind myself. My default mode is self-pity and self-justification. That is what happens when you have a hole in you.

I lost many friends from the awkwardness of grief from the expectations that led to resentments that led to confrontations that led to me having an arm. And it is very very long.

sober

Three months after Lucy died, I wrote this:

I am both drastically different, and exactly the same. I am exactly the same person living a drastically different life that looks exactly the same. 

In the beginning, I told myself my own story. I had just quit drinking and was going to meetings listening to people's stories of drinking and recovery every night. I stopped drinking and stopped being able to sleep. I tucked into bed, read books about alcoholics who make drastic changes in their life, thought about the layers of lies I told myself through the years about my drinking. Everything was beginning to make sense about me. Alcoholic--that is my tribe name. Now I know. I wondered how I could be here at 37. I felt lost, but on my way to home. And then I would tell myself my own story, in the dark.

Hello. My name is Angie. I am an alcoholic. I took my first drink when I was four.

At four, I blacked out and threw up and asked for more. I was a four-year old sot, a drunk. An alchy, I think. A four year old boozer. I couldn't stop, even then.

It is a family legend. Told around the Thanksgiving table. A party at my grandmother's house, I began drinking wine glasses filled with frozen berries and a Riesling when my aunts, uncles and grandparents walked away from their glasses. All my older relatives thought they were distractedly drinking too quickly. They repeatedly filled up their glasses. I would drain them again. Before long, I became violently ill. After hours of throwing up, I asked for some more berries with juice. And also asked if we could go to McDonald's. I guess I got the munchies. I was four.

There is a man I know who always says that the first time he drank, he drank too much and threw up. To sober him up, his friends gave him coffee, and he threw that up too. And he never drank coffee again. Because alcoholics will keep drinking, even though we are dying.

I was dying spiritually, emotionally, physically.

Beezus is four. She has never seen me drunk. She has never been drunk. She once pointed to the liquor store and said, "Remember that time you bought wine there?"

Yes, I do.

I am sober nine months. Nine months without a drink. I have gone longer without a drink. Still, it means something to me. I had never done the work to get out of the way of thinking that makes me an alcoholic. I have never really comprehended the wreckage of my drinking. I thought it was victimless. I thought I was a drunk Buddha. I thought I could have it all--spirituality and drinking. Looking at God and myself through a bourbon bottle distorted everything. Made it wiggly and aggressive.

For me, those two things are not compatible anymore. Drinking was but a symptom, that is what they say. I believe them. For most of my drinking, I was alone in my apartment.  I stopped going out to bars, because it seemed to get in the way of me drinking the way I wanted to drink. And the writing. ("You know, I'm a writer. I have to go home, because I am working on something.") I started isolating a long time before Lucy died. I thought I should tell you this because I have complained about my friends and my support on this blog. I complained about how alone I felt.

I did that to myself.

Maybe you didn't know that. Maybe you parsed it together through the years. But we used to drink together, my friends and I. Then, I guess, I crossed that invisible line between heavy drinker and alcoholic. Maybe I crossed that line at age four when I stopped drinking like the other four year olds. I didn't realize how isolated I had become. I would treat people like we were having a conversation:

Sure, we'll get together next week.

Six months go by and I would contact them ready to go out. Alcohol exaggerated everything for me--grievances, time, depth of friendships, people's tolerance for my bad behavior. Maybe I stopped hanging out with my friends because I stopped drinking like my friends. Maybe I stopped hanging out with people because I wasn't able to hold it all together, because my alcoholism was seeping through my every move--the self-pity, the resentments, the anger, the depression, the desolation. Maybe I stopped hanging out with people because alcoholism wanted me alone. Isolation is a symptom of this disease, but one not every alcoholic has.

When I got married and had kids, I thought I had kicked all this bad drinking business, if I even had drinking business. I drank infrequently after I had children. But when I did, I drank until I fell asleep, or passed out, whatever your perspective, because I had trouble sleeping. That's what I told myself. Drinking in the last few months before getting sober, I realized that I immediately could not quit. My alcoholism had been doing push-ups during my years of birthing children. It was getting stronger. Sure, I still was accomplishing things. I still had my marriage. I still was parenting. I still was waiting until the kids went to sleep to drink. But those things would have fallen away. Sometimes I think I got sober the day before I lost everything. Not the day before I lost many of my friends, that was a process happening for years that was my first indication that something was seriously wrong with me.The only thing all those friendship break-ups had in common was me.

I thought I was a person who made no impact on the global suffering of the world. How could drinking affect the way I treat people? It seemed as though it didn't. I deserved a drink, for the love of God, because I worked hard, and helped others, and my daughter died, and eff it, because I am an adult. It's just a drink, for the love of God. I had no idea that drinking was simply a symptom of a larger, more profound, spiritual malady. That might sound dramatic, but I am downplaying it.

Today, I am drastically different, and exactly the same. I am exactly the same person living a drastically different life that looks exactly the same. And I am incredibly grateful for that.