My first drink - A piece of my story.

I talked to my sister last night and I don't think she was too keen on me coming for Thanksgiving. I didn't take it personally and was actually a little relieved to be free from obligations.

We have had an estranged relationship for many years both suffering alone without each others support. She left for college when my Dad remarried and didn't really stand up for me when the emotional abuse started. This is really behind us now and we both made our amends during our last visit.

I have built my life around the story of being the outsider. That is why I fit in with Al-anon. It feels like a room full of outsiders. I liked alcoholics because they seemed to fit in better than I did.

I realize now that we really aren't that different. I think they drink to fit in and to quiet the same ugly voices that us Al Anoners have.

When I first came to the meetings I was the victim and felt superior to alcoholic in my life, then I felt sorry for him. Then as I matured in the program I really started to see we were the same people. I just didn't have a liquid escape route. I was just as sick without any excuses at all.

I don't know why I am not an alcoholic but I can definitely relate to the need to escape. In the beginning when I attended AA meetings to summoned some empathy, which was in short supply at the time, it made me think about my own first drink.

I was 15 and life was unbearable at home my co-workers at Long John Silvers offered my a ride home. They really wanted me to buy beer because I looked the most mature. I purchased it at Kroger and we drank in the car.

I can still remember now the relief I felt at the moment the pain of my life dissolving away. The stress of trying to make my stepmother happy, she is still not happy. It felt good to let my guard down to fit in just for a few moments.

I don't know why I didn't become an alcoholic. The grace of god I guess, I had plenty of reasons to escape and after leaving home at 16 I had plenty of opportunities to become one.

In my younger years I worked in restaurants where there was free drugs and alcohol for anyone that wanted them. I did drink a lot and dated bartenders and cooks. That is how I met my husband. Once we were married I decided we needed to get out of the business, it was a bad influence on him. This is where my Al-Anon story starts.

Pork and Meatloaf

I have spent the last hour playing Hit the Road on Bored.com and having some much needed fun. In the game you are responsible for getting people across the street without them getting hit by a car. Hey I can do that, it is helping people right? Just like life is isn't as easy as it looks. Their remains are scattered on the road when you fail. It really gets crazy when they put you in charge of the traffic lights, so much responsibility. I had to quit at level 12 too many casualties meant I was maxed out for tonight. It was hysterically funny, am I a bad person?

I have spent the day just hanging around the house. I started pot of soup with some pork I made at Thanksgiving. Don't I froze some, so anyone out there counting the days since Thanksgiving. I originally cooked it with green chilies and tomatoes. Today I had some butternut squash that I cooked in a cast iron skillet also from my grandmother, the skillet not the squash. I wanted to give it a roasted flavor before adding to the soup. It was a pain to cut it up though I had forgotten how dense butternut squash is, I know you usually bake it, but I didn't want to wait. It actually tasted great when it was finished.

I have been organizing the house today and did come across some stuff from the past. I am sentimental in a way that would probably make your eyes roll. I keep stuff from people that I have loved or that have loved me. Sometimes it is a piece of clothing or in this case a letter written by my ex-husband after he had been married a few years and we were speaking again. I kept everything he wrote me during our years together. He was a great writer and this particular letter was a letter of amends.

In his letter he said that he had learned a lot from our relationship and that it had made him a better man. He always had a good heart but his childhood left him without skills to work through the pain and ended up turning to alcohol for comfort. We were the same really soul mates in a very unhealthy way. We were equals in that we had deep unresolved pain and thought another person was the answer. He thought he had picked the wrong person and moved on.

I have thought about him a lot the past few days. I was playing the old Meatloaf CD Bat out of Hell yesterday, this was one of our favorites. The famous dashboard light song where he is trying to laid and she says "Will you love me until the end of time?" and he says yes and then "now I am praying for the end of time to hurry up and arrive". We would sing to each other to the top of our lungs. We had been married a few years by then and appreciated the sentiment. We had a lot of laughs and that is why we stayed together, but the drinking crept in and that was the end. Our pasts had destroyed our ability to have a future together.

I can be sentimental because it was million years ago and time has healed that wound. He introduced me to real music and real food. We met in a bar and he was a cook and I was a patron. I had been eating his food for two years before I even met him. He was a great cook and went on to be a chef and then I stepped in talked him into leaving that life. I thought it promoted drinking and I wanted a family. So he got a corporate job and met his new wife. What is it we say, we didn't cause it, we can't cure it and we can't control it. I didn't think he had a drinking problem I just wanted him to come home at night.

Oh well, that relationship taught me a lot too. I was so sick and in so much pain by the end that it was a joy when he finally left. He was angry and drinking. I was scared of him, I thought it was my fault. I wasn't good enough to make him happy. I will never be that person again because of the program. He was cheating and drinking and pissed off at me for just being alive.

This is a far cry from an amends letter and my rosy picture of him in my head right now. I don't know if he was alcoholic or whether he has a program. All I know is that he wasn't the same person when the drinking escalated.

I think this post has been good for me. A review of the past with rose colored glasses first and at the end not so rose colored. Relationships suck sometimes and you just have to do the best you can and hope it works out. I hate growing up.