Sober on Martha's Vineyard
Sober on Martha's Vineyard.
The moment I’d been dreading came early during my getaway with college friends last weekend. We came home from dinner that first night and decided to change into bathing suits and get into the steamy hot tub out back. We all carefully eased ourselves into the scalding water wearing our one-pieces because at 55, we are less than 10 years away from drawing on our social security with midsections to match. I sank into the hot water and looked around at my six oldest friends holding plastic wine glasses of icy cold rose while I sipped on my sparkling water and – for the briefest of seconds – wished that I could just drink like a normal person.
When we gathered at our friend’s home on , I drank a lot of rose in that steamy hot tub. I drank a lot of rose – and every other flavor of wine – out of the hot tub, too. Before sobriety, I never needed an excuse to drink, but a weekend away with girlfriends, and these women, in particular, conjured for me bottomless cocktails and endless possibilities. For me, alcohol was always the gasoline of all adventure, as the writer Sarah Hepola so aptly noted. It was the key ingredient needed to ignite the fun.
The eight of us have had a lot of adventures together. Drinking stories that come up from our past as we’re sitting on couches sipping coffee or late at night in a hot tub under the stars. Stories about skinny dipping and kissing one-armed bandits that make us hoot with laughter, remembering the crazy things we used to do.
When we became friends almost 40 years ago at the University of Delaware, from different parts of the East Coast and with varying backgrounds, booze was our common denominator and beer was our drink of choice. This was probably true for many white women (and dudes) who went to college in the 1980s.
Over the decades, the eight of us have gotten together fairly regularly to do many of the same things we used to do in college – namely eat, drink and sit around on couches interrogating each other and laughing – just in much swankier locations than the Alpha Phi house in Newark, DE circa 1987. For years we convened on the end of Long Island at a friend’s home in East Hampton in the fall and lately, we’ve been arriving via planes, trains, and automobiles (and sometimes ferries) to another pal's house in Martha’s Vineyard.
For most of the gang, the drinking has grown up as well, both in the quality of the alcohol that’s being consumed as well as the amount. They all can have one Bloody Mary and not let that trigger an urge to drink 10 glasses of wine afterward. Believe me, I studied how much everyone drank all weekend, out of curiosity and also out of habit. When I was still drinking, alcohol took up so much of my bandwidth as I monitored what I and everyone else around me were drinking. It was exhausting.
When I told my oldest child last fall that I’d stopped drinking, his immediate reaction was to ask, “So, you’re not even going to have a drink at my wedding?” despite not even having a girlfriend at that time. But the question could also not have been closer to the many and varied reasons I had for clinging to alcohol. Imagined moments in the future that I couldn’t fathom not including a celebratory drink. These moments included (but were not limited to):
My four children’s weddings
My own future wedding
Imagined trips to Paris and the Italian coast with a romantic partner
Gathering in a hot tub with my college girlfriends
How, I’d ask my therapist whenever she gently suggested I take a break from drinking and give AA a try, would I be able to get through these life moments without a drink in my hand? How would I ever be able to have fun without alcohol? I just couldn’t wrap my head around not drinking FOREVER.
I shared my concerns about committing to never drinking again with another mom who had been sober for almost 18 months when I met her last fall through another woman in early sobriety. We met up one afternoon to walk around the track at a nearby park on a crisp late fall day and she shared with me her experiences in “the program.” When I told her I was so worried about never having another drink for the rest of my life, she told me she doesn’t look at it that way. “It’s just for today,” she told me, and that really helped calm me down in those early days.
I’ve thought a lot about that conversation in the last 11 months of sobriety and all the occasions that would have called for a drink (or 7). I’ve celebrated all the major holidays and a birthday without alcohol. I grieved the loss of my cat without booze, too. Throw in my baby’s high school graduation, a trip to visit my daughter and favorite drinking partner in Raleigh, a new job, and never-ending complications from my divorce and still, I have not once felt the urge to pick up a drink. I remind myself that I just need to get through the day without booze, which is getting easier and easier. Believe me, I'm as shocked as you.
The weekend in Martha’s Vineyard with good friends was no exception. Sure, there were moments I looked longingly at what was in the other girls' glasses – Bloody Mary’s overflowing with shrimp and olives on a deck overlooking the harbor under a perfect blue sky; or all the full wine glass as we sat around a table outside by the pool eating or the white wine on the beach at dusk waiting for the sun to set into the water while eating fresh lobster rolls. All those moments I never thought I’d be able to get through without buckling to the lure of alcohol.
Because we are the type of friends that like to leave no stone unturned in each other’s lives, the girls had a lot of questions about my sobriety. Did I miss alcohol? Was it a struggle to see them all drinking? What are all those meetings I go to about? I explained that I learned that AA really had nothing to do with drinking. It’s more about why you were drinking too much in the first place. That’s the bigger question.
And then right on cue, while scrolling through Instagram, I saw a quote from the writer Holly Whitaker that perfectly explained why I didn’t drink last weekend: “The goal isn’t to be sober … the goal is to love yourself so much that you don’t need to drink.”
That’s the gift of recovery, learning to love me. Recognizing that I care about myself too much to drink. That alcohol gets in the way of the woman that I want to be and the life I want to live. I couldn’t have gone away with my friends and felt as strong as I did last weekend six months ago or maybe even three months ago. In 11 months I have built a strong foundation of sobriety through all the meetings and work to keep me grounded in the reasons why I don’t drink.
When I forget for a hot second, I look at a beaded bracelet a sober friend recently gave me that reads ACCEPTANCE and am reminded that I can’t just have one glass of anything. That’s just the way it is. And each one of my friends over the course of the weekend recognized my sobriety and told me how proud she was of what I was doing. They made sure there was plenty of fancy sparkling water on hand at all times and tried to be low key about their own drinking. I felt loved and supported by them all.
On our last night on the island, the stragglers from the weekend packed a cooler of drinks and fresh clam chowder and headed to the beach in Menemsha where you can see the sun set into Vineyard Sound. We found a little nook of sand tucked into the dunes to shield us from the wind as we nibbled on cheese and crackers left over from the weekend that I washed down with my big bottle of Pellegrino. We unwrapped our fresh lobster rolls that had come right off the boat and marveled at all the big chunks of meat piled on the hot dog bun. We dipped the sweet claw meat into little plastic cups of melted butter and watched as the sun kept slinking lower in the clear September sky.
People stood on the beach below us wearing sweatshirts and windbreakers and as the last of the sun dipped behind the horizon, the crowd broke out into applause. The sky gave way to darkness as we drove home along the island’s dark, winding roads lit by an almost full moon above. It was still there when we got back into the hot tub one last time, shining its light down on me, filling me, as I took a sip of my sparkling water and plunged my shoulders under the steamy water.
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
I absolutely can't with Nine Perfect Strangers, the latest Liane Moriarty book to become a Nicole Kidman mini-series (this one on HULU). I watched about three or four episodes and gave up because A: it was boring and B: I couldn't handle Kidman's Russian accent one more second. I could have hate-watched the rest but I'm valuing my time too much these days for that type of indulgence.
I do, however, L-O-V-E the newest season of The Morning Show on Apple. My only complaint is that when I sat down to binge Season 2 on a rainy Friday night, I discovered that they're only releasing one episode a week. Not ideal for those of us who enjoy over-consumption in all forms.
This "helpful" list from The Skimm of 14 useful items for anyone living alone kind of depressed the hell out of me (but that bracelet gadget is low key genius).
Much like my midsection, my feet just aren't what they used to be. Lately, the only comfortable shoes I wear are my Hoka sneakers and loafers from Birdies, which my hair goddess Lorraine told me about. The inserts are super cushiony and the leather is so soft that I'm waiting for them to go on sale and buy another pair for fall.
Two new podcasts I've recently been turned onto: No Mercy/No Malice is biz professor/author Scott Galloway's weekly take on tech and its relationship to the economy and The Nantucket Project's founder Tom Scott's weekly riff on the state of the country and the world that offers varying points of view.
Finally, this video made me laugh thinking it's how I felt when all my girlfriends were ordering Palomas to sit outside watching live music on a perfect September night on Martha's Vineyard.