Finding Missing Pieces (Before the Dog Eats Them)
This week marks the longest stretch I’ve gone without alcohol – today is 94 days – since my last pregnancy, 18 years ago. In 2016, I stopped just shy of 90 days but then broke the streak when I impulsively poured a glass of white wine and in no time, went back to my old habits.
My goal then had been to stop drinking for 100 days, which would prove conclusively that I was not “addicted” to alcohol and reset my habits around booze to those of a more “normal” drinker. I started right after I turned 50 in August and over the course of three months was able to ride out mediation with my ex, election night and two Bruce Springsteen concerts, without drinking. But the whole time I knew that there was a big glass of Italian red patiently waiting for me at the end of my teetotaling tunnel. I always planned to drink again.
I remember that 2016 November night, sitting in my office and hearing my two daughters in the kitchen laughing with a friend and the sound of glasses coming out of the cabinet and a wine bottle being opened. And that voice that had been quietly whispering to me for 89 days – telling me that I’d be able to go back to drinking and assuring me I didn’t have a problem – started to get very loud.
I don’t really have a name for my annoying voice. She's definitely got a Regina George kind of vibe. All I know is that she always tries to bust through my mental door if I leave it a little bit ajar. Like recently, I was putting out an outfit to slip into to go to an early meeting the next day when I remembered I was also going to do a zoom meeting later that same day. Did I really need to do two meetings in one day? And that’s all that mean girl needed to start cooing, “Nah. Take the morning off. Sleep in. You’ve been working so hard. You deserve it.” Mind you, this is the same gal who tells me to click "Next" at the end of every Netflix episode I watch and eat half a tin of Trader Joe's Jingle Jangle in one sitting.
As I placed my clothes for the next day on the bench in my room, I stopped and listened to that voice trying to convince me to ditch my plan – she's so convincing – and then quickly slammed that door in my brain shut and silenced the voice. I put my sneakers alongside my pile of clothes, went to bed, and stuck to my original itinerary.
That voice was strong on that 89th night of not drinking in 2016. She heard my daughters gathering in the kitchen, the sound of the electric wine opener releasing the promise of escape, and she told me in no uncertain terms that enough was enough. That I needed to stop the nonsense. “What will 10 more days prove? You’ve sacrificed so much. You don’t have a problem. You deserve it.”
And just like that, I was cozying up on a stool next to the girls and reaching for that bottle of wine.
On Monday, I hit 90 days sober but this time, I did not celebrate with a glass of chardonnay. Instead, I got in my car and drove to a meeting and was greeted along the way by yet another killer sunrise. I’d come downstairs early that morning in the dark to find a card and new mug for all that tea I’d been brewing, courtesy of my 23yo daughter. She’d taped golden 9-0 balloons to our frig and a silver “Congrats” to a nearby window. In her card, she wrote that she’d been so proud to watch me work so hard on my sobriety and hoped I was proud of me as well. I got a lot of support throughout the day and that night, the kids and I ate slices of the most delicious chocolate layer cake from Wegman’s with big dollops of fresh whipped cream on the side and not once did I wish I had a glass of red to guzzle it down with.
This week, my daughter and I also finished a 1,000 piece puzzle we'd been working on since long before Christmas, which had been taking up half of our kitchen table. It's a wintry tableau of the New York Public Library that definitely has that New Yorker cartoon-quality and it was a bitch to do. Every damn piece looked the same, especially once we put together anything that had a hint of color on it. I threatened to throw the whole thing away a number of times but my daughter persisted and truth be told, she's the one who finally finished it. She called me in to look and pointed to a spot that showed the wood of the table underneath instead of a puzzle piece. "He did it again," she said, referring to our dog lying under the table, just waiting for things to drop. "Face it, every puzzle that comes into this house is doomed."
While it used to drive me crazy that our dog eats any puzzle pieces that slip off the table onto the floor, I've started to come to terms with the inevitability of it all. It's not a perfect situation, but it works and most of the pieces manage to stay on the table and come together to make one cohesive image.
It's a lot like my life. While you can get the general gist of what all my pieces are trying to be, there are still a few missing. That's how I think of my newfound sobriety, like it was an important piece of my puzzle that had fallen on the floor but somehow managed to evade the dog's mouth. I found it just in time and picked it up off the floor and snapped it into place.
