One thousand days

This week I found myself hungover for the first time in over two years.

I woke up Thursday morning with my head pounding and my mouth felt like it had been stuffed with a bag of cotton balls. As the day progressed, my symptoms worsened and all of my “remedies” just complicated matters. I drank a lot of caffeine to perk up, which made me so jittery that when I tried to nap my brain felt like it was vibrating. I was starving, but nothing in my frig seemed remotely appetizing so I didn’t eat. When it finally started to get dark around 8 p.m., I was in my pajamas and ready for bed.

Don’t be alarmed. Booze was not the cause for being so debilitated on Thursday. It was all Beyonce’s fault.

We got back to my daughter’s apartment in Philly super late after the concert on Wednesday night and woke up early the next day to drive back to Jersey. The day before, I had gotten up at the crack of dawn before leaving for Philly to finish up something for work. So for two days in a row, I didn’t get enough sleep.

Add to that some mild dehydration, brought on by multiple iced lattes + giant Diet Pepsi at the concert + 0 ounces of water all day. I could not wait for Thursday to be over and for Friday to come. And when it did, I felt like myself again.

Before the concert, the girls and I had gone out to a Lebanese restaurant in Philly for lunch and we all had sandwiches piled with marinated chicken on toasted baguettes and dipped triangles of grilled pita bread into a big clay bowl of shakshuka. The bowl had a mechanism on its bottom that made it like a lazy susan that we could spin around to get at the eggy, tomato-y sauce at just the right angle.

When we got back to my daughter’s apartment, she said she had a surprise and emerged from the kitchen bearing a homemade chocolate cake with numbered candles spelling out 1,000.

“I don’t know if you realized it but yesterday was 1,000 days of not drinking,” she said as she walked toward where I was sitting on the big mustard yellow sectional couch. When I asked her how in the world she knew that, she said, “I have an app that stalks your sobriety.”

There was a time when I, too, stalked my sobriety. I had an app that kept track of not only how many days it had been since my last drink, but how many hours that equaled along with the amount of calories and money I had saved by quitting.

In the beginning, just getting to Day One was a major accomplishment for me. I’d start every day feeling kind of like how I did after Beyonce, swearing that I would not drink that day. And then, inevitably, I’d talk myself into having just one glass of wine. That would turn into two or three or whoops, there goes the bottle. I could not get out of that cycle, no matter how hard I tried or how desperate I felt.

Getting to one year was a major accomplishment. I kept my eye on that 365-day mark in October all year, imagining what it would feel like when I got there. And when it came, I celebrated in the new way that I celebrate things, replacing the champagne with Pellegrino and surrounded by new sober friends.

Year two came a little quicker. To mark the occasion, I celebrated at a dinner with sober women before heading to a celebration meeting. Being sober was still a big part of my story.

Somewhere along the way in this third year, I stopped keeping track of my sobriety. Not drinking has become more of a way of life than something that I am actively doing. I don’t really even think about it anymore. Not the way I used to when my drinking status defined me. When I couldn’t imagine how I would just never drink booze again. Like, ever. Or how I would be able to go out with a group of people who drank and feel like I had to explain why I didn’t. As if it mattered.

My therapist, who really thought I should stop drinking for many years, once said, “If you decided to stop eating asparagus, no one would give it a second thought.”

Alcohol was the centerpiece of my life. It seeped into every activity. To celebrate. To unwind. To rage. To complement a meal. To pass the time.

Over time, my relationship with booze went from mildly codependent to wildly dysfunctional. I thought about it a lot and it made me feel terrible about myself. This is a role I know well.

So one day, after many, many days of trying to stop, I just did. And for a long time that defined me. But now, it’s become just a part of who I am. Like the beauty mark over my left eye that I don’t even notice anymore until the dermatologist asks if I’d like to get rid of it.

“Oh,” I say, because I never even think about it anymore.

The doctor leans in over my face with a headlamp-type device strapped to her forehead and examines the brownish bump that I first remember noticing when I was seven. I was standing in my Catholic school uniform in the church parking lot during recess and some other girl asked me about it. I remember going home and examining myself in the bathroom mirror and feeling horrified to have something so weird on my face. How did it even get there?

I took a selfie in my kitchen not long ago, something I’m not very good at, and the angle of the shot made my beauty mark look especially raised and two-dimensional. I decided right there that I would go ahead and get it removed. I reported this finding and plan of action to my son who was home from college, and his reaction really surprised me.

“Don’t do that!” he said and came rushing toward me. He seemed really worked up for someone who I didn’t even think noticed me, much less the mole on my forehead. “You won’t be my mommy anymore,” he joked while staring at my face.

His reaction made me cancel my mental plans to visit the dermatologist, who was the one who put the thought into my head in the first place during that examination.

After she asked if I would like to remove it, she continued to examine the mole close up and then said, “No, it’s probably a part of who you are.”

That’s what not drinking has become. Just one of the many things that make me, me. It was a good reminder this week of just how horrible it is to wake up and not feel pretty good (minus the assorted arthritic aches and pains). That’s the way I’ve started most of the last 1,000+ days. It was a good reminder that I never want to feel that lousy again.

Also, I am reminded of all the things I have accomplished in that amount of time. Things I never would have been able to pull off had I still been sitting on my couch drinking red wine every night. The job in Corporate America. The salary that’s pretty legit. Financial stability. A relationship with my mom. A house by the beach. A full-length manuscript under my belt.

Any time that little voice in my head starts whispering that one drink won’t kill me, I have to remember all those good things that have come into my life because I gave up booze and kind of got my act together. I have to smother it as quickly as I can.

When I hear that voice, I need to go up to the tiny bedroom in my rental where I set up a small IKEA table that has a magnifying mirror on top. I can sit on the little stool and pull that mirror close and really look at myself. The giant pores. Menopausal whiskers that sprout now over my lip. That beauty mark that sits so prominently above my left eyebrow. Taken separately, gah. There are a lot of flaws. But put them all together, and it makes up who I am. Parts of me I don’t even think about and try not to examine anymore. I have better things to do.

Like my sobriety. It’s just a piece of a bigger story. It looks like that perfectly fried egg on top of the big bowl of shakshuka — loaded with tomatoes and sausage and fingerling potatoes — that the girls and I ate for lunch the other day. Scooping it all up on that perfectly grilled pita. Spinning the bowl around to get just the right amount of everything on the bread.

And it tastes just like chocolate cake.

sunday shares: read + watch + cook + buy

A return trip to Cape Cod (in my head). I gobbled up Adrienne Brodeur’s 2019 memoir Wild Game after finishing her latest novel Little Monsters the week before. Both set on Cape Cod. Both deal with complicated families. But the memoir also has super gorgeous food writing, which is something I really love. I am just a sucker for descriptions of how squab is prepared. Highly recommend.

And a trip to Maine. I have about 20 minutes left of the audio version of the new novel Pete and Alice in Maine. A young family retreats to their summer home at the start of the pandemic and following the discovery of the husband’s infidelity. Excellent.

Somebody Somewhere. I am not sure this gem on HBO is for everyone, but I loved it. A woman returns to her Kansas hometown to care for a sister, who ends up dying and is left trying to come to terms with her past. It’s really funny and bittersweet.

This is what my scones would have looked like if I had remembered to add blueberries.

Who am I? Recently, I got it into my head that I was going to be the type of hostess to offer her guests fresh scones on a Saturday morning (I blame this blogger). The closest I could come to “guests” was my two daughters, for whom I made scones for the first time and I have to say — they were a hit. I even used gluten-free flour for someone who is experimenting with that life, and they were still yummy. I think they might be my new thing. Obviously, it was an Ina recipe.

Go-to summer recipes: Everybody needs a recipe repertoire. Those few dishes you pull out that everybody loves. For me, they are all in my go-to summer weekend grilled steak dinner.

These crusted parmesan potatoes are TikTok famous for a reason and make people freak out. Here’s a basic recipe, but I do it a little differently:

• 425 oven for 35 minutes

• after I melt butter and add cheese, I doctor up with garlic and onion powders, salt and pepper and then sprinkle some more cheese on top

• pull out after 35 minutes and the cheese starts to harden quickly and gets all crunchy

I also have a horseradish sauce I make to go with the steak which is a family staple. I got the recipe from my friend, Phyllis’s, mom many years ago and I still have the handwritten notes Mary Rita wrote on an index card (now an heirloom). Here’s a quick version:

• whip heavy cream (I always make too much but try about 3/4 cup)

• to whipped cream add: sour cream (1/4 cup), dijon, and horseradish (both to taste)

  

For dessert this weekend, I made a blueberry cobbler recipe that I hadn’t made in many years (thanks again to Phyllis). Also with the gluten-free flour. Also delicious.