In Your Dreams

Making those shots!!! 

I quit drinking five months ago because I was afraid I’d end up with one of those “buzzed DUI”s. After a seed gets planted in my head, it comes to fruition, one way or the other.

I was talking with my mom about how I wanted to quit, which meant I had to quickly adapt to voluntary abstinence, because once my mom starts lighting her prayer candles with good intentions, a brutal path unfolds leading to the endgame. Her prayer power would have resulted in me driving my car off the freeway, with multiple casualties, living my sober life, in jail.

I feel very safe and stable when all my mom and I talk about is the food we ate the day before.

The best part of not drinking is waking up feeling good. Hangovers, even slight, are the worst times of introspection, where weight is given to self-constructed limitations and failings look like road blocks rather than splits in the road.

I told my sister, Lacey, being hung over makes me wish I was pregnant. She gets that feeling too, and thinks it’s a biological urge for forced sobriety. I actually just think it’s a biological urge for productivity after demonstrating such disregard for time. Your body’s reaction to wasting your talents is forced work, growing a little baby and then being very tired for three solid years.

My sobriety app tells me I've saved $1,860! The savings doesn’t take into consideration the uptick in kombucha consumption. And it’s not truly money saved because I have a lot more time for yoga on these wide-eyed-bushy-tail weekend mornings. So I bought the annual pass on black Friday, and that ate up half of those Coors Light savings.

The yoga studio fills the void of the carnal pleasures in a late night bar. I’m constantly confronted with the sexual buzz generating off the teachers, and most especially the assistants. Assistants don't get any money to rub up on sweaty patrons, they get paid in the excessive pleasure taken by thrusting their pelvis on you to “aid in the position.” Whenever an assistant presses upon me, I immediately have an OCD moment, commanding myself not to imagine them having sex, which then turns my brain into an ocean of filth. 
Leaving the yoga studio, the instructors and assistants wave goodbye from the front desk, they’re all sitting on each other’s laps and giving each other shoulder rubs. I have yet to receive an invite to their after hours den of iniquity, but who knows whats in store for me in another five months.

Occasionally, I’ll dream I’ve gone out and really tied one on. When I wake up, there’s a moment I’m engulfed in shame thinking I blacked out the night before. It’s such a relief when I realize I don’t have a headache, and it was all just a dream stemming from dormant anxiety. Last week, I woke up from a dream where I was drinking champagne and doing cocaine. My boyfriend was already awake, reading his phone. I looked over at him, and said, “I just had a dream I was drinking and doing cocaine.”

Then he said, “You’re such a bad girl in your dreams.”

Which made me laugh, but then I stopped because I wasn’t sure if he said, “You’re such a bad girl, in your dreams.”

The benefits from not drinking spill over into every area of my life. I'm way more productive, creative, happy, rested, blah, blah, blah. But I'm also a better mom, way more patient. My son spilled his cup of kombucha across the kitchen table, soaking Kiki’s homework, which might have been a head exploding moment, but I just got out a towel and we decided to microwave the wet paper. I wasn’t paying too close attention, or I would have advised he microwave the soaked homework in 15 second increments, and so it turned out, the homework caught on fire in the microwave because he set it for three minutes. 
Kingsley laughed so hard she threw her face into the hard plastic straw coming from her water bottle. And I am still recovering from the PTSD of her nearly blinding herself from laughing at the possibility of our house burning down.

At the end of the momentous evening, Geoffrey started climbing on the kitchen counters looking for his Altoids. Again, this would be a time for me to get hostile, but instead, I said, “We aren't living in a damn hipster Indie movie. You can’t climb around the kitchen like that.”

And Kiki said, “Mommy said a bad word.”

“You’re right. Bad girl, mommy!”

And then Kiki said, “Yeah, mom. Sure."