Sobriety Update

 

My sister and I were talking about our sober apps. My app is a tracker, and every morning I check in and read my inspirational quote. There’s only 30 unique quotes so they recycle each month. I could buy more, but I like my money too much. 

I told my sister I notice on Facebook a huge uptick in people from high school going sober. Maybe it just happens as we approach 40, for health and family, a realization that alcohol adds no value.

I’m lucky my closest friends are either sober or not big drinkers, but this isn’t my first venture into the land of dry bars, and sometimes when you quit there can be people who discourage the move, and in retrospect they make you drum your fingers on your chin, and think, “What the fuck do they want me to be such a sad sack for?”

My boyfriend doesn’t drink much, and when he does he ends up with a headache. I told him he should probably eat more bananas and he’ll be fine. I don’t know why I was pushing for him to keep up the good fight, if I started drinking vicariously through him I’d end up hating him like I hate myself when I drink. 

I told him, “I’d probably be able to handle alcohol if I gained 20 pounds.”

He said, “ I don’t think its worth it.”

“But I’d end up a B-cup!” I added with optimism.

He was probably thinking, “But, that butt!”

My butt would get gigantic. I’d show all those true crime enthusiasts how you actually catch a serial killer. Shove that big booty into some Lulu leggings and go running around the park. One of them will surely venture out of their molester vans parked along the park perimeter, trying to get their hands on that bouncing booty.

My current butt size is already attracting men who get dropped of at the park as part of their adult daycare. They probably have the same intelligence as the serial killers, but luckily didn’t have a childhood with a psychotic dad putting cigarette butts out on their face every night after he drank 18 Natural Ice. 

Unsuspecting at first, I just assume, what a friendly person, always waving and saying hello. And then we have an actual, “Hi how are you? You from around here?” Conversation, and one will go right into how they’d love to go line dancing together sometime, or I notice another one standing on the corner with a fishing pole going into a shallow mud puddle. I’ll ask him if he’s caught anything yet, and he’ll smile and say he’s waiting it out. I realized, the nice ones are childhood trauma deprived serial killers.

I tell my kids alcohol is poison. They’re predisposed to these horrendous genes, and I can name five relatives who drank themselves to death or let alcohol drive them into a major come to Jesus moment. I figure it will help the kids when they first dip their toe into it, that they realize getting black out drunk is not all it’s cracked up to. Luckily my daughter has inherited her dad’s IBS, and I think having a holy shit storm in the aftermath of alcohol will be reason in itself to reassess the pros and cons of binge drinking in order to get home before midnight.

My son, he doesn’t have that though, and he has the same problem as me, where he can go to crazy town, with the best intentions, and end up wallowing in the pendulum's back swing.

We went to the tennis courts at the park. He envisioned himself running about like Andre Agassi, and when reality didn’t match that image, he had a full blown, racquet smashing melt down. I was able to talk him off the ledge, but after more ball-chasing he sat down on the bench pouring his bubbly water over his head and agonizing about his inadequacies. There’s only so much, “This is your first time… Practice is all you need,” before I decided it’s time to close the spectacle down and head home.

As we were walking off the courts he was acting like brat, and jokingly, playing off what I’d seen him do moments earlier, I took my bubbly water and dumped it on his head. Terrible idea.

Both of the kids went straight for the jugular, and pulled their divorced kids card, telling me how little they preferred my company.

Defeated, I walked ahead of them to the car as people watched them trailing behind me crying and acting like I put cigarette butts out on their faces.

The next day Kiki had therapy, and when I picked her up, I nervously sat in the car thinking, “Oh lord, her therapist is going to pin point the entire reason were in therapy after learning about the disastrous tennis incident.”

I actually thought I should have implanted the seed of their general meeting discussion right before dropping her off, “Remember that time Shelly, your dad’s girlfriend, wouldn’t let you sit next to your dad at the restaurant 5 months ago, but you refuse to let it go?”

I didn’t have to because the first thing the therapist said when she saw me was, “Were just working on her stuck thoughts.”

I was relieved, grateful my daughter’s undying faith that no other person in this world will rise up to her status in her father’s eyes led her to fixate on this earth shattering incident.

My sister and I were trying to assess how we ended up with these shit genes, and I think part of it has to do with starting too young. Get right into the party scene and think it’s all about getting faded, as we used to say. This habit led me to think the intention of drinking alcohol is to black out, and then my consciousness is deactivated and some form of alien technology within me is activated.

I crave the abandon, the lack of control, and it starts at the very first sip when I think, we’ll see where this leads me. After a while my mind goes cyborg, and each face I focus on is categorized as either I want to fight you, I want to fuck you, or undecided. Seeing as how my best friends are all related to me, I’m a glad I quit when I did.

Because it’s always a good idea to blame your problems on your parents, I added, “Maybe it’s because mom and dad are yellers who liked to end their rant on a complimentary note, so it left us all with low self esteem and high self confidence. Leading us to think, I should hurt myself and have faith I will overcome.”

I’m a yeller too, and sober or not sober, I’ve got to constantly work on it. When the kids get into a tantrum, I unravel into a similar state of mania, and the three of us look like a motley crew of unhinged desperation. It’s hard though because once we get into a good rhythm and understanding, they go off to their dad’s for a couple days and we have to start all over again.

Everyday is not going to be like the days we sing to Meghan Trainor and dance like Freddie Mercury. Sometimes, I start the day with coffee and they make their way to the couch with a blanket and pillow, half asleep and complaining. In an attempt to change the subject, I ask them things like, “Do you think we have alien technology inside us? And it can be activated at any moment?”

My daughter fully takes the question in, and her jaw drops. However, before I can start on how we should meditate to activate our alien technology, G gets bored out of his mind by the ridiculousness and will likely punch me in my the butt, and ask why it jiggles so much. 

I look at him, and sigh, and then yell, “Hey, Alexa! Play Queen!”

It activates a good day.

Pranksters

The other morning I was heating up soup for the kids’ lunch and the smell made my stomach turn. I ran to the kitchen sink and threw up. My mind went right to, “Oh my goodness, what have I done!”

I remembered swallowing my Ladies multi-vitamin with black coffee on an empty stomach 15 minutes earlier, and rested easy. But a PMS mind doesn’t rest easy for long. The barf in combination with my complexion, that’s looking like Bill Murray’s these days, had me googling “Is it ok to chew Nicorette Gum while pregnant.”

I’m blaming the corona-masks for my zits. My face hasn’t looked this bad since I was pregnant with my daughter. Lots of women report bigger boobs and a pregnancy glow, I looked like I was carrying my baby in my butt and had a face like Freddy Kruger. 

Halfway through my pregnancy I walked into the elevator at work, and my co-worker looked at me and said, “You’re having a girl. I can tell because she’s stealing all your beauty.”

She was right! I ended up with a beautiful baby girl. 

My period came later in the day, so I didn’t have to worry about figuring out how I’d fit a pink baby bassinet in my closet. It does concern me, I’d have no acne indication if it were a boy, and his embryonic development would be getting a steady stream of nicotine from ten pieces a day.

Boys don’t suck beauty from their mom, I didn’t get one zit when I pregnant with my boy. I don’t know where boys get their beauty, but they do get just how to drive their mom crazy with a big smile on their face. This afternoon doing homework, he kept saying, “Mom, I have to tell you something,” and then get up to my ear and burp. He didn’t tire from it, and found it just as amusing the tenth time as the first, and by then I was swatting him away with the kitchen broom.

On YouTube he watched prank videos made by some kid. Not understanding what a prank was exactly, he walked out of my bedroom holding a pair of scissors and said, “Pranked ya!”

I yelled, “What have you done?” And raced into the bedroom, to see that he cut a hole in the fitted sheet.

I told him, “A prank isn’t destroying someone’s property, it’s a trick, like putting Red Bull in someone’s TheraFlu.”

I can just imagine him throwing a cup of juice against the wall, and shouting, “Happy April Fools Day!” 

After which, I drop the broom for a mop and scream, “Its freaking May!”

My daughter is so curious about the idea of starting her period. She is only nine. I get it though, she is ready for her super power, PMS clarity, to kick in, even though I can’t imagine how whack her mood swings will be. When we were talking about it, I started singing in a low raspy voice, “Girl, you’ll be a woman soon, blah, blah, blah.”

And she asked, “Who sings that song?”

Then I got a grossed out look on my face and said, “Some freaking weirdo.” And her and G laughed.

Later, my daughter took out her markers and gave me one of her tattoos. She made a big heart and inside it wrote, “Alicia, but my preferred name is Mom.” It took up my entire back. When G walked up asking what we were doing, I told him Kiki is giving me a tattoo and it says, “Alicia, but my preferred name is…” 

And he quickly finished my sentence saying, “freaking weirdo.”

I hid my face behind my hand because I had to laugh. I’ll probably get more zits from that. He’s figured out a way to make up for the lack of pregnancy acne. Of course.