Major Holiday Sober ... Check!

Thanksgiving is over.  Well sort of.  Tomorrow is my mom's Thanksgiving and it will actually be more difficult because I'll be around other people.  My mom knows of my sobriety and said she'd support me by not drinking.  The others who will be there are all very normal drinkers and will be supportive.  We are making a gingerbread house with my kids as we have done for years and it's hard to picture myself getting through that without a glass of wine but I know I will.

Yesterday was the most uneventful Thanksgiving I've ever had.  After I came home from the gym I spent the rest of the day in my pajamas and the turkey was good!

I guess I've now made it a habit of watching my husband drink.  When I was drinking with him I think I was too worried about how I could get the majority of the wine that I never noticed just how boring of a drinker he is.  Of course he has had too much on occasion, but it is very rare.

Anyhow, yesterday he opened a special bottle of wine.  Special because it is from a winery we have been to and was a gift.  I never saw him pour more, but I know he either had one large glass or 2 small (normal) glasses because there is about half a bottle left.  HALF A BOTTLE LEFT?  Still fascinated by someone who can do that.  Especially on a holiday.  He doesn't have to go to work today, it was a really good bottle of wine, it was a gift, etc.  All the reasons my brain would have told me to finish it and probably open another. 

I'm really worried about the rest of that wine going bad.  And yes there is a part of me that is just sad about not having any.  Don't worry, I'm not going to drink it...but that leads me to the other interesting thing that happened yesterday.

When my husband opened the wine I grabbed the bottle and said I wanted to smell it.  My son saw me grab the bottle and said, "Mom, drink water with me!"  This sort of stopped me in my tracks for a moment.  He knows I've stopped drinking and I've mentioned my blog.  He hasn't actually read it but thinks it's cool that it gets hits from different countries and things like that.  So he knows generally what I'm doing but I haven't made too much of a big deal about it.  So I was a little surprised by his reaction and am curious what it was all about.  Does he just want me to succeed in something I've started or does he genuinely not like it (me) when I drink wine? I'm pretty sure I know the answer. 

I think the point is that I am learning more and more that my kids have been affected by my drinking.  It was so easy to tell myself that it was fine and that everyone else does it and they didn't really know what was going on.  Hopefully the good example I can provide now will be enough to offset the bad.  My daughter is really only about 3 years away from the age I was when I had my first drink.

The other thing I did yesterday was read...a lot.  I love to read and have spent a ton of time reading blogs and books about recovery in the last month and a half.  In fact, that is a huge part of me getting this far.  Yesterday though, I decided to read a regular old book and it was great to read a normal book again!

Day 19

Good things are happening today!

I have a running text with 2 of my best friends and this morning I just casually put it out there that I was done drinking for good.  Guess what...the world didn't end.  Time will tell how it will be the next time I'm around them and they are drinking and I'm not but it feels good to put it out there and plant the seed.

Also, I have been missing my group fitness classes for about 6 weeks now because I am trying to recover from plantar fasciitis.  I've been wearing orthotics for a couple of weeks now and went to my dance class today.  It felt so good to be back!

Speaking of exercising...I can think of so many times I went to the gym hung-over because I was trying to prove to myself that my drinking was not a problem.  Of course sometimes I just felt too bad and couldn't make it but as long as I made it to class I could tell myself that I wasn't drinking too much.  One of my favorite classes is on Sunday morning and it will feel so good to feel good in class!

My son (11) had noticed the other day that I had created a blog.  He mentioned it again yesterday so I told him I had decided to stop drinking alcohol because I thought I was drinking too much and that's what the blog was about.   That was really the end of it.  I plan to talk to my kids more about all of this in the future.

Still Day 5

I have never thought of myself as a writer or ever considered the possibility that I would like to write but now that I have started this blog I feel like I can’t stop and am constantly thinking about things I want to write about.

So as I was just making myself some breakfast I was thinking about the fact that tomorrow is Friday and it will most likely be the hardest day for me so far because it’s FRIDAY and who doesn’t want to have a drink on Friday? Then I was thinking that tomorrow I will write about what I was doing the previous Friday (drinking) and I realized that that wasn’t true. The previous Friday I spent hung over because I had too much wine the previous Thursday. Why was I drinking last Thursday? I’ll tell you. My daughter’s evening activities were cancelled (I didn’t have to drive) and my husband would be home late (no one would have to know). Of course my kids were home with me all night watching me drink but somehow I had convinced myself that this was ok.

So here’s how the night went. I got home from picking up the kids at school and immediately opened the bottle of red wine. I drank that wine while making lunches for the following day, cleaning the kitchen, kids doing homework (I was happy to be having the wine because surely it was making these mundane tasks so much more bearable). I’m sure I told myself as I usually did that I’d just have one glass. Then we watched some of our favorite TV shows. At some point I finished the bottle, put the it in the recycle bin and the glass in the dishwasher and we all went to bed. Nothing “bad” happened. But what kind of example is that setting for my kids?

A few days later I asked my son if he wanted to watch The Biggest Loser and proceeded to turn it on. He said that we had already watched that episode. I was staring at the TV but it wasn’t ringing a bell. Honestly sometimes TV is so mindless that I don’t remember it even when watching it when sober (or at least that’s what I tell myself). But as I was watching this show I realized that we must have watched it last Thursday when I was into the bottom of the bottle of wine I had been drinking. I laughed it off, and deleted the episode. Don’t get me wrong…it’s not like I blacked out and forgot the entire night. I remember it generally, I know I watched TV with my kids. The specifics just aren’t there. Is this the end of the world? No. Is this a problem? Yes.