Addiction's Different Faces

What I hope my Lady Banks rose will look like next spring.

“When you discover your mission, you will feel its demand. It will fill you with enthusiasm and a burning desire to get to work on it.”

W. Clement Stone

I’ve spent the better part of the past two days in bed and now sport wrist braces on both arms because I discovered my mission and it filled me with a burning desire to get to work on it. My to-do list is down to two items and both hands are messed up. My right hand and forearm are swollen. Both hands buzz with some kind of nerve pain, and the right hand is agonizing at night. I’ve also contracted a cold.

But my Cecile Brunner rose is now an architectural beauty, and the Lady Banks rose hedges are lean, clean, and rewoven. I have conquered and pruned the tumultuous herb shrubs into tidy mounds. Parts of the house are sparkling clean.

I don’t know how to work in moderation. I have two speeds: slow and 100 mph. Some of my sober friends blame their excessive behaviors on their alcoholism. I don't know about that. I just know that today I’m thankful I can work at all. In the past two days, we’ve lost two friends to the ravages of addiction.

On Monday, a youngish woman showed up at an AA meeting after an absence of a few months, tearful and thankful to be welcomed back warmly. She had made a decision that she wanted to live, she said. She was going to start calling me, and a sober newcomer became her designated driver so she could attend a meeting Monday night and another one on Tuesday at noon. On Tuesday at noon, she was found dead.

Wednesday evening, the wife of one of my husband’s good friends called to say he had died that morning. In the past six months, his heroin addiction had robbed him of the ability to walk, to eat, and to care for himself, but he spurned the offers of his sober friends to help him. All I could think of after Janet’s call was that day, years ago, when I called him for help because my husband was in a deep depression, and he came right away to our house.

My other friend, who spiraled out of control earlier this month on an opiate addiction, has decided for now that she doesn’t deserve to ask her friends for help in her struggle to stay clean. She wants to be left alone. So we don’t see much of her. Until she reaches out for help, there’s nothing any of us can do.

More than 20 years ago, before I got sober, an unsolicited manuscript came across my desk as editor of a fitness magazine. One of the associate editors had thought it worth consideration for publication. The title of the manuscript put me off because it didn’t provide a clue what the article was about. It was called “Cunning, Baffling, Powerful.” After a glance at the manuscript, I understood it addressed alcoholism. I didn’t like it, so I passed it back to the associate editor with a rejection note.

But today I know what “cunning, baffling, powerful” means. Substance addiction is a hard enemy to fight. It can strike when you’re weak and when you’re strong. It can go into remission and return with a deadly vengeance. It can conquer a person’s willpower for life. It makes you deny you have a fatal disease. It’s insatiable. It’s never cured. We live recovery one day at a time because that’s all we’ve got, this moment of freedom from addiction.

I’m thankful for freedom today. With my wrist braces on, I put my hands together and pray.

I'm Not a Slave Anymore

~~~~~

It has bothered me almost all my life that women cook and wash up, while men joke, eat and doze. I must have made a vow, when I was a girl child washing dishes after family suppers, that I wasn't going to be a kitchen slave when I grew up.

In the extended family I was born to, there was no wonderful sacred society of women cooking mysterious dishes and delicious meals, secretly passing on the legacy from generation unto generation unto the sixth or seventh generation of them that love to eat.

My grandmothers on both sides of the family were the offspring of rural folk who made do with what they had, and it was obvious that what they had was not exotic. We had plain old American meat and potatoes, served with a Jello salad and maybe a sheet cake, or possibly a cobbler, for after. For excitement, there was sometimes the relish dish, made up of store-bought sweet pickles and canned olives served in a fine glass dish divided down the center for this very purpose.

The most exotic and mysterious I ever saw my grandmothers get about kitchen duty was when my dad’s mom, a largish lady decked out in an old dress with a homemade floral apron over it, cleaned some butchered chickens at the sink while I watched. She showed me the grit inside the gizzards. I thought that was interesting.

But generally, there was nothing of note going on in the kitchen except work on the part of the family women. The family men, waiting for the women to feed them, sat around in the living room and made fun of each other.

In the early 1960s I was old enough to be enlisted for KP by my mother after we ate. No one asked me if I preferred to play with my cousins. I don’t remember being asked about my preferences at all. It was just a bald order: Get in there and help with the dishes. To be honest, my big brother had to do it too. We were burdened with one dirty dish after another, as the women put the food away, and sometimes we could hear manly snores from the living room.

And there I think I made my vow, while staring down at the cold, soapless dirty dishwater I had my hands in trying to find that elusive last spoon, and here comes my ma with a giant kettle of encrusted mashed potatoes and she plops it into that water…I vowed that I would not wear this ball and chain when I was a grown-up.

Well, I grew up, got a great job, got feminist, and still cooked and washed up while the men joked and watched football or whatever on TV. I think I divorced my first husband because of it.

Now my dearest is retired, and he's the head cook and I'm the chief bottle washer. It is good and right and fair. He makes more than meat and potatoes too. And so can I. Apparently we both have become the sacred society of kitchen workers because our respective children call us and ask for our secret recipes.

Here’s my secret recipe for candied yams, recently requested by my daughter Milo:
Open a big can of cooked yams, drain and dump it in a casserole dish.
Put some brown sugar and butter in a bowl with a wee bit of water and stir it around a little after nuking it. Pour it over the yams.
Put a bunch of mini marshmallows on top and bake it for 30 minutes at 350 degrees.

Very mysterious and everyone loves it.

If you know a kitchen slave, or you are one, I share these vital words: Break the chain, while you still can!

Jolts of Silk

I'm feeling a little silky with bliss today because of three things:


1. The poetry blog site Bolts of Silk features what I think is among my best poems ever. You can see "How the Egret Saved Me" here.


2. I have a year and nine months sobriety today. I no longer mourn that I drank again after 15 years. The experience has given me a new life and a renewed compassion for the alcoholic who still suffers. I mourn nothing that has happened in my life. It has given me richness beyond what I ever hoped for.

3. Tomorrow my family will gather at our house for the annual Christmas Eve supper, and then we'll go to our separate churches for that beautiful Christmas Eve service. I'm grateful for my family and the precious freedoms we have that I too often take for granted.

And saying that, I suddenly envision the Bill of Rights, that amazing document that spells out our freedoms. Then there's the simple statement in the Declaration of Independence that we have the right to pursue life, liberty, and happiness, merely because we live in the United States, a free country....that is awesome, when I think about it. The signers of the Declaration, "appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world," sought justice and freedom, pledging their Lives, their Fortunes, and their sacred Honor to uphold such a declaration.

In spite of the many things that have sullied the independence and freedom envisioned for us, we have that Bill of Rights, and the justice of this land is bound to abide by them. I'm grateful to live in this free country, where I can publish what I like, have the opinions I wish to have, worship the way I want to, and make of my life whatever I'm willing to work for.

Christmas may come and go, but I won't stop praying for peace on earth and good will toward humanity everywhere.