If you want to subscribe to LOL Sober, hit the purple button below. I’m mostly publishing free pieces right now, but paid subscribers do have access to monthly premium pieces—such as THIS comedy special about my 10 favorite addiction/sobriety jokes!
The other night, I went through my family’s finances at midnight. For an hour, I realized over and over again how sloppy we’d been for a month or so, and most of it was on me. I didn’t spend all of the money, but I’m the family accountant and either gave a thumbs up to something, spent it myself or just didn’t pay enough attention. As a family, we don’t buy new cars and obvious stuff that you could point the finger at. It’s more of the “I went to Target for contact solution, and 19 extra items later, I walked out with a bag full of $132 worth of stuff.”
So I climbed into bed around 1 am knowing I had to have a tough conversation with my wife about finances. I was quite aggravated. I was mad at her because she did buy some of the stuff, and I was frustrated with myself for not being on top of things. I realized in the moment that our financial issues are as much a communication issue as anything else.
And I am writing about this on a sobriety newsletter because I have been thinking a lot about a character defect that I continue to think about, pray about and talk about… but I still have ups and downs with. That character defect is sloppiness. I am an “F— it, let’s go to New York City right now” kind of person, and most of the time that is fun and unpredictable and helps the part of me that tries to stay present and let go of yesterday.
But… I gotta be able to pay my freaking bills at this stage of life, and shrugging my shoulders for a month as we spend twice as much on Christmas presents as we planned isn’t what I want to be doing. So I went to bed stressed, and I actually considered waking up my wife to unload on her. If I had to break down my resentment, it was 80 percent against me, 20 percent against her. But as is so often the case with resentments, I think deep down I did not want to own the 80 percent that was mine, so my brain started coming up with ways to ship that 80 percent to other people (like my wife!).
So I tossed and turned for an hour, obsessing over how to pay off everything before I finally fell asleep. I then spent the next six hours asleep having a horrific dream about my wife coming to me and telling me that she finds one of our family cats, Captain Cuddles, very annoying and wants to put him down. I said no way, we can’t kill Cuddles just because he tries to eat everything in the house and then barfs it up (which is true, by the way). She was insistent, and then somehow my mother-in-law suddenly appeared in our kitchen and also advocated to murder the cat.
In my dream, I eventually told her I was moving out, that I could not bear to kill Cuddles. I was going to take him and find an apartment, and I said a bunch of nasty stuff to her as we prepared to break up.
Oh my god, it was ugly. I woke up half laughing at the ridiculousness of it, but also aware of what was really going on. I went to bed with a resentment coursing through my veins, and that thing settled into my subconscious overnight and turned into a monster in the middle of the night, culminating in an attempted cat homicide of my family pet.
So I think I learned a few things.
First is, don’t go to bed angry. Seriously. It’s a bad idea. It’s a cliche, I know. But cliches usually have a lot of truth in them.
The second thing is that financial stuff around the holidays is probably better digested at 12 pm than 12 am. My wife and I did have a very cordial conversation about it the next day, and we both agreed to clean up our sides of the street and try to do better, so that’s good.
The third thing is that I probably should do a quick fourth step resentment check-in if I ever lay down at night with something burning me up.
And the fourth thing is, I gotta protect Cuddles. You know how sometimes you have a crazy dream and wake up and realize it’s an insane dream… but some of it still sticks to your brain a bit? That’s definitely the case here. I think my family loves him and that dream was an absurd projection of anger onto him. But still, I will be keeping a close eye on the safety of my furry body for awhile!
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
Two men walked into a bar.
You’d think the second one would have swerved.
(Credit: AA Grapevine, November 2001, Fritzi J. from Conyers, Georgia)
Please spread the word to a sober friend! Find me on Substack… or Twitter… or Facebook… or Instagram… or YouTube. And introducing my web site, LOLsober.com.
