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A little housekeeping first: Just a heads up that next week I’m going to start publishing on Tuesdays and Thursdays rather than Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Fall gets crazy at my house so I may be strapped for time more than usual.
I wanted to talk about something I heard recently at a Saturday morning meeting. It was one of those things that I just hadn’t taken a step back and thought about in awhile. But now it’s still landing for me, a few weeks later.
A woman shared that she had a hectic week… stress at work… financial struggles… arguments with her kids… all the normal stuff that happens in life, sober or not.
But at the end she said, “Geez, at least it’s Saturday morning, I can take a breath and I am not waking up hung over or still drunk.”
That seems so straight forward, doesn’t it? It’s the kind of statement that is so obvious I wouldn’t have thought about it. But now that I do, I feel a lot of gratitude.
Because Saturday mornings used to be a dumpster fire for me when I was drinking. I was drinking and drugging every day, but I REALLY would let it fly on Friday nights knowing we were at the end of the week and the beginning of the weekend. It felt like work was far off in the distance and I could just wing it.
So I would. I would eat dinner on Friday nights and then wind down from all the pills I’d taken during the day. I’d start cracking beers—with 30-plus painkillers already in my system, mind you—and stay up well past midnight. My whole family would go to bed and I would just be getting rolling. I’d usually get to 4-6 beers and then take an Ambien or two. I’d then try to stay up as late as possible so I could experience the booze and Ambien mixing together.
I’d often end up vomiting, or passing out, or both. When I look back on my drinking and drugging, I could have easily died many, many nights, and if I had, it probably would have happened at 2 a.m. on Friday night/Saturday morning.
OK, let me stop with the drunk-o-logue and get to my point—what I’m grateful for now. When my Friday nights used to be like that, my Saturdays usually were me waking up at noon, dehydrated, sick, hung over, miserable. My wife and kids had usually already gone to a park or done something without me. My wife would say, “Everything OK?” and I would say something like, “Oh yeah, my feet are just bothering me and kept me up too late last night.” I’d have to smuggle beer cans and pill bottles over to the gas station near my house without anybody noticing—I always think about the cleaning crew over there and how they must have thought Pablo Escobar lived in the neighborhood because of the number of pill and alcohol bottles getting dropped off every week at Pump No. 11.
So to summarize what my s**t-show life used to be like: I would try to wind down on Friday nights from a week at my full-time job… with a part-time job of trying to manage, hide and continue my drug and alcohol problem. It was terrible.
The real Saturday sadness for me was all the important moments from my two oldest kids’ lives that I missed or was foggy for. I vaguely remember first steps, first words, first Halloween costumes, etc. I was never the kind of drunk who disappeared for a week in a hotel room in Las Vegas. I was always around but I was never truly present. It was like having a stuffed animal that the family carried around wherever they went.
So back to that original thought: That’s not what sober Saturdays look like any more. I usually get up early and get to a 12-step meeting. Then I come home and my kids usually have some stuff going on. Last weekend, I went to a meeting, grabbed Dunkin breakfast for everybody and then went to my youngest daughter’s soccer game. She scored eight goals, by the way. Then we had some other family stuff to do, I watched a bunch of college football games, we had a nice family dinner, then a chill Saturday evening.
I’m going to try to remember that every Saturday for awhile. I forget just how ugly it was when I used to throw away what might be the best day of the week. My Saturdays now are serene and family-oriented, usually with some recovery and spiritual nourishment to get me started, and I love thinking at the contrast of how much better that is than the alternative. Sometimes the most basic sober message is the best: “Holy s**t, I am not hung over and I don’t have to lie about anything this morning! Yay!”
Oh, and it’s also pretty nice that I usually have zero cans or bottles to get rid of the next day!
ALCOHOLIC/ADDICT JOKE OF THE DAY
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:
A drunk strolled into a bank, presented the teller with a check, and asked him to cash it. The teller explained to the woman that she would have to identify herself before he could cash it.
So the woman pulled a mirror from her purse, looked at it closely, and confirmed, "Yes, sir. It's me all right."
(Credit: AA Grapevine, February 2004, Alexander from Greenbelt, Maryland)
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