29 years and counting...

Yesterday I celebrated another year of recovery from the insidious disease of addiction. There is no doubt in my mind addiction is a disease.  Why in the world would a young child lie in bed at night and listen to the never ending arguments of a codependent father trying to control the drinking of a mother caught up in the web of alcoholism, only to repeat the story when she grew up?  I don’t recall ever saying, “Gee, I want to grow up to be just like my mom.”   I do remember through clenched teeth attesting,  "I won’t put my children through this nightmare."  Her addiction completely annihilated her marriage, any meaningful relationship with her children, and worst of all her self-esteem.  Her addiction lasted for many years; the greater part of her life.  And mine.  The worst part of all, she died young, with just 7 years of sobriety under her belt. When she got sober, I started to drink. 

I tried to not be like her.  I really did. I kept the genetic predisposition at bay for a long time and dug deep into my iron will  to change the entire narrative.  However,  I did marry young the first time,  like she did and hauled in my steamer trunks of childhood baggage padlocked close to me, to keep my secrets safe.  I created and lived a fantasy world of a picket fence marriage,  putting on the Stepford wife face,  which always felt disingenuous. I wanted to do this right, for her too. I tried.  

You can’t keep the past hidden away.  It pokes its dysfunctional little head into your business when you least expect it.  You have to deal with its evil little acts.  If you don’t,  it will burst open spewing into the lives of everyone you have relationship with.  Wedded hostage taking should not be a tool in the problem solving belt. And, I took that poor man when I was 19 and held him for 7 years.  I had myself convinced I was a perfect wife and mother, and that just might get me extra credits with a God I knew, but didn't seem too fond of me.  Maybe then He would like me as I proved my worth as a spouse and momma. 

In the best of relationships, as human beings, all of us  have an ugly underbelly of behaviors that usually don’t expose themselves until much later, when a little heat is applied.   In a marriage, after the blush of romance, you end up looking at each other and wonder who took over the body of the person you said "I do" to.   These unruly character traits that show up can be survivable for healthy couples, who expect them, but, there were already so many  cracks in my shakey foundation and I didn’t have the skills or desire to repair them. In my case, my steamer trunks were  bursting at the seams.  I had never seen an example of a couple working through their issues, and growing stronger together.   Gary Zukav, life coach and spiritual author says that relationships and the unintentional button pushing that ensues after the heat of passion cools, is a holy thing.  It is meant to trigger us and help us to grow into our spiritual skins;  learn who we are and how to be true love.  My character defects were like a pressure cooker, ready to blow. I didn’t know how to turn them into a growth experience to be more self-aware.   I turned to the only thing I could trust to alleviate the constant pain I kept trying to push down.  The first sign of trouble sent me fleeing into a wine bottle.  At first, it was just a glass of wine at night, after work, to help me sleep and forget that I had failed. Again.  Problems didn’t leave and divorce seemed the solution.  After that,  It wasn’t long before the whole bottle was needed to numb my sense of failure and regret at not being able to give my daughter what I did not have. My genetic predisposition had fully kicked in. And by the time I found my way to the twelve step programs, I didn’t have the knowledge or empathy to realize that I hadn’t failed.  I had a disease.  

Today, I accept I have a disease.  It’s manageable,  as long as I take care of myself.  I've tried to do that for the last 29 years.  

Today, I am grateful for the man, the father of my child, who was clearly put on my path to reveal the hard work that needed to take place in putting my past behind me.  He was an important catalyst in my story. He unwittingly led me to face my demons and learn that  to be like my mother was not the worst thing that could happen to me.  She had put her disease into remission and found her bliss in the arms of a twelve step program, 7 years before I did.  I am grateful it didn’t take a lifetime for me as it did for her.  

Having the courage to do soul excavation through years as well as continuing to encounter these beautiful human helpers along the way,  has been key to my ongoing recovery and spiritual journey.  In 29 years I have had to relearn lessons, suffered unbearable losses, and grieved until I thought my heart would never recover.   I have also experienced exquisite joy which directly correlates to practicing accepting life on its terms; forgiving, mostly for my own sake, and staying grateful for the simplest of things.  I have learned I can take care of myself as long as I closely ride the waves with a Higher Power who has always had a long term investment in my growth and happiness.   Life will always be like the weather, mercurial at best.  I accept that. 

If you would have asked me 29 years ago to write a story about what my life might look like, I couldn’t have even come close to what I have been blessed to  experience through the years.  I became an authentically imperfect wife again, courageously taking a risk on love, and learned what it meant to lose that soulmate without becoming bitter.  I have earned the title of mother and discovered that there is no love quite as perfect as that of a grandchild.    I’m a poster child now for the belief,  all things happen for a reason.  My sobriety quite possibly might not have happened if it wasn’t for my early experiences, a mother who loved me to the best of her ability in an nontraditional way,  and my first husband who taught me to be true to who I am instead of trying to be something that I am not. 

Today I am grateful for 29 years of a meaningful life and I plan on making the most of every day of this gift.  

No Lie Left

A little over a week in, and I have already learned this authenticity commitment is a bit more of a challenge than I thought it would be. I imagined it would be a simple matter of proclaiming, this is who I am, what you see, is what you get, here is my truth.  That’s great, however, I discovered this week, there are times I just really don’t know the truth.   Sometimes the truth gets buried under years of protecting the feelings of others, and shame and guilt. 

This is where my Higher Power steps in.  By openly declaring my word, a spiritual pact has been formed between myself and God.  This year’s word, AUTHENTIC, I’ve decided to essentially follow what I call a Four Agreements lifestyle.  For those of you unfamiliar, the four agreements come from the book of the same name, written by Don Miguel Ruiz and published about eighteen years ago.  I read it way back then, and again off and on through the years, usually desperately, when a patch of quicksand on life’s road threatened to take me down.  Its simplicity is perfect for people like me who occasionally spend far too much excavating and then dissecting things in my head.  

The Four Agreements are:

Be impeccable with your word. (A little irony here perhaps)

Don’t take anything personally.

Don’t make assumptions.

Always do your best. 

Simple.  Right? Not at all.

Last week I got to work on being impeccable with my word.  With myself. God thought it was time.  I have to be open to learning more about who this authentic creature is and how she operates in order to not tell myself anymore lies. In an interview a few years ago  Alanis Morrisette said something and it stuck in a random brain cell.   She said, “I hate my own lying.  I need to get to the bottom of it until there is no lie left.”  Being impeccable with your word includes the things you tell yourself.  Authenticity begins at home. 

Those lies aren’t intentional.  I consider myself a painfully self-aware, honest person, sometimes struggling in identifying when the honesty has turned into self-flagellation. Some things are buried so deep, we can’t seem to unearth them on our own, or we don’t deal with them until they begin to affect our lives. They are the subtle tales we’ve woven, usually for many years. It takes a little nudge from an experience or in my recent case, God, to turn those lies into a truth that can set you free.  Last week, His nudge was an inner voice pointing out a few lies I’ve been telling myself all my life that have profoundly impacted me and others.  My lies are:  Love hurts.  I am unlovable. Everyone abandons me.   I can’t let myself be so vulnerable ever again.  

The thing about these internal lies about our character, they usually aren’t really true and we often don’t even know we are telling them.  They have become a part of our belief system and likely began a long time ago. We eternalize them because we think it will keep us safe on some  level  and we continue to breathe life into them.     I’ve fed that impostor all my life, which began in childhood and I refused to acknowledge because of a sense of misguided loyalty, guilt and shame. I thought I had put it all to rest, and essentially I have.  Most of it.   Don’t misunderstand, I blame no one.  I love my parents deeply.  Both of them have been gone quite some time now and I’ve taken the time to put the craziness in perspective with the help of some incredible counseling,  lots of prayer and developing a meditation practice.  They did the very best they could from their level of consciousness with the tools life had handed them. I came to not only know that, but appreciate their lives as well.  They too had struggles. This has allowed me to forgive and focus on their goodness and the things I loved about them. 

My lie apparently has been harder to get rid of.  It isn’t a lie. I have been abandoned.  From the beginning of life.    The insidious evil part of my lie is how I continue to perpetuate the story: I am unlovable, everyone leaves, and I can’t be vulnerable.  What a shock to discover, I keep the lie alive.  I breathe life into it with every choice I make. That awareness unfolded the first week of my Word of the Year. 

As I was vacuuming, and crying about yet another surgery coming up, and bemoaning the fact I would have to walk through it by myself, this internal voice said, you created that reality.  You can’t pick people who are irresponsible, emotionally unavailable,  dishonest, or incapable of intimacy, and expect them NOT to abandon you.  They don’t have the capacity to have a healthy relationship.  It’s not their fault, just like it was not your parents fault. The difference between back then and now, you couldn’t choose back then.  You can now.  If you truly want healthy relationships, pick healthy people.     

Of course, my comeback in this conversation was to  blubber to God about my one healthy relationship, and how he even abandoned me.  God said: He didn’t abandon you, he got very sick and he died.  My response was:  Well, you could have saved him.  God said: His life journey ended.  He did what he came here to do, and it has nothing to do with you. He didn’t leave you, he died.  I haven’t abandoned you.  I never will. Use my love and loyalty as the standard when you are choosing. 

It’s always a shock to realize that we really do create our own life and destiny.  The quality of my relationships are up to me.  I pick them.  If I want a caring, reciprocal, intimate relationship with someone, I have to choose people who are capable of one. I also have to decide, for myself, if I am picking those kinds of relationships in order to sabotage any chance of meaningful, reciprocal, intimacy,  knowing I just might really be content and satisfied with living alone. Whatever the truth is, no more lies. 

I have a feeling this Authenticity gig is going to be a bit more than I initially bargained for.  But, I have a feeling the rewards are going to be too!