I have to say those words all that time, that I am sober, all the time. It still amazes me. I am sober. I am sober!! And I think how much I prayed to be sober. I prayed my heart out. I think about what I prayed for when I asked God to be sober. I said, please God just let me stop drinking. If I can stop drinking I know everything will be okay! What did I think okay looked like back then? I had once written what I thought it should look like in one of my journals. I said, I will be sober. I will be happy and content. And I will find the love of my life. What surprises me still today, besides I am sober, is that 13 years into my marriage, I had written in a journal that I would find the love of my life and not think anything of that statment at the time, because I had never thought openly about leaving my husband or that any man existed besides him. I stumbled across this passage in this journal after I came home from treatment months later. And I believe my heart skipped a beat. Why on earth would I have said that when I was supposidly happily married. Because obviosly, I was not. And somehow, even back then, I knew that two years before I would meet him, I would find the love of my life two weeks after I got clean.
Everything is not okay as I would have presumed it would be back when I begged God to save my soul. Yet who defines what okay is? Me or God? Because being clean alone HAS to be okay. It is the only way that I can be happy and content. And it is the only way I will ever be able to love and care for this man, who is the love of my life. And besides all of this, the only way I can even begin to care for a child, a child who I begged to have, a child that I brought into this world and still continued to drink when he came, I must be sober. To care for anything, most especially myself, I can NOT be drinking ever again in my entire life. That is a fact. The pain alone from what I have done to my child is unbearable. It takes all my efforts to not have pure hatred for myself. I try so hard not to think of the damage I have done to this innoncent person I tried to raise the best I knew how, yet still did so many terrible mistakes to him. Will he ever understand and will he ever be able to forgive me for what I did. Though the point is, I could keep making so many more mistakes if I am still drinking. That has to mean something. Dear God, I pray it means something.
What I conclude on the subject of who I want to be is that this new me has to be someone I have never met before, someone I am barely just starting to know and love. Someone I still don't even know some days. I see her in the mirror when I look at her. She is so much more beautiful than she ever was to me now. This face staring back. I used to despise her and find her so disgusting most days. I would hate her for lying to herself. Watching her over and over again telling herself to stop drinking, only to do it again and again. I was so angry at her for so many years. She was trying sono hard to be authentic and all she ever did was deceive. It has to be something of okay now that I can wake up every morning and know I am doing everything I can to be real. Not dulling life and making everything, the good and the bad, all hazy and crepusuclar by thousands of toxins and lies. This is at least the best attempt and gift I can give to my son to be who I want to be to him, a real Mother. It is only that it does not look like it now because I am not in his life the way society says I should, yet I am in his life more than I ever was when I lived with him and was not sober. Dear God, I pray that has to be okay.
Who do I want to be? Sober. The only answer I can come up with for now is sober. And the only thing I know how to do to stay sober is to recover. Everything that I have never had to do before in my life I have to do NOW. There is no handbook on this I have found. Only that I have a heart that keeps searching for answers through God and those around me on this same quest to keep clean. Addiction is such a complicating and baffling disease. It is manipulative and cunning. It will always tell me that good things will come my way if I drink again. Even when I know percisely how much that is not true. It will tell me I can be a great mother and wife if I drink. All these things. It will always come to me when I doubt, when I am depressed, or when I question who I want to be and it will tell me that I will have everything I want in life if I drink again. I want to be sober. That is who I want to be. And that is okay. It is okay, because it means everything.
Thanks for reading my blog! Love, Tina