I woke up from a nap at 2pm, after sleeping off yet another hangover. I remember sitting in bed with the shades drawn down in the middle of the day. I could hear people in my house (we were under construction). There I was on a sunny day, locked away in my bedroom. My days had become managing hangovers, procuring more liquor and trying to maintain some semblance of being a wife and mother. For a while I had been seeing myself as if from above, a bad made for tv movie, but all of a sudden that day it hit me. I realized that there wasn't going to be a seismic movement involving trumpets and clouds…no one could do this for me. I had changed, I had gotten used to evading, canceling, disappointing, delegating….but this wasn't something I could hire someone to do for me. I didn't know what sobriety would bring but I knew that the bleakness of sitting in bed in a dark room on a sunny day was as crushing as sitting in a drunk tank.
I called an addiction specialist and within a few weeks I was on a plane to rehab. For me, it was surreal, that whole experience was like being water boarded. Going shopping because I was going someplace really hot and I had gained weight from drinking. Being alone in a dressing room buying godawful depressing clothes for rehab. Standing in line paying for those clothes. It was hard for me to believe that I had let it get to that. I had had big jobs, with suits and boardrooms…and now I was buying pants with elastic waistbands…for rehab. Sitting on 2 planes and walking into the rehab lockdown unit, having my luggage searched, not having razors or tweezers or even mirrors….
But, I will never regret going to rehab, it probably saved my life, my marriage and my ability to be a good mother. There was a self flagellation about it, it was hard at age 48 to go to a strange place voluntarily and relinquish all control. Strangely, every night now when I go to sleep, I appreciate the fact that I am in my bed, with familiar noises and that if I want to pluck my eyebrows in the middle of the night I have tweezers and a mirror. Those 30 days I will always count as among the most important in my life because I saw both people I wanted to be and people that scared me because they didn't understand the seriousness of what we are dealing with… Giving up drinking is such a small part of it, for me it really has been about self awareness of why I had gotten used to blurred edges.
Getting sober feels like restoring an old house. The bones are good, they were just covered with cobwebs, and each day brings more and more revelations to light. I now make a point to put the shades in my bedroom up each morning, it is a little reminder of where I am at now compared to the dark days. There is nothing inside a bottle that is going to bring the sunshine in anymore for me, those days are behind me.