A Good Enough Saturday

Better is the enemy of good.

Voltaire

Day 18

I just ripped out for the fifth time a border that I'm trying to knit for a baby blanket for my granddaughter that we're expecting in Jan. Arrgh! The thing is, the baby blanket is finished. It's a simple popcorn stitch crocheted blanket with a little hood in one corner. Simple and sweet. But I decided it would be better with a border of some sort to jazz it up. Make it more special. And that is the reason, I have one patch of hair left on my head this beautiful fall morning. I just can't leave well enough alone.

This is Saturday and as you know, I usually celebrate "Act Like I'm Not A Drunk" Saturdays but I'm going to take that one step further today. My lesson for today in the "Language of Letting Go" says that during recovery we are learning a new behavior called "Be Who You Are" so today I'm going to combine the two and celebrate a "Act Like I'm Not A Drunk and Be Who I Am" Saturday. But if I am being totally honest it's probably going to be more like a "Act Like I'm Not A Drunk, But Who The Hell Am I?" Saturday.

When I read through the posts on the message boards about why we started drinking, time and time again I read, "I just wasn't comfortable with myself, alcohol made me more social, less shy, funnier, braver….you fill in the blank. And then when we decide to moderate or quit drinking we become afraid that nobody will like the "real" us, we'll lose our friends or our loved ones won't love us anymore.   I was the same way.  What the hell were we thinking?  I took a perfectly good, somewhat shy, intelligent, thoughtful girl and I tried to make her better and more than she was by adding booze. As often happens when you try to embellish something that is "simple and sweet", I adulterated the clean lines of that beautiful simplicity by trying to throw in all the different stitches and patterns and goo-gaws that other people wanted until the original girl, back when she was good enough, has been distorted beyond recognition. Alcohol only made the stitches sloppier and the pattern more chaotic. It's time to do some ripping out.

It's not going to be easy. As a wife and a mother, I've added so many of my loved ones "stitches" to the pattern that I don't know if I can distinguish my own stitches from theirs. Alcohol served to dull my own desires, it made them stand down and fooled me into thinking I wanted what others wanted. Without alcohol, I no longer have that insipid complacence. Thank God! I am so excited and so invigorated. I'm kind of like a kid at Christmas. What do I want? How do I feel? How do I want my life pattern to turn out?

I know that life is always going to throw some of its own unforeseen stitches into my pattern and I'll have to work them in. But my hands will be steady, my stitches precise and soberly well thought out and the end result will be of my own design. Good enough!

So today I'm out there just doing my best to discern when good enough is good enough for me and keeping it simple.

P.S. I am going to try that border one more time, though.