Good, Just Pretty Damn Good!

"Good! Just pretty damn good!" was an expression of my dad's.  If you asked him how his steak tasted, if you asked him how the fishing was , if you asked him how he felt, as he lay in bed with tubes coming out of every orifice after bypass surgery, you knew that was going to be his response.

He was not a complainer, my dad.

I'm not complaining today either.  I'm on my second day of the couch potato to 5K program (I should have checked to see if they had a Couch Potato Plus program) and I went out and ran my prescribed 1 minute increments-Did I hear you say, "Oooooh! Ahhhhhh! Woooow!"-except for the last one, I only made it 30 seconds.  I hated every lung ripping moment of it, thank you.

But I came home and tore off my sweatshirt and stood there in the kitchen in my sports bra and sweats and grabbed the jug of milk out of the fridge, just like you see in the commercials, except in the commercials the actress doesn't have a doughy white midriff lapping over the waistband of her sweats.  I fixed myself a bowl of cereal and went outside and sat on the step and ate it.  Out in the morning sun.  In all my glory.

I felt Good! Pretty damn good!

Abs chat was great last night.  Several chatty chatters showed up which always makes it fun.  One of our guys is contemplating giving up 500+ days of abs to have some wine for his 25th anniversary in Hawaii.  I don't know if we talked him out of it or not, but at least he's got some other voices in his head other than his own.  How brave was that for him to even admit he was thinking about it, huh?

We had a couple of confessions, including one of my own.  It made me feel so good, I am driven to confess on here, too. I may have even already confessed on here, I don't really remember, because I wasn't really giving much weight to my transgressions.  So here goes.

I have taken sips of alcohol every now and then throughout my sobriety.  I'm a big girl, I know the difference between a drink and a sip.  I think the last ones were in January in San Miguel de Allende when the cap'n and I were celebrating our 20th wedding anniversary.  I took three sips of wine. I didn't feel the urge to drink more.  The ghosts of drinking past did not chase me through my days after that.  It was the same with the other sips I have taken in the last four years-not weekly, not even monthly.  Those sips did not talk me into jumping on the sled and riding it to the bottom of the slippery slope.

Those sips are not important to me.  The thing that is important to me, is that I have been sober for almost four years, those sips did not sacrifice my concept of sobriety.

But I know those sips are important to others.  I know they believe that I have indeed compromised my sobriety.

And that's okay.  They can believe what they believe.

I believe what I believe.

Those sips were not totally benign though, because once more I was carrying a secret because of alcohol.  I made a pledge in my very first post on here that I would be honest and by withholding this truth, I was being dishonest.  That is like rubbing a diamond in mud, or worse, shit.

So today, I'm cleaning that diamond back up.  I don't know if I will refrain from sipping in the future, but I will refrain from hiding it.

How do I feel after my confession?

Good! Pretty Damn Good!

P.S.  I took this post down last night because I really had to think about how I was going to respond to any negative comments about it, if I got any.  I worried that my other blogger friends would think I was a hypocrite, and I worried about the same thing myself. But I'm not a hypocrite, I post about being sober and I am sober.   I am okay, more than okay, with how I have treated my sobriety. The reason I posted this to begin with was so that anyone else that might be hiding something that they are afraid that everyone else will see as a reason for shame, a reason to start all over-we never start back at Day 1 on this journey, that doesn't even make sense-would know it is okay.  If you are happy with your sobriety, if you are at peace, that is what is important.

Thank you to the dear friend that gave me the sign I was looking for to put this back up.

All my best, Kary