Some people who are vacationing down the beach from us stopped in for some drinks and conversation yesterday afternoon and stayed and stayed and stayed, so I got very little done that I had intended to get done. That's ok, because all the while they were drinking I was thinking, at least I won't be hungover tomorrow so I'll be able to catch up. Can't begin to tell you how much of a difference that makes in the stress level. Of course, if I'd been drinking, I would have just told myself that getting drunk was worth it, because make no mistake I would have gotten drunk, then today I'd be full of self-disgust and in a panic because God knows how long the hangover would last-at the end of my drinking they could last a week-and I only have four days left to get everything ready to go back to the states...And, I can honestly say I didn't miss drinking for one second yesterday, never even thought about it even though it was going on all around me. I still find that a miracle after all these years.
The woman was a natural moderator-she had one glass of wine and got happy. I joked and told her, "You're who I wanted to be when i grew up" but the truth is I never wanted to be that kind of drinker, I wanted to be the gal who could drink with the big boys and tell raunchy jokes and shoot pool and scratch where it itches no matter who was looking-and I was very successful at all of that for many, many years-except shooting pool, I always sucked. There is a part of those years I regret-I now know that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't drink like I did and be as good a parent as I wanted-but other than that, which I agree is huge, I don't really regret the years I drank. It was fun and I made a lot of good friends and i would have kept doing it if it would have remained fun, or for me, if drinking hadn't started trying to kill me.I have a problem with books or programs that demonize alcohol and tell us it has no role in life except as a destroyer of lives. I disagree. Some recovery organizations and recovered people spend so much time trying to convince us, people who love/loved drinking, that it's a horrible thing, alcohol, and all those years must have been horrible years no matter what they felt like when they were happening, after all that hell it should be easy to give up the demon drink, and we must recognize what a horrible presence it was in our lives. But that's the problem for most of us, we don't view all the time we spent drinking as horrible and destructive because it wasn't, not all of it, for some of us, not any of it was destructive but we recognize it might be heading that way.
Here is how I look at my relationship with drinking, we had a good time and when we no longer enjoyed being together and I recognized it was never going to get better, we were never going to be able to go back to what we were before, it was time to part ways. But I do have fond memories.
How The Heck Are You?
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