oh man its that time of night. i want a friggin cookie. or a bite of a grilled cheese. or a bbq baked lays chip. or an apple. whew. its way harder to do a cleanse/fast at home than at a spa in palm desert. duh.
must comfort and anesthetize (spell check please) myself with tv at least. otherwise i’d have much more to say about day 1.
Oh lordy, sobriety has the strangest side effects. Such as, we (my self, my husband and our 3, 6, and 9-year-old kids) recently spent 5 nights, including Christmas, camping on an uninhabited island in the Sea of Cortez. It was friggin’ unbelievable. I actually shed a few tears when we said goodbye to our guide. I swear I left a piece of myself on that island. Sigh.
As for other bizarre sobriety side effects: in the last year or so I’ve gone on a 3-night raw food retreat where I ended found myself naked in a pool getting swished around by a 6-foot-tall bald man.
And I got my first colonic. Swear to God the technician said, “that was one of the largest releases I have EVER seen.” And I am 5’4” and was 130 at the time. I clogged up the machine. It was like taking the most satisfying crap you’ve ever had and multiplying it by, well, a REALLY big number. Ahhh.
For my 40th birthday, I spent five days in the desert at We Care spa doing a liquid-only cleanse and daily colonics. It was fabulous. Never in a million years could I have imagined I would be doing that on my 40th birthday.
I could go on and on but I’ve made little progress on my TV addiction (especially since I’ve discovered 16 and Pregnant) and it’s time for my fix.
It’s the end of my sole Ease-In day and I’ve consumed, roughly in this order: my green juice concoction of greens, apple, lemon and kiwi), rooibos tea, more green juice, kombucha, and butternut squash puree. I didn’t exactly follow the Ease-In rules but since it’s optional anyway I figure close enough. I will drink the laxative tea tonight and then tomorrow I will commence 10?! days of consuming only water, tea, salt water, and a mixture of water, lemon juice, cayenne pepper, and grade-B maple syrup. Go figure. It’s one of the oldest cleanses around so, well, I’ve got that going for me. And I’m getting a colonic tomorrow. Hurray!! My how times have changed.
i’ll have 8 months sober on the 13th of june. life is way different. except in the ways that it is still the same. more on that later.
i did it. i made it through thanksgiving. my first non-pregnant sober thanksgiving since… middle school probably. let’s see, how old was i when my sister and i started sneaking wine into our bedroom. i remember going on stealth missions to secure a bottle a wine only to get it into the bedroom and find that it had a cork. damn. back for a screwtop which fortunately wasnt too hard to find in our house. the wine tasted awful but it was well worth it, the way i felt. we played captain and tenile on our 45 records and billy joel on 8 tracks. we used tall green tupperware cups. when we got older we played drinking games. one time we had to drink every time madonna sang “papa dont preach.” yikes. that may have been the year that we got my normally stoic grandma tipsy and the three of us pounded on the table chanting for my mother to “burn the stuffing, burn the stuffing.” i always liked my stovetop with a nice crust on it. ahhh good times. i must have been in college the time i got high with my aunt and she stole my one-hitter. “how was your thanksgiving?” “well it was pretty good except my crazy aunt snagged my favorite one-hitter.” i’ve been stoned just about every thanksgiving since then. except yesterday.
it was going pretty well until a guy came up and offered me some weed. last time i saw him was on a family camping trip in september when i was asking him for pot at 9 in the morning. i wasn’t tempted but after that i got to thinking how nice it would be. the music, the lights, the kids in the pool with the water changing colors, the food, the wine. [the kids are screaming again, right now that is, better just hit publish or this post may never see the light of day.]
i’ve been sober since otober 13. no alchohol, no recreational drugs, no pills (except zoloft of course). so far it is way better than being unsober. way better.
the best part is that i dont torture myself all the time anymore. i still have a sadistic asshole of a superego thats for sure. but i’ve taken away a tremendous amount of its ammunition. (plenty left though, not to worry, i still have lots of good material for this blog if i would just turn off the idiot box and write but hey one thing at a time for chrissake).
i actually cant think of much else to say right now. i feel… well, pretty good. i have a new therapist that i see twice a week. funny story: back in august when i first went to see her, she basically took one look at me, arched an eyebrow and said something like, “The only way i will see you is if you come twice a week.” And since i had recently tried snorting percocet (thanks for the idea nurse jackie), because a mere pot and alcohol buzz wasnt enough for me anymore, i wisely agreed that twice a week seemed appropriate to me.
gotta sign off now because littleurchintoddler clad in fuzzy footie pj’s just came to me and said, “you play zingo wif me mama?” then she raced off and started putting away the blocks and said “i’m cleaning up so fast, are you done mama?” what’s a mother to do? play zingo course.
you are ALL tagged, every single one of you, to write a six word memoir. here. in my comments.
check out this link to the six word memoir on love and heartbreak project at smith magazine. but i want to hear it first.
here’s my six word memoir:
dead babies, live babies, what else?
and yours?
i watch too much tv. every night and every nap the baby takes. i watch tv. that’s another way that i turn off the madness. i veg. when i have free time, i NEVER want to exercise for a release or have sex or take a shower. i want to watch tv. or go to the movies. i have been like this for as long as i can remember.
there is something wrong with me.
I have so many thoughts swirling in my addled brain, things I’ve been wanting to clarify, things that I cant even begin to get a handle on, things I cant write because I don’t want my husband to read them.
First of all, if ezk manages to find me and send the police to my door, there wouldn’t find me all fucked up with my kids watching cartoons while we all share a bag of cheetos and wipe our orange fingers on our pants. They wouldn’t notice if I‘ve smoked because I always use visine,listerine and a spray from a sixteen year old bottle of some kind of misty stuff. (seriously my best friend gave it to me when I graduated from college-unbelievable). If I’m downstairs I might use some hairspray.
Anywayyy, the amount of pot they might find in my house varies from a speck so small that I cant even find it because it has fallen out of the one-hitter. Or i might have enough to fill about half of one side of a contact lens container. Seriously we are talking about laughable amounts of weed here.
But that sounds like such bullshit even as I write it. I mean, it is true but that doesn’t change the fact that my whole addictive process starts over again any time I get my hands on even a minute amount of weed. Sometimes it can a take a month or so. Or it can be compressed into two days. High is high.
So in a way, Natalie is right when she says that the problem may not be the pot but how hard I am on myself about it. I like to think that is true. It is part of the problem. The rest of the problem I think is that I am flat out addicted to pot. When I have it.
I don’t always have it. In recent years during non-pregnant times, maybe half of the time I have pot, maybe 1/3 of the time. It’s hard to say.
When I don’t have it, I am NOT always thinking about getting it. I wrote that in an earlier post and looking back at that statement, it isn’t always true. The following is true: When I have it, I am pretty much always thinking about when I will smoke it. That goes on until I run out or throw it out. I’ve thrown out pot plenty of times. I’ve thrown it in a lake one time, off a balcony twice, in the sink, in the toilet, out a window. I do give myself some credit, at times like those, for just saying no more.
I haven’t thrown any out lately however. When I need a little break from the struggle, I have rocketman hide it from me. Crazy, isn’t it? Is that textbook enabling or what? But it’s not his fault. He just wants me to be happy.
Back to having weed. When I first get some I feel such a sense of freedom. Like I will have the freedom to control my feelings and moods. Like I can relieve stress, boredom, anxiety, exhaustion, hopelessness. It never lasts. The feeling of freedom is quickly replaced by feeling controlled, powerless, ashamed, humiliated. Smoking makes that go away. Temporarily.
Eventually I run out. Eventually might be two months or two days. When I run out or toss it out, then I feel real freedom. To live my life again. And I don’t think much about pot for while. Maybe a week. Maybe a month. It depends.
Then I get back around to wanting some weed again. That’s where I am today.
**I came back later to change this post but decided to leave it as is and just add some thoughts. That part about how the cops wouldnt find me stoned with my kids watching cartoons and eating cheetos? What a load of bullshit. I mean, it’s true but what the fuck was the point of that sanctimonious crap? To make myself feel better that my kids don’t even watch cartoons or TV at all really except on Sunday mornings.
“There, I did it again with the high and mighty crap. What the fuck?”
“Here it is, THIS is what I am trying to say: taking care of three kids is a lot harder when you don’t park them in front of a TV or a computer or video game.”
‘So let me get this straight. I am to be commended for not letting my kids watch TV??!! Never mind that I am HIGH while they are outside digging for “Indian clay.”’
Sometimes I seriously wonder if I have multiple personalities.
What I was trying to convey is what things look like in my house. My kids aren’t being neglected unless of course it’s benign neglect and that’s a whole different issue. I don’t act or appear stoned. I don’t think any of my neighbors have a clue when I am high. I’ve had friends over who I don’t think have any idea that I’ve had a toke. It’s not an outwardly extreme situation going on here. I have two Master’s degrees for chrissake. Not that any of that makes it right. Not at all.
Maybe I am trying to convince myself that it’s not such a big deal to have a toke while my kids are at home.
Why anybody would want to read this crap is beyond me. I reread and think this is such drivel. Is that a real word? Guess I am trying to work shit out here. Out loud, unfortunately for you people. But clearly you don’t have to be reading this. Some of you are just rubbernecking in cyberspace, I guess. I know, some of you actually care about me.
Ugh. Now do you have a sense of why I smoke weed? So I can TURN IT OFF. With one puff I can turn off the chatter, the blathering, the criticism, the second-guessing, the hypothesizing, the rationalizing, the catastrophizing, the negafuckingtivity. It never, ever stops. Except.
actually ezk (see comment under my last post if you want to know what the f*ck i am talking about) isnt my first hater. i am my first hater. i doubt that she or he or anyone could say anything to me that is as bad as the things that i think to myself. not that i am encouraging people to try. fact is i am ruthlessly critical of myself. Much of it is well-deserved. Seems like beating the living shit out of myself is what fuels my addiction. At least that’s part of it.
Just to be clear, my husband does know that I sometimes get high when I am home with the kids. I think he probably tells himself that I only take one hit (which is generally true but who am I f*ucking kidding, high is high) or that I don’t drive ever (which is true of course) or that if he were home with three kids 24/7 he might want to be on something too. He rationalizes and justifies and denies the severity of the problem I am sure. He is a classic enabler. Fully sucked into the bullshit.
Its weird writing this today because today is such a better day than yesterday. Yesterday and the day before and I guess probably the day before I really wanted to get my hands on some pot. I haven’t had any for a few weeks. I emailed a few people, which was f*cking pathetic on my part. That made me feel pretty desperate. Or maybe it was feeling desperate that made me do it. But I was unsuccessful fortunately. Yesterday I scraped a tiny leftover speck out of my bong and hit that. It got me a little high. High enough to feel shitty. That’s the really f*cked up thing is that most of the time I don’t even feel good or better after I smoke. I sometimes feel more anxious or self-conscious. But I feel DIFFERENT. And that is enough I guess.
Today is a better day. I am not thinking about pot very much today. I went out to dinner with some girlfriends last night and came home feeling deflated, depressed, overwhelmed. We talked about our kids way too much. Then cancer. Cancer?! At a birthday dinner. Ugh. One of things that brings me down the most about having kids is the possibility that after the hard part, the first 18 years, is over either they wont want anything to do with me or they will but I will die from some awfulness like cancer.
It happened to my mother-in-law. She busted her ass raising her four boys while working double shifts as a recovery room nurse without a whole lot of help from her husband. Just after the youngest went to college, out of the clear blue, she had a massive stroke from a brain tumor. She never came close to recovering and died a year later. At 51. She didn’t see any of her boys get married and didn’t meet any of her six (so far) grandchildren. That is def*ckingpressing.
The other thing I came home thinking about was how isolated we are in my neighborhood. I see my neighbors as we all go in and out of our driveways all day long, schlepping our kids around. The kids don’t play outside the way we did growing up. They are too busy with homework, piano lessons, sports, ballet, “playdates.” Oh how I loathe the term “playdate.” When we moved here I actually tried, hard, to connect with people in my neighborhood. Silly me.
Then there’s this. Since I am staying home with my kids, they are pretty much what gives my life meaning. What if they turn out to be complete jackasses? What if I really screw it up? Screw them up? Its such an enormous responsibility raising children and I feel the weight of it everyday. Will they ever eat green vegetables? Are they getting enough calcium? Will legoboy ever develop any frustration tolerance whatsoever? Will my older daughter do every single drug she can get her hands on as soon as she possibly can? (I did.) Will my daughters hate each other, deeply and completely? Should I force legoboy to plays sports and if not then will he be left out as one by one his friends get obsessed with sports while he still wants to run around pretending to be star wars characters? Will my f*ckedupness ruin their lives? Will they be deeply unhappy? At least I know one thing for sure. It will be all be my fault. Isn’t everything always the mother’s fault?
Meanwhile I am spouting off about how I worry about their white-flour loving palettes but I am willing to overlook that i steal away sometimes to smoke weed in my empty bathtub? What the f*ck? I think the fact the I am such a worrier, and that I feel like so many of the decisions that I make on a daily basis can have such far-reaching consequences, is what drives me to try to reduce that anxiety. Yes I am on meds. 50 mg of Zoloft. It is helping. Just not enough. I haven’t increased my dosage because I am still nursing my 20 month-old and it seems to affect her sleep. Yes smoking weed and nursing a baby. Many of our moms drank and smoked while they were pregnant with us, right? I always try to make sure I don’t nurse her for several-many hours after I smoke. But it’s in my system. I know. Imagine the comments that I am going to get about this. Bring it on. It cant be any worse than what I am already thinking. And so it goes. On and on.
It’s way past time that I get back into regular therapy. If only my therapist would stop going to Nepal for six weeks at a time. Yes I could/should get a new therapist. I could and should exercise too. And I should wash my face every night instead of just when I take a shower, which should be more often. And I should wax my bikini area instead of just halfheartedly trying to tuck in the strays. and I should put out more but I feel so not connected to my husband and I have WAY WAY too much deadbabytrauma to consider accepting a penis into my body when i’d rather curl up into the fetal position. I should cook. I should clean. I should check the mail more often. I should watch less tv.
Electroshock therapy. That’s what I should really do.
i couldnt even think of a clever title. i’m still here. let’s say i’ve been “amotivated.” (where the fuck does that period go? does it ever really go outside the quotation mark? it looks wrong out there.)
really i’ve been busy with the kids and with being an addict i guess. i’m addicted to pot. (and maybe to alcohol too.) whenever i have pot, i have to smoke it. when i have it and am not high, i am thinking about when i will get high. i’ve been doing this, off and on, to some degree, for oh maybe 10 years, maybe 15. it’s exhausting. the abuse that i heap upon myself drives the cycle. fact is, most or at least much of the abuse is well-deserved.
i havent wanted to post about this because i want it to be a secret. i am afraid of telling people, my husband, blogland, the truth. because i have kids. little kids. even though i tell myself that sometimes i am a better parent when i’ve had a toke, fact is, i am often high while i am taking care of my children and that just cant be a good thing. even when we dropkick soccer balls into a tree to make the autumn leaves shower down on us. even when i haul the camera out and take what i think are some breathtaking photos of my children. okay so most of them are blurry but thats because i dont know how to work our fancy camera. i digress.
i am an addict.
i’m considering blogging about it. does anybody know any blogs by people who are coming to terms with addiction? i could use some company here.
confessions of a complicated mother 