Flashbacks

I just came back from my morning meeting. As we went around the room, I was feeling really positive...grateful for the things that sobriety can bring to us that I was hearing in the meeting. It can be as simple as babysitting a grandchild to something big like traveling to New Orleans to assist victims of Hurricane Katrina.

And then one man shared about what he was struggling with, his active ex wife. It brought up a lot of stuff I went through with my Mom in the first 5 years after my Dad's death. I can remember her coming to visit in the summers. She'd rent a beach house a few miles from my home and we would essentially live there. My brother's family would come up and we would have some really nice days on the beach with our kids. That was what it was supposed to be. Instead there was a lot of time worrying about my mother. It was then that her drinking was no longer something that we could deny. Yet we managed to do that. We managed to ignore it and let it happen so that we could enjoy our vacation. She was drinking in the morning and all day and all night until she passed out. Thing was so were we....well we waited until at least lunch.. but sometimes lunch started at 11. She was falling alot. I remember she fell down or up the stairs that second year. I didn't see her fall but the aftermath was horrible. She was terribly bruised and swollen along her whole right side. I wanted to take her to the ER and she refused to go. Then I was angry that she wouldn't go. Wouldn't take care of herself. She was coming home from grocery shopping which means she was driving drunk. Of course she was. Years later I found out that she had broken a few ribs because the doctors saw the broken bones in a chest xray they took to see her pneumonia. I can see now that this was the beginning of the end for her. She usually went to bed really early, to drink in private and to pass out. She'd get up to go to the bathroom, sometimes in her underwear, something grandmas just don't do, and sometimes falling onto her hands and knees in the hallway. Steadying herself to get up. I clearly remember myself, my brother and my sisiter in law watching her do this and doing nothing. Saying nothing. Just exchanging glances. We'd talk about it amongst ourselves but it was just too hard to deal with. We never figured it out. She'd wander in the middle of the night not knowing where she was. I know because I was usually up drinking myself. There's more but these are the incidents that kept flashing in my head as this man was speaking this morning. I did try to confront her once or twice, talk to her but that's hard to do when you've got a glass of wine or a beer in your hand. She told me I didn't understand. And I didn't. She had fallen into this deep abyss and couldn't climb out. Didn't want to climb out. And refused the hands that tried to reach for her. As the years passed she stopped having us for holidays and stuff. She would come here but it was getting increasingly difficult to get her here. And when she was, she drank the whole time. She tried really hard to cover it up, cover up how she could barely walk, how she was physically wasting away. She'd have us take her back to the hotel right after dinner I presume so she could drink without being watched. She refused to stay in my home. That last Thanksgiving, she said she had fallen over a vacum and hurt her back. That was why she couldnt' walk when what I know now was she was experiencing symptoms of Wernike's Encephalathy. She barely ate but I remember she wanted to take some leftovers home and I forgot to pack them. 2 months later, on New Year's day I found her severely malnourished and the only thing in the fridge was a bit of chicken from Boston Market with a Dec. 4th date on it. I've had a hard time with that. She couldn't go out for food. Yet she did manage to get boxes of wine as they were all over the house, empty. There was one in her car still full. She had binged through the holiday, knocked the phone off the hook. That was how we found her because we kept getting a busy signal and finally went to check on her.

I don't know where I am going with this. At the meeting, I felt a welling of grief and was going to pass but the guy next to me was sharing how grateful he was to have the meeting to share his stuff, that others wouldn't understand. But I couldn't share....I tried and it just came out as tears. I was just able to say that stuff had been brought up for me by the other share....and that I was grateful to be sober. Then I wept through the rest of the meeting. It was very nice to get some hugs after the meeting. One of my buddies got her 10 month chip so I was able to get out of myself to feel good for her. I was able to talk to another girl about some of her issues which helped too. Clean my side of the street with her. That's another story. And I am grateful for this forum where I can write about this experience and work through it. I will call my sponser this afternoon and I think I will go to the 9:30 meeting. I don't feel like drinking but I don't feel good. I'm not sure what I feel. But I know that I can't just stuff it and that is progress. And I am very grateful because I can see that my mother's low bottom became my high bottom. I could no longer drink without seeing the consequences right before my eyes even if I was not there YET. I was certainly heading in that direction. There but for the Grace of God go I.