Happy Birthday to Me

A year ago today, I walked into my first AA meeting. I wasn't convinced at the time that it was the thing for me, but since heavy drinking didn't seem to be solving any problems and had landed me in jail, I thought I'd better give it a try.

I guess it's different in different places, but the AA meeting I go to on Sundays celebrates annual "birthdays." And there's cake. My kids have gotten wind of the cake. I had to promise to save them some.

They sing a version of the birthday song to you, and my sponsor gave me two tokens--one of hers from when she reached one year, and another one that reminds me that when I have tried everything else, I can be still be sure that I will step forward and the earth will support me or that I will be given wings.

I cried. And then I did what was expected, which is to tell the story of how I got there, or as we say in AA, what it was like then and what it's like now.

I talked about being a good girl from the suburbs. How I'd only had a few drinks before I went to college, where I met the delicious wine cooler Bartles & James. I reminisced about how alcohol removed all anxiety and fear. How I became a heavy drinker, but not all the time, which gave me the illusion that I had it "under control." And then I talked about a bad year, where I had to put the Greatest Dog in the World to sleep, suffered a major professional setback, had a miscarriage and stopped communicating with my husband. And how it all fell apart. And how I know I can't go back now, because it isn't something that gets better. I crossed some kind of invisible line.

Sometimes I feel guilty because nothing truly bad happened. Mine is not the scariest story I've heard. It makes me feel like I don't deserve to feel good about the progress I've made. But then I say that out loud, and it sounds kind of fucked up, so I figure that's just part of the disease of alcoholism.

I don't feel like drinking anymore. In fact, I can say that by some miracle I now think of drinking as something other people do, but not me. What remains is the inability to know how to live life without drinking. Without meaning to sound pathetic, I seem to be a bit deficient in the coping arena, and learning to cope without liquid courage turns out to be quite a project.

Another favorite AA cliche, "One day at a time."

I invited my stepmother to the meeting. She brought me flowers and took me grocery shopping afterwards. Then she brought me to her and my dad's house for Sunday chicken dinner. Happy Birthday to me.