I am not here to write about trauma today. Yay! I am not here to talk about being sober even though that’s always an amazing topic. I am here today to share what feels like some serious healing. Three nights ago I dreamed I was getting ready to teach a writing workshop. I was in a giant building that was obviously NOT my studio. There were tons of people there. There was a little kitchen where I went and made myself a cup of coffee. In the kitchen there was a small child. A tiny toddler who was probably 18 months old. She was dancing and she was beautiful. I walked over to her and put my hands out to her. She took my hands in her tiny hands and let me dance with her. She was looking up at me with the biggest smile on her face. After a few minutes of dancing, I reached down and scooped her up in my arms. She snuggled into me. She loved me. She was beautiful. She had blonde curls and blue eyes. I loved this child even though I had no idea who she was. I carried her around for a while because I just didn’t want to put her down. She fell asleep in my arms. I couldn’t stop looking at her and I wasn’t about to put her down. By this point in the dream, half the people who were there for the workshop I was teaching had left and the other half were restless because I was so late getting to it. But I didn’t care. The only thing that was important to me was this child. I went into the room and taught the workshop as best I could without putting the toddler down. She slept in my arms the entire time. I’m sure the quality of the workshop suffered, but I didn’t care. I’ve learned that dreams have messages for me and while this one is super obvious, it took me a few hours after I woke up to understand that she was ME. It wasn’t until I told a friend about the dream that I understood. Saying it out loud helped me make the connection. It felt a lot like some serious healing and it brought tears to my eyes, which doesn’t happen for me often. She was me and I loved her so much. I could feel that love in my dream and when I woke up I still felt it. Powerful. My therapist refers to “the inner child” as that part of us that is untouched and unharmed by outside influences. The part of us that is pure joy. That’s exactly who this child was and exactly what I felt while I was holding her. Pure love. The exact same love that I feel when I am with my own children. I am certain it’s the dancing that’s bringing her out. We danced together in the dream. I *think* I am getting ready to go a bit deeper into that journey of healing my inner child, but I know that it’s all the play time that connects me to her. Get ready world because I am about to take a trip to Michael’s and get crafty! My child wants to create for some reason and I am going to let her! Should be interesting since I am the least “artistic” person I know. But, if you know me, you already know that I will put everything I have into it. I will be the craftiest person EVER! LOL Get ready to see some shitty art on the internet and tell me it’s beautiful anyway! 😊
Here’s a little secret. My husband doesn’t read my blog. Not regularly anyway. And I don’t offer it up to him for some odd reason. Probably because he’s the one who knows me best and sees me every single day. He doesn’t give a shit about how popular I am on the internet. He sees the real me. Every day. Not just the best photos and the edited words. He gets the unedited version. He’s not on FaceBook and he hates social media. But, he did recently get an instagram account, which I was quick to give him shit about. Because Instagram is social media. Now I feel like I have to censor my Instagram posts a bit. Like he’s there to babysit. Not that that’s necessarily true, but I do get asked who certain followers are. And since it’s social media, I typically have no idea. He assures me his life would be easier if I was ugly. I encouraged him to get the Instagram account because he used to ask me to post pics for him on my page. I like to keep my page looking a “certain way” which doesn’t include pictures of the fish he caught that day. Now he has an Instagram and it’s cute and hilarious that he really doesn’t know how to use it. I post my blog on Instagram and use the standard “New blog post is up, link in bio” caption. He has no idea how to get to my bio or click on the link. I showed him how to do it a couple of weeks ago and he sat next to me and read my blog for what seemed like hours. He went way back…….and I could tell he was upset. I have suggested to my Mom that perhaps reading my blog isn’t the thing she needs to do. I am thinking maybe he shouldn’t have read it either. It hurt him to go back and relive some of it. I know he also felt slighted because he never saw his name in any of my posts. I totally understood that too. I frequently speak about my therapists, past and present. I write about my “tribe of women” who support me. I don’t write about my family. There are a few reasons for this. The first reason is that believe it or not, I do keep parts of my life private. My family is the MOST important thing in my life. I feel like they have their own stories and they aren’t my stories to tell. But here I am. Talking about my family. My husband anyway. The truth is, I hated him for a few years before I got sober. He was the enemy in my mind. He was one of the firsts to point out that I had a problem with alcohol. I could fool a lot of people, but he wasn’t one of them. I hated him for that. He was the person always taking my keys, my wallet and my liquor away. But he wasn’t sober. In fact, we drank a together A LOT. So why was I the one with “the problem?” Maybe because I was the one who blacked out and did stupid things? Here’s the reality. My husband is 15 years older than me. He rescued me when my marriage to my second husband fell apart. I didn’t know how to be alone but I also knew I didn’t need to involve myself in a relationship. I found a man who lived far, far away that would come visit me when I wanted him to but didn’t live close enough to roll up at my house anytime and get too comfortable. Because I DID NOT want to be in a relationship. 6 months later I moved to North Carolina with my two children to be with him. That happened so fast. I had a pretty good handle on my drinking at that time. I was a “functioning alcoholic.” Two years later I got pregnant. I stopped drinking while I was pregnant and nursing (or at least didn’t nurse when I was drinking). When our sweet Jackson turned two, I weened him (yes, I nursed him for two years). It was at this point that my raging alcoholism kicked up several notches. I’m not really sure why. Other than the fact that once I started drinking, I couldn’t stop, which IS the very thing that makes me an alcoholic. I drank every day. At 5:00. Until the day I discovered that I could drink during the day because I was grown. That was a game changer. That’s when the blackouts started coming. The insane behavior and really bad choices started happening more and more frequently. My husband spent a lot of time on the phone with my family and friends “telling on me.” I hated him for it. Today I know he was looking for guidance and support, but that’s not what it felt like at the time. I would have preferred it if he had gone to a support group rather than bring all of our friends and family into our mess, but he’s not that guy and it wasn’t my choice. He spent a lot of time on the phone with my therapist too. She suggested hospitalization for me. I hated her for that. I hated a lot of people for a lot of things. All things that I was responsible for. He took drunk me to an AA meeting once and asked “those people” what he should do. He just wanted someone to fix me. He was watching the woman he loved, the mother of his children, kill herself. My oldest two children lost their biological father to addiction. My husband has raised them since they were tiny and he IS their Dad. I think he hated me as much as I hated him, but he wanted me to live. And eventually so did I. He supported my recovery by giving up alcohol. It wasn’t a struggle for him and if sobriety was going to work for me, he knew he had to make some changes too. I had every intention of getting sober and leaving him because he was a controlling asshole. But then a funny thing happened. Not overnight, because that’s never how things work for me. But, as I began the process of getting sober, along with gaining some emotion regulation skills and a tiny bit of sanity, he began to seem like less of an asshole. Not because he changed, but because I changed. Not gonna lie, all of the changes freaked him out too. I’m not sure either of us knew who sober me would be. All of the new things I was doing seemed weird to him. They were weird to me too, but also things I needed to do. Meditation. Yoga. Meetings. I caused a LOT of damage to our relationship. Damage that isn’t a secret to our friends and family. Things that I had to own and walk through. But, he hung in there and walked through them with me. He hung in there because he knew I was worth it. He saw my worth when I didn’t. And sometimes he’s still an asshole. But he’s my asshole. He’s no longer freaked out by the weird things I do and pretty much expects me to come in the door beaming about the new “weird thing” I am currently in love with. Our relationship isn’t perfect, but whose is? I’m still trying to figure out what we have in common. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot. But, he makes me laugh and he’s pretty damn cute. So there’s that. He’s a safe place for me. He makes me feel secure. He gives me the space I need to grow. He has his life and I have mine and they are very different. But, we come together every day and share our “seperate lives.” Every now and then we even do things together. Like a real couple. One day, I’ll even go fishing with him. What I am not going to do, is put this blog in his hand. He can find it on the internet like everyone else. Sometimes, I’m an asshole too. 😊
Sober Yogi 