How to Be Perfect Like Me

by Dana Bowman

  I turn around after he heads off into his breach, and then, I look at mine.

  On this particular day, my breach is the kitchen. And I hate the kitchen.

  My kids ate only two bowls of corn flakes and drank two small glasses of juice; however, my kitchen looked like it had been turned upside down and shaken. I couldn’t really understand how two bowls and juice cups could be so destructive and mean.

  Sometimes? Adulthood bites.

  After an entire day of tackling kitchen counters, laundry, bathrooms, and so on, I started wondering, just a little bit, if I had any sort of purpose other than wiping things.

  Later, I was making a healthy and delicious meal for my spawn when you-know-who had the audacity to return home from his breach. His job may not be all unicorns in Dockers pants, but at least he gets to drive in a car and go away.

  Standing over the cutting board, I paused my chopping and found myself looking at my husband with a lot of anger. Like, a lot. It was all misguided and bent, like a ticked-off Leaning Tower of Pisa. Without realizing it, Brian became the seat of all things bad, mainly because he was coming in from the outside. “Away” was all I wanted to be at that moment.

  “Away” sounded flipping wonderful.

  This is not groundbreaking material. I’m not the first mom to feel like she plays a game called Monotony every day. I’m certainly not the first one to feel stressed or isolated after a day with two little kids. But, of course, I am an alcoholic in recovery, which makes things a little more interesting.

  And no, I don’t mean interesting as in TED Talk interesting. More like being stuck in the dentist’s chair while he drills away, trying to distract myself by remembering all the lyrics to ABBA’s “Fernando.” That kind of interesting.

  In my recovery circles, I learned the acronym HALT, which warns me not to get too Hungry, Angry, Lonely, or Tired. It is always good to have a reminder as to why you might suddenly feel unhinged. It might be that your children are feral. Or you just need a juice box. This is kind of tough to avoid because parenting makes you HALT all day long. A good part of my day as a mom is spent forgetting to eat or feeling alone or worn out. I would like to admit that I was never angry during those early parenting and recovery years, but that would be a lie. I felt angry plenty of times.

  For example, I felt anger toward Brian for breathing over my salsa.

  I stood in the kitchen with knife in hand, and I forgot my recovery. All of it. It was gone without even a wisp of recovery smoke to remind me. There was no earthshaking tragedy in my kitchen that fuzzed my memories. This was just a day, pretty much like any other, with salsa.

  And it was taking me apart.

  Here’s how recovery works—at least how it worked for me. I got sober, and it was wonderful and hard and life-changing and terrible, all at once. In the early weeks, I lived in this breathless treading of minutes, getting through Friday nights and long weekends and dinners out and kids, all without a glass of wine firmly tucked in my hand. There were times when I ached for the feel of that glass between my fingers. I swore I could sense it like some sort of phantom limb of addiction, fitting so smoothly and delicately between my fingers. I once caught myself staring longingly at the glassware section in Walmart like I was looking at pictures of my ex-boyfriend’s family.

  For those first weeks, even brushing my teeth was a new discovery. No wine stains. No rumbling stomach and gagging. These were both good developments, but every little detail of my life was different and exhausting. I passed through the looking glass into recovery, and I was nowhere near as relaxed about it as Alice. Granted, my land of recovery was not nearly as trippy as Wonderland, thank goodness. Each day passed on with the same slow agony as I focused on getting through the next minute.

  I realize this makes recovery sound awful, which is not really the goal, I assure you. But, sweet Jesus, those first few weeks were hard labor. They were physically and mentally demanding. They were Ironman tough, but without all the Speedos. Also, I had no knowledge of where the finish line was, or even whether there was a finish line at all.

  On top of all this—as I was running the race all sweaty and exhausted—I kept thinking, “Maybe drinking wasn’t so bad. Maybe I can drop out of this right here. Maybe . . . this whole thing is crazy.” Pounding out the miles in recovery was hard enough without my evil anticoach in my head whispering in my ear that the whole race was pointless. “You should stop here,” anticoach said. “You need to hydrate. Probably with an icy gin and tonic.”

  I wonder what it would be like if people in recovery were treated like Ironman athletes. I’m pretty sure early recovery is just about as harrowing. There are tears. And sweat. And agonized facial expressions. If I’m going to have to wear the tiny metaphorical Speedo here, I really would like to have a medal for it. And on the really tough days, I would like to wrap myself in one of those crinkly silver blankets you get at the finish line, creating a big, sober cocoon.

  Of course, there would have to be the obligatory Australian commentator. I can imagine him speaking with his thick accent as I start my morning:

  And Dana makes a rousing start from the bed into her morning routine without vomiting or wishing she were dead. And her entrance into making breakfast really shows us her strength, ladies and gentlemen! She really gives it a go! Look at that form as she wipes up three-day-old oatmeal, or what we hope is oatmeal, from the floor! Let’s see how she handles the transition from basically waking up to parenting two small children. . . . Wow! Did you see that! She just powered through an entire shopping trip with her two boys in a cart that has only three working wheels! The mental strength alone while she kept her head at the whining-while-waiting-in-line stage is the mark of a true champion. I can’t wait to see how the final leg, bedtime, carries out. Truly, a tough course today, but Dana is showing she has the will, by crikey!

  Pairing recovery with an Australian commentator is not a bad move. It’s rousing. On the difficult days, I want my own overly enthused narrator heralding my slow-motion dive into bed at 7:54 p.m. “Watch that again!” he would crow, as my head hits the pillow while I clutch not one but two books, an iPad, and an industrial-sized bag of Skittles to my chest. “She really has a smooth transition here from being a normal walking and talking human to total nighttime-cocoon mode with her silver blanket! Whatta ripper!”

  There is just one problem. In recovery, there is no actual finish line. We might want one, but that’s sobriety for you. We don’t get to break the tape.

  And lately my pacing has faltered.

  My recovery started out with a strong entrance right into twelve-step meetings. I kept pace with counseling, journaling, and pushing myself through a rocky landscape. I kept up. I did the work. I thought of each day as a sort of prize, making it to my bed with the knowledge that I did not drink that day. That was enough.

  And, after a few weeks and months, it did get easier. It always does. Once you do the work, the muscles strengthen, the head clears, and recovery starts to smooth out. Anyone who has trained long enough can tell you about the magic that occasionally happens while running, biking, or any other nutball thing meant to torment a body. Athletic types nod knowingly at this and call it “flow.” After a while, the muscles rely on memory, the body responds, and you get to run with wings on your feet as you “flow” all over the place, which is better than it sounds.

  This happened in my recovery too—until it didn’t.

  Recovery is not an event, a class, or a destination. In my case it was more like a complete shifting of life—taking all the parts and pieces of my world, turning them upside down, and shaking them a bit until all the broken bits hit the floor with a clatter. And then you repeat this until you die. Recovery also has the annoying tendency to be difficult to pin down with any sort of exactitude. I can’t say, “I am at level-one sobriety. Should be going for my finals soon to see if I can pass on to level two. That’s when I get to do an internship.”

  For three years, I did meetings an
d read and meditated and kept at it. I fed and watered my sobriety and was a solid, spot-on Super Recovery Girl. I never considered that I would get tired, eventually, of all that healing. Getting better is hard work.

  On the night of the salsa, I picked a fight with Brian because I was weary and feeling sorry for myself. That’s no big news. But there was a third party involved, and it was my tired-out recovery. Third parties can really muck things up. I was sober three years at that point, and my days were not solely focused on not drinking anymore. That kind of desperation was long gone. I no longer fervently whispered the Serenity Prayer as I maneuvered myself through—minute by minute—giving the boys a bath and getting them into bed.

  Now, there were many days when I forgot I was an alcoholic altogether.

  Big mistake. Huge.

  The fight with Brian was your basic, standard-model married couple fight. When two people sign on to be around each other all the time, they are going to annoy the heck out of each other at various points during their marriage for no reason they can reasonably ascertain. This makes marriage completely unpredictable and thus exciting.

  “Whatcha making? That looks good,” Brian asked. He totally missed my earlier icy rebuffs for two reasons: (1) He doesn’t have that much of a mind for detail (it took him a year to remember my middle name); and (2) He is one of those annoying souls who feel like one person can “be silly and cheer the other person out of her gloom.” This works on toddlers and puppies,* but it does not work on me. My reaction is to simply hunker down into misery with a nuance of rage.

  And so, we argued about jalapeños.

  “I’m cutting jalapeños,” I hissed.

  “Wow! Jalapeños!” Brian stated, needing to make sure we were all on the same page.

  “Yes, and they’re SPICY, and I will put them IN THE SALSA because YOU like them.”

  Ignoring the large, angry, spicy-loving elephant in the room, Brian cheerily replied, “Well, that sounds yummy! When’s dinner?”

  “AS SOON AS I’M DONE MAKING AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT MEAL THAT YOUR CHILDREN CAN EAT.” I gestured with my knife at the offending peppers. “These . . . these will HURT our darling spawn. But you don’t seem to CARE.”

  And Marital Spat #4,675, the Battle of the Jalapeños, continued on from there. There was the slander of cilantro, and Mexican food in general took a solid hit that night. When it was over, neither of us had a clue what the fight was about.

  You see, I had forgotten I was an alcoholic; therefore, I had also forgotten what resentments can do.

  Definition

  Resentment: (noun) a state of being in which you find yourself furious about things that are sometimes simple but sometimes not. Sometimes resentment is legitimate, and sometimes it is not. And sometimes you should do something about it, but also . . . maybe not. In sum, resentment is wonky. But it can come at you, armed with a jalapeño, and take you out at the knees.

  * * *

  * Scratch that. Puppies are never gloomy.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  HOW NOT TO

  be an alcoholic

  As I sat in my therapist’s office, she looked at me with that pleasant, vanilla gaze of expectation that meant I needed to start spilling my guts. So, I took a breath.

  “Last night I dreamt I was buttering toast. For, like, an hour.”

  There was a soft silence while she waited and then realized I was expecting her to say something. She lobbed a rather tired “oh” at me.

  “Other people get to dream they are flying,” I lamented.

  Three years sober. That’s a good thousand days without that slender glass in my hand. I’d managed all the firsts—the first sober Christmas, first sober wedding, first very sober date night with nothing to say to my husband, first sober scary movie. I’d done them all, multiple times at that point. It was becoming, dare I say, easy. Except for scary movies. I have decided that my life is just fine without zombies or mutant anything. Life is scary enough.

  It wasn’t a big deal, I thought, this whole alcoholic thing.

  In the world of recovery there is an unwritten mantra: once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. I can’t unalcoholic myself. I had long ago passed one of those “Am I an Alcoholic?” online tests with flying colors, and so now the task at hand was to stay on the sober path. One day at a time. March to the beat. Stick to the straight and narrow. All these things involve walking, which is easy, right?

  My problem was that I was getting a wee bit tired of just walking all over the place. I wanted glitz and glamour. Walking is so pedestrian.

  Initially, in recovery, I was seeing Joan, my therapist, about once a month. However, it had been more like once every two months now because my schedule had been swamped. We caught up, but I kept eyeing the clock, wanting to make my time with her worth the money. And yet, there was nothing to talk about. I was good. The marriage was good. The children were still good. We were all walking along, the landscape was clean and simple and de-alcoholed, and I was bored out of my mind.

  “The whole buttering-toast thing? It took, like, I don’t know, an HOUR. And that was it. I buttered two slices of toast.”

  No response from Joan. Helpfully, I pantomimed a knife spreading butter.

  “I can still hear the stupid knife scritch-scritching across it.”

  Silence from Joan.

  “I don’t even get to eat the toast,” I complained.

  Joan began doing the head tilt thing a little more. I wondered if she would get a neck ache from this. She tilted a lot for me, but she hadn’t written anything down in her notebook the entire time I was there. Clearly, this toast material was lacking something. Had I run out of things to say? Did Joan and I need to break up?

  There was silence. I looked around the room. Joan had a new Scentsy candle that smelled like a cupcake on steroids. I took a breath and searched for more.

  “Oh! So, my husband and I had a fight the other night.”

  I noticed Joan visibly brighten, and I wondered how often the inner Joan deflated a little at the whole “please analyze my dream” thing. Was there ever a time when inner Joan thought, “Oh for God’s sake, not the Muppets in the shower dream again. It’s just too weird. Can we just call a spade a spade and decide this dream is totally nuts?”

  I prattled on; she said very little, and I found myself again in that weird counseling place where I wondered if I was supposed to keep talking. Joan continued to tilt her head and stare—the Scentsy candle was more responsive. I felt like I was stuck at a four-way stop, and everyone was staring at each other. Joan was either incredibly patient or writing a grocery list in her head. I forged on.

  “Yeah, it was horrible. I was mad about . . .” and then I sort of stutter-stopped because I realized I didn’t have a glamorous description of what I was mad about. In fact, the whole “about” part was elusive, similar to trying to remember that one guy’s name from that one movie you saw once. You know, the one with the dog?

  “I don’t know why I was mad. I was just mad. There were these jalapeños, and I hate jalapeños. Like, I really hate them.”

  I eyed her to make sure she understood how deeply I felt about jalapeños. She nodded.

  I channeled my inner Eeyore and sighed heavily. “But I know Brian loves them, so I put the jalapeños in the salsa.”

  Joan’s head tilted so much to its side that she looked like she was shaking water out of her ear.

  I slumped a little on the sofa, and added, “It was silly.”

  “Please, Joan,” I thought. “Just say something. Tell me it’s not silly and that I need to book an emergency getaway spa vacation in the Caymans because I’m so horribly stressed. Tell me my husband is a jalapeño-eating piece of ——.”

  “How did Brian respond to you?” she finally asked. She seemed awfully interested in Brian. “Did he decide to engage in your . . .”—she gestured at me with wide circles and finished—“stuff?”

  That word, stuff, is like summing up Sybil’s multiple personality di
sorder by describing it as “a little glitchy.”

  I took a breath.

  “He didn’t at first, but then, after a while, there was yelling. He said I was overreacting. I told him he was a douche. It was typical married stuff.”

  Again, tilty head from Joan.

  I mustered a weak smile. “I’m over it.”

  This is the deal with relationships. Rarely is any utilization of the phrase “I’m over it” actually the case.

  I have a friend in Florida whose sole purpose in life is to post on Facebook those horrifying videos of sharks circling in the water that are actually yards away from unsuspecting swimmers. The water is blue and serene, and the little, happy dots that are the swimming humans continue being little, happy dots. All the while, black, toothy, shadowy things are coalescing and sending shout-outs for more toothy friends to join them—it’s awful. I have to wonder whether watching these videos before making our summer plans would persuade us to never go swimming again.

  That’s also kind of how I feel about marriage. And recovery.

  It’s startling sometimes how similar they are. For example, marriage is long-term. At times, it can seem rather relentless. Marriage practically begs for the Serenity Prayer on a daily basis. True, I am not trying to detox from my husband, and he won’t cause liver failure or lead me to make questionable choices when shopping online. I might need to detox from control issues tightly linked to my relationship with him, however. All of it is progress, and work, not perfection.

  The thing is, when Brian and I got married, I kind of had it in my head that I was saving his sorry behind from a life of lonely bachelorhood. I was rescuing him. I had already helped him stop wearing a phone on his belt, and I managed that in less than two weeks. I could totally rehab the guy. I was on this marriage thing. I had a whole slew of It’s Marriage! It’s Awesome! books, Bible studies, and plans ready to go. We were going to be the best married couple in the world.