How to Be Perfect Like Me

by Dana Bowman

  And so it went with recovery. I got the books, the studies, and all the plans, and voilà! I became Super Sobriety Girl.

  Sobriety tells you the straight story. It sits you down and stares at you and says, “Kid, here’s how it’s all going to go down.” And, if you really want this, you listen. But you have to keep listening.

  So I created my sober playlist. I listened to others who were in recovery. I listened to books, podcasts, and blogs. I listened to my inner sponsor who told me to change people, places, and things. Also, I listened to my outer sponsor who said, repeatedly, “Dana, it is possible it’s not all about you.” I listened to music that made me happy and peaceful. I listened to my quads when they ached from running, and I listened to them thank me when I did the whole self-care thing and got a massage. And I tried not to listen to my husband’s friend Neil who asked me, at a neighborhood barbecue, “What? REALLY? Come on, not even one?”

  Or you do listen to Neil and then look him in the eyes and tell him exactly how you feel about even one.

  I listened to the rules: lean in; go to meetings; don’t drink in between. I continued to listen to my playlist when my brain started to sizzle and I forgot all my recovery tools and how to think anything but “My God. A glass of wine would FIX THE WORLD right now.” I listened really hard then because that’s a dangerous time for an alcoholic.

  And I learned to listen even when that sizzle faded and became a soft hum way off in the background, like the Muzak at a department store while you’re shopping. You might be all happy as you shop and are probably chattering away with your friends, but you still listen. Because as far away as that Muzak version of ABBA’s “Fernando” might seem, it feels good to hum along. That is when you listen the hardest, when it seems the farthest away.

  And then, somewhere along the road, I stopped listening.

  I should have told someone.

  I should have said, “Hey. The music is fading. How do you hear it, still, after all these years?” I should have asked for help. I was so good at asking for help at the beginning, but I didn’t want to ask the same questions again. I was afraid I would be docked points for repeating myself. So, I kept on treading water.

  When my kids were in swim lessons, one of their instructors totally freaked them out one morning by barking, “Right! Okay! Kids, today we’re going to learn how to drown!” My children stood shivering at the side of the pool, skinny arms clutched to their chests, eyes wide. The instructor just barked, “Everybody in the pool!” It was quite an opener, but as my boys bobbed in the water, teeth chattering, the instructor explained: the first instinct of any swimmer when he starts to struggle is to struggle harder. This is totally human nature, but it is wasted energy that only makes him sink sooner. One of the best things for a swimmer to do when he starts to tire out is to simply stop moving and float, arms spread out wide. Then, renewed, he can swim again.

  “On your backs! Stick your stomachs up!” he bellowed to the class. “Now, relax! Just breathe! Let the water hold you!” There was a wet kerfuffle of arms and legs, and then I watched as my boys, blue-lipped and buoyant, stared up at the early-morning sky. Their scrawny white chests rose and fell with each breath, and they floated, smiling in the sun.

  I had forgotten how to float. I had forgotten that letting the water hold me up was a possibility. And I had forgotten that, in my recovery, just treading water would kill me.

  And all the while the sharks had started networking and were slowly approaching.

  Tools to Help Jazz Up Your Recovery

  1.Wonder Woman footie pajamas. Also, spend ridiculous amount of time googling “Superman cat costumes” because every Super Sobriety Girl needs a sidekick.

  2.Limited edition, artisanal, craft sodas that have ingredients like lavender and rhubarb. They have to be ordered from upstate New York, and the email newsletter you receive from the company is headed with something like “Hey, Dana.”

  3.Google “hot actors who are sober.”

  4.Goat yoga.

  5.Google “hot sober actors doing goat yoga.”

  6.A tattoo of the Promises of AA on your lower back. All sixteen sentences of it. So, maybe your upper and lower back. With a butterfly.

  7.An entire “Sober [Your Name]” audience button on your Netflix queue. Now you can answer when asked, “Who’s watching?” Sober you, that’s who.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  HOW TO

  relapse

  IN

  footie pajamas

  Christmas morning had arrived. I was in our bedroom, clumsily pulling on my husband’s present: footie pajamas with some bizarre purple space monkey motif, including a hood with small, rounded ears. I turned around to see the tail, and just kept turning, because that’s what happens when you discover you have a tail and you’re an idiot. I slowly zipped up and caught a glance in the mirror.

  I was ridiculous. And I was buzzed with enough vodka in my system to make my floppy ears bearable.

  No one else, not even my husband, had any clue I was drinking again. I started the night before Christmas, and over three years of solid recovery blazed up like a Christmas tree afire. I was in trouble.

  I admit I didn’t want to write this chapter. I would rather have cleaned out the vegetable crisper drawer. I even offered to cut my cat’s toenails, but he turned me down. Quite adamantly. But as I look back objectively, the relapse was probably the best thing that ever happened for my recovery.

  Three years earlier, sobriety had taken a tired, wrinkled, sick version of me, grabbed hold of my hand, and said, “Hey. Come over here with me. Sit down. Let me get you a La Croix. And let’s talk.” And it was glorious.

  Except when it wasn’t. Which was often. At times, it was about as fun as getting physical therapy for my sciatica when I was pregnant. This undertaking was not glorious. It made me squirm in pain and sort of woozy afterward, and yet I had to go or I wouldn’t be able to walk or give birth, both things that I was kind of locked into at the time.

  Some days, recovery left me sore and wobbly. These feelings were totally fine and normal, not to mention being all about acceptance and being a grown-up. But somewhere along the way, I filed away a resentment about getting sober. It was tiny and often smushed down by realistic, grown-up thinking, but it was there, living in the basement of my mind.

  I thought my sober story should include daily unicorns: fabulous ones, real ones, ones that walk up to you in the middle of paying a parking ticket and shake their mane, saying, “Girrrl. You are SOBER! You don’t have to pay that ticket. Let’s sashay over here and go shopping!”

  I do realize this thinking is total crap. Life can be crap: children get sick and puke all over you, your Visa cards get stolen, and your husband can make that sound he does when he eats. And, because of all the sober chocolate you are shoveling down, you grow out of your skinny jeans. I dealt with all this daily crapola by using the tools I had in place. They helped keep Sober Dana’s engine purring throughout all this, smoothly through all the hills and valleys.

  But I forgot that the tools only work when you decide to pick them up.

  And all the while, that unicorn hung out on the couch in my basement, waiting to make his grand entrance.

  I stopped going to meetings around the holidays. By “holidays” I mean the great trinity: Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas. In early October, I found myself in that happy zone when It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown started showing up on the airwaves. I was aflutter. The air was crisp and scented with pumpkin spice. And somewhere in there, mixed in with the homemade astronaut costumes, the pumpkin patches, and all the leaves to rake, I stopped going to meetings.

  Cue the scary music.

  This is the part where the big-eyed girl goes into the creepy house and asks, “Is anybody there?” Then she proceeds to walk right up the stairs.

  This is the part where I should have listened. It’s the part where I should have turned around and run the hell out of there and into some meetings.r />
  When I dropped one tool, I didn’t decide to let all the other ones fall to the ground. But it’s similar to my “healthy” eating history. The days that I decided to eat a Super Fudgy Nut Bar for breakfast were usually the days that I had more Super Fudgy Nut Bars for lunch, which meant no salad in my future. It was only Super Fudgy Nut Bars. All the time. That’s when I would end up licking chocolate crumbs off my T-shirt at dusk as I watched an infomercial about food dehydrators that can steam clean my floors.

  Fall ended. I raked all the leaves away and continued right on into Christmas. This blessed holiday, as you know, is what divides the strong moms from the weak. If there ever was a hill I was going to die on, it was Jesus’s birthday. This is really so not what he wants for his birthday, but I had started to feel guilty. There were no tangible guilt-making events that were in play here, just a floating sense of “I’m screwing up” that kept scratching at me. And nothing fixes guilt like an absolutely perfect Christmas.

  Meanwhile, the unicorn in the basement was practicing his Christmas carols.

  Tools were dropping to the ground all over the place. I had misplaced my Big Book. The morning devotionals were replaced by sleeping late, and my Serenity Prayer had been archived. As these things dwindled, my anxiety grew—the addict’s teeter-totter.

  I finally attended a meeting. I managed to wedge one in between Christmas shopping and heading home. My friend Keith—who is a dead ringer for Ernest Hemingway with a silver beard and grizzled manner—greeted me with “Where have you been? I’ve been worried about you” and gave me his viselike hug. I explained about all the church events, choir concerts, and caroling parties. He just looked at me and gripped my hand with his rough palm. Keith is officially an old-timer. He takes no crap. He loves me, and I felt his blue eyes bore into me as I rattled on. He was quiet, though, offering no warnings, no advice.

  The thing is, recovery is more than a metaphorical bag of tools that you schlep through life, one day at a time. It’s a heart issue. I had all the help I needed right in front of me. You can lead an alcoholic horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Or not drink, I guess, depending on how you look at it.

  My heart had gone cold.

  I once lost a precious earring: a tiny, dangly emerald that was misplaced somewhere in the mess of our bedroom. My husband had bought the pair for me way before kids—when we had disposable income and could afford romance in the form of precious, teeny-tiny gemstones. Lost things really annoy me, most often to the point of obsession. I need to find the lost item because if I don’t, I am a slob. I have been trying to convince myself this is not the case since I had two children. Unfortunately, slobdom and children are total besties.

  My stare swiveled around the room, and I vowed to find the earring because then, just once, I would be leading on the scoreboard: Mom 1, Slobdom 0.

  Twenty minutes later I was covered in cat fur, digging out the detritus underneath our ancient radiator. I found seventeen cents, forty Legos, three marbles, a golf ball, and something that looked like a sock but was so covered in grey fuzz I couldn’t tell. The pile sat before me, and I unfolded myself from the floor. One of the cats gleefully batted a marble across the room, and his footsteps stirred up poofs of grey fluff as he walked. I sighed.

  “I know you’re in here somewhere,” I growled. “It’s only a matter of time, earring.”

  I became a bit . . . unhinged. And all I had to show for it was a furry sock and some change.

  My Christmas unfolded in a similar fashion: me looking around frantically amongst the piles of wrapping paper and cookie sprinkles and hoping to find that one precious thing that would make it all better. And all the while, all I kept coming up with was dust.

  Three hundred yards of twinkle lights couldn’t answer a soul that was sick. But they were so sparkly. I was just like my cats, willing to bat the glittery bits around for a while until I was exhausted.

  About three days before Christmas, I stood in my kitchen, listening to one of my twelve Pandora Christmas stations—one station for every mood. As I stared at a menu for Christmas Eve, I thought, “All this needs is a nice glass of champagne.”

  Now, let’s be clear. This thought has occurred to me 157,980 times before. As an alcoholic, celebration drinking is difficult to let go. It’s understandable. It’s one of the last vestiges of drinking done right. Happiness and alcohol, actually together in the same room, had not been a thing with me at the end of my drinking days. I was a warm-vodka-out-of-a–plastic-bottle kind of girl at the end. But there had been days, long ago, when drinking happened because of just fun and happy things. When I quit drinking, picturing that golden, slender glass of delicate bubbles because a fun, happy thing was occurring nearly brought frustrated tears to my eyes. But it got better. Sobriety trumps fizzy alcohol anytime.

  That’s what recovery teaches us. And recovery is super smart and right, every time. Sober is Harvard University taking a look at your SAT scores, but still being nice about it. Before, when those itchy feelings of a drink would bubble to the surface of my brain, I would listen to recovery, and it would throw a few slogans my way, such as “Think through the drink,” or “Sober is bettah,” like my sober Boston buddy tells me. Or “What the hell is wrong with you? DRINKING IS NO LONGER AN OPTION, YOU NINNY.” Okay, that’s not a slogan that you would see printed and thumbtacked to a wall in my meetings, but it still works well.

  But this time, I guess Burl Ives and his holly jolly-ness drowned out that voice.

  No, that’s total crap. Burl Ives was not at fault. He’s Burl Ives. Nothing is ever Frosty’s fault.

  We are all built with an inner compass, and that inner compass is what directs us while watching our children sleep, eating kale, and watching videos of corgi puppies. However, it doesn’t push us; it simply points. And in my kitchen on that cold winter morning, I came to a decision.

  I was going to drink again.

  Just over the holidays, though.

  Because if I kept drinking, right on to Groundhog Day, that’s when I would have a problem.

  But who doesn’t drink on New Year’s Eve, really? (Sober people, for one. Sober people don’t drink on New Year’s Eve. And also me, for the past four years.)

  Then my vision became tunneled, and I tilted my chin a bit in that stubborn way I’ve done ever since I was little. And the planning started.

  Picture the briefing room at the White House before invading some bad country. That’s not even close to the workload involved here. Initially, I had to work on PR because this was not a relapse. It was a perfectly planned “break.” If I had had a bullet journal back then, I would have scheduled my “break” in tidy calligraphy.

  I didn’t actually start drinking until Christmas Eve. Waiting those extra days only further proved that this was not a problem. I was simply taking a vacation from sobriety for a short while.

  The trip to the liquor store was interesting, but I was on autopilot by this point, so I wasn’t really checking whether something interested me or not. I stuck to the plan.

  I stood in front the wine display and waited for all the bottles to lean forward and say, “Hey! Old friend! It’s so totally okay that you’re doing this because we know you’re just on a planned ‘break’! And look! Your favorite German wine with the super long name is on sale!”

  “Ja! Guten Tag!” said the German wine. The Italians just stared.

  I stared back at all the pretty bottles and waited for something like a blip of happiness to drip down into my heart, delivered via a wine IV.

  No spark of glee glistened back at me in those display cases. No inner Kevin Bacon shouted, “Let’s paaaaarty!” while I stood there. I looked around, searching for some fabulous new peppermint-flavored chardonnay for me to try, but no such luck. So, I grabbed my Gewürztraminer and then wandered through the mazes of bottles to the reds.

  I was going to get one bottle of red, and most of it would be used in my spaghetti sauce. This, of course, really played well i
n my “this is not crazy” plan. Red wine after nearly four years of hard-won sobriety wasn’t crazy; it was culinary. I picked up a bottle.

  After my stroll through the aisles, I headed to the checkout and made polite, “this is not batshit crazy, this is a break” small talk with the checker. I didn’t have any sort of major tremors or panic. I just coolly pulled out my credit card and discussed red sauce and holiday plans and whether prosecco is better than champagne. Somehow, in my mind, since I had decided I was taking a “break” from sobriety and doing all of this so rationally, with only two bottles in tow, I proved my point.

  I had this all under control.

  And I had lost my mind. But that was all under control, too. Because that’s how people who are going crazy on a nuclear level think.

  I plunked the bag down into the passenger seat, and that’s when the bottles started clinking. It was then that I made the shocking realization that I had wine in the car, and I was going to drive it home. For a moment, I wondered how I had made it out of the shop without lights or sirens or at least one of the salespeople pointing at me and screaming like those pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Don’t they have a list of alcoholics up by the register like they do with all the stolen-credit-card people?

  Even in my drinking days, I always had problems with liquor stores. Walking through their doors always made me feel uncomfortable because I felt at any moment someone would see me come back out, laden with bags of wine, and shout, “Unclean!”

  Perhaps it could have been that inner compass of mine, tugging at my sleeve and reminding me, “Alcoholism is plague-ish with your family, Dana. Let’s go get a McFlurry.” Also, I always wanted to look at ease amongst bottles and bottles of things I didn’t ever really feel old enough to understand. If there had been a section labeled “Don’t worry! This wine goes with everything,” I would have been thrilled. I attended a wine tasting once at a winery in Bordeaux, France, and all I remember is thinking, “Why do they keep giving us these teensy cups to drink out of? I don’t need to note the color. I just want to drink it, not paint with it.”