Belated trip report. Zelda, spider-man, mustachioed Frenchmen.

It’s been almost a week since our trip, but I thought maybe I should post about it since I’d been worried how it would go.

It went really, really well. It wasn’t my favorite trip, but it felt the easiest. My favorite trip was the time we were in the Central Park Zoo and looked up to see a plane spelling out a marriage proposal.

So far so good….

 

 

I don’t know what made that trip my favorite, but I’ll add it was that same white-knuckle trip from one year ago that felt so hard because I missed drinking. So you see, not-drinking doesn’t ruin anything.

I missed drinking one time this trip. We were waiting for a dinner table in an overly crowded restaurant in Times Square and the kids were fighting over the one free stool and my husband came over with a frosty pint of beer and it made me pretty sad to think “well I fucked that one up real good.” But that makes it sound like I screwed up once, and the reality is drinking and I had more than two decades of dysfunction.

The craving for beer passed, just like it always does. Copious amounts of good BBQ and diet coke helped. Afterwards my youngest and I walked back to the hotel and laid in bed and stared at moving pictures on the TV while my husband and oldest watched some guy dressed as Spider-Man hang and spin from a street lamp before the cops could shoo him away. I know that sounds like more fun, but I’ve learned to listen when my fun-meter is all full-up.

A good night’s sleep cured all, just like it always does. The next day we rode the Staten Island ferry and while my husband was pointing out the Statue of Liberty to our girls and explaining it was a gift from France, a mustachioed stranger I can only assume was French smiled proudly and said “Yes, it was.”

We walked around what was left of Battery Park and noticed a turkey in one of the gated-up playgrounds. You see a lot of things in New York City, but not usually turkeys.

The picture I took made it look like she didn’t have a head; this one is from nyctransported.com

Her name is Zelda and she survived Sandy and if you like inspirational stories about turkeys (you’re here, so duh), give her story a read: http://www.dnainfo.com/new-york/20121122/battery-park-city/battery-park-turkey-survives-hurricane-sandy-another-thanksgiving

Everything gets easier with practice in sobriety. Easier isn’t always the same thing as more fun, but what I love most about life is how unpredictably fun happens. I can do certain things to make fun more likely, like not eating at the busiest place and time possible with two exhausted kids and their cranky parents. Yes, I will do that next time.

Hope your weekend is filled with ease and fun.

Just Write

I’m a big fan of The Extraordinary Ordinary because of how beautifully she writes. I love the idea of trying to capture those weighty everyday moments without a lot of explanation. This is my attempt at Just Write.

I go into the living room to talk because it’s the one part of the house where calls don’t drop. The cat follows me. He probably thinks I’m talking to him. He’s 18 but he’s never used a phone before.

My little girl comes in next with a blanket, her new baby doll and a plastic tube of tiny knights she got on our trip to New York City. She lays the doll and blanket on the floor and lines up the knights on the keys of a 1978 Wurlitzer organ we rarely use and knocks them down with a green dragon, one by one.

I am talking to my grandmother on the phone. I had thought up many reasons not to call. I’m tired from our trip. I mailed her a mother’s day card and gift. I’ll call tomorrow. None of them beat the voice that waited patiently until the Brady Bunch episode with Peter’s terrible volcano was over and insisted Call Now.

My grandmother is 86 and does most of the talking. I know from phone logs that we usually talk for an hour, give or take 10 minutes. She tells me a lot of the same things each phone call and I’m not sure if this is because she forgets or thinks I forget.

She brings up things that happened a long time ago, like that time another family member got drunk and said terrible things three Thanksgivings ago. I was even there for it, but I know not to interrupt or argue the details because once I lost my patience and made her cry. She hung up on me and I felt like a drowning person must feel in that final moment when panic changes to relief but it’s still the end. Of course I called her back to apologize. Let’s start over, I said. She’s my grandmother.

For the 51 minutes we talk on the phone, my little girl comes and goes out of the room to watch bits of America’s Funniest Home Videos and report back to me.

A boy just pooped on a girl’s shoulder! she whispers in my non-phone ear and then steps back to watch my response. I raise both eyebrows and make an O with my mouth and think what kind of pea pickin’ show are they watching anyway. Later I realize she said bird, not boy.

My little girl climbs on my lap and gives random hugs and quiet I love yous and then rolls herself up in a blanket and lays so long and still at my feet that I am sure she’s fallen asleep.

The last five minutes of my phone call are me trying to find the exit. My phone battery is dying and l tell her and she says Just wait a minute and tells me what her mechanic said about her car battery. She also says And another thing, just like they do in the movies. My grandmother fled her Soviet occupied Baltic state when she was a young woman and still speaks with a heavy sing-songy accent that I found soothing as a little girl.

In the end, I am saved by a raccoon. One minute my grandmother is telling me what her mechanic told her and the next I hear her rapping on glass to scare off a raccoon that is washing his paws in a water dish she keeps on her back porch for the birds. No wonder that water is so dirty! she says.

The raccoon’s presence has boosted her mood and she tells me she is happy I called. We say goodbye and I feel something loosen inside me. I go upstairs to plug in my phone to charge and my little girl follows me upstairs like a puppy wrapped in a blanket with a sprinkle of freckles across her nose.

My daughters and I in Battery Park. (Puppy on the left.)

How to pack for the big apple.

This weekend we are going to New York City for mother’s day. This is possibly a funny destination for a mother who doesn’t really like the city, yet I’m the one who picked it so maybe it’s growing on me. No homemade pencil holder and fussy brunch for this mother. I’ll take a heaping dose of street Elmos and a knish, plus whatever else I couldn’t possibly see coming, thank you.

I’ve never had an easy relationship with the city, and here are some early memories to prove it.

I am 7 years old and it’s sweltering summer. This is the same summer I collected a bunch of those brown and white vertically striped caterpillars you see everywhere for a brief period. They were literally falling out of the trees across the street, and being an animal lover, I couldn’t help but see them as furry pets I could keep in a cardboard box on the front porch. I scooped them up in soft, wiggly handfuls and lined the box with plenty of shiny green leaves and got the worst (but far from only) case of poison ivy in my life. No amount of cortisone shots or oatmeal soaks could undue the elephantine swelling of my face, so when we went to NYC and my parents gave the fare collector our tokens for the subway, he took one look at me and whispered “she can ride free.”

The other trip that stands out is a drama club trip in 12th grade to see a boring musical about a hotel. I think it was called Hotel. I slept through most of it, exhausted from not much sleep the night before in a Hoboken hotel. I wish I could say I’d stayed up all night having a makeout party in the bathtub like another girl in our group, but instead I’d laid awake in terror because I had to share a room with Betsy Carr, a bulldog of a girl who hated me for reasons I never understood.

Earlier that day, Betsy had taken the tray of McDonald’s food I’d ordered and paid for. It took me awhile to figure out and then a bit longer to shakily accuse her and ask for it back. She’d probably eaten a good many fries and maybe licked my cheeseburger too by then. She gave a sheepish smirk and slid the tray back over to me, but made sure I suffered that night in our shared hotel room. She called me and the German foreign exchange student names – dork, loser, lezbo – and threatened to beat us up when we laughed at her anger. I laid in bed that night wishing I were home and wondering why she hated me so much when I went through life trying to go mostly unnoticed.

There have been more recent odd, unpleasant NYC memories, like the one from the month before I quit drinking. I’d recently started on an antidepressant that made my jaw clench up involuntarily and sped up my brain about 20 miles per hour, but not in any helpful way. I drank more to slow it down, but it just made me have to pee more. I stood in the forever-long line for the tiny but surprisingly clean bathroom at Bryant Park and found myself in an uncomfortably intimate and dark conversation with two strange women about cancer and sex. I had the thought “what am I doing? what’s wrong with me?”

None of these uncomfortable city memories had anything to do with the city. In all three, I had brought my baggage from home. You can get away from it all, but rarely from yourself.

Last mother’s day we went to the city and it was a bit of a white knuckle trip. I was just shy of a year sober and being in an old stressful place without the old comforts sparked a lot of cravings. I do not expect that will be the case this time, but expectations are tricky bitches and so I’d rather leave mine at home, at least as much a possible.

Still, I am excited and what I am most excited about is the company. I’m going with my husband and daughters and I’m in the middle of a second or third or twelfth honeymoon period with these beautiful people that I’m so lucky to have in my life. I’m not a believer in forgetting the painful stuff, but I’ll leave the caterpillars and bullies and drunk talk behind and hopefully just take it all in.

Unaccomplishments

So you don’t think I only write obnoxious posts about stuff I have done, I will write an obnoxious post about some things I have not done. 

 

I did not finish CampNanoWrimo. I set a word count goal of 30,000 and only made it to 19,116. I was basically the kid who gets sent home the last week of camp due to an unfortunate incident involving fire ants. So I missed the end-0f-camp dance and bonfire, but maybe I learned archery, which is harder than it looks. One night I sat down to tap out a few words for campnanowrimo and found a story I didn’t even know my brain could create. It was all spit and no polish, but damn, it felt right.

I am not doing meditation or yoga class anymore, though I will probably come back to both at some point.

I am not sticking to my low sugar plan. I don’t have this one licked, folks, which makes me think of lollipops and ice cream cones, which I love very, very much and probably always will. I’ve gained a couple of pounds or I haven’t, depending on which day of the week I weigh myself and where (scales at doctor’s offices are assholes), but it really isn’t about the number. I don’t feel good after I binge because it feels like secretive self-sabotage and how I used to be and don’t want to be anymore.

Still, I am tired of trying to tame the sugar demon and think I might sit with him for awhile. I feel a certain tenderness towards my demons, no doubt due to Running on Sober’s poem about cuddling with hers. This is not the same as feeling like I want to give up or give in to old cravings, so I’m not sure how it will turn out yet.

I am trying new things I never would have before. I am learning which things I am good at (ie archery) and which I am not (ie fire ants). I report them here in my battle against the need for perfectionism and control. A little failure is in order here and now that I found it, I will linger with it for a bit in a way that feels decidedly sweet.

Hope you have a wonderful weekend.

 

we are the 10%

The other day I had lunch with a friend I met in AA when we were both wobbly and unsteady in sobriety. She always looked perfectly put together, but when I first heard her speak, she sounded tiny and scared and I instantly identified. She is one day shy of one month behind me in sober time, so we’re both closing in on two years. If you believe the statistics on the success rate of AA, or any program of recovery for that matter, you’d think that’s really something. The statistics don’t explain why nearly everyone I still keep in touch with from AA is also still sober. Most of the bloggers I’ve followed here for the last year are still sober too. I know sobriety is never guaranteed and that we must work to keep it, but I’m not sure why fear seems to rule the roost.

My lunch friend still attends almost daily AA meetings. I haven’t been to a meeting since September. While I got a lot out of meetings and believe they saved me in a way I couldn’t have saved myself that first sober summer, I had started to feel more put upon than helped. I would go back if I felt the need to, but for now meetings are not for me.

It was mostly an issue of not enough time for meetings and not feeling ready to give back through sponsoring others and chairing meetings. Each time my youngest kid saw I had left the car parked in the driveway at night, she would ask “mommy, do you have a meeting tonight?” If I answered yes she would say “oh” in her sad voice. If I told her no, that I wasn’t going to a meeting, she would say “yay!” In a dual-income home with tricky schedules and no easy childcare, giving up precious family time to go to meetings caused more strain than support. My family is my number one priority right now.

One thing I kept hearing at meetings, though, is that my sobriety should always come first. The idea behind this is that if I don’t stay sober, I don’t get to keep all the good things in my life, like my family, my job and that elusive peace of mind. I just don’t see regular attendance at meetings as something I need in order to stay sober anymore.

In the months after I stopped going, I watched my moods with hypervigilance for signs that sobriety was slipping away. When I found I felt more peaceful and stronger than I had before (likely a result of continued, strengthened sobriety more than anything else), I started to relax and worry less about relapse.

Just like it took a leap of faith to go into AA in the first place, it took a leap to step out. The thing about AA is that when you stop going to meetings but stay sober, there’s little distinction between you and someone who goes back out and starts drinking again. If you’ve seen the depressing statistic that less than 5% still attend AA meetings at the end of one year, you too might assume the remaining 95% percent relapse. It’s more likely that many of them took what they needed and went on to work sobriety in a way that suited them better.

I just finished reading a book called Sober for Good . I heard about it when I was still new to AA but purposely avoided it when I saw it dispelled the myth that AA is the only program that works. Even though intellectually I knew this was true, at the time AA was meeting my needs and I already felt baffled by the animosity I saw directed at the program – often by people who have never been to a meeting.  I just wasn’t ready to hear about other approaches at the time. Now I’m in a place where I’m not only ready but maybe need to know there are others out there finding and maintaining their sobriety in non-traditional ways.

Sober for Good tells the stories of 222 “masters” who quit drinking for at least five years, many for much longer (note: a very small percentage continued drinking moderately, but the book’s focus is on abstinence). More than half of those interviewed got or stayed sober through non-traditional methods, ie not AA. Many of them used other programs, such as SMART recovery , Women for Sobriety , or Secular Organizations for Sobriety.  Incidentally, none of these organizations hold meetings in my immediate area, yet there are about 15 AA meetings within a 15 mile radius every single day. There’s something to be said for convenient face-to-face contact with other people going through the same thing as you.

Sober for Good mentions that most problem drinkers are pushed towards traditional 12-step meetings, while little information is given or even known about other treatment options. It’s much harder to find alternate help and almost easier to try it completely on your own. This is what a lot of people do. Successfully. Is their sobriety any less real than someone who went to rehab and then AA?

Yet it does seem that we make up separate, almost warring, factions in sobriety. Those in AA often speak the language and take flak for doing so. It doesn’t seem to bother them, except maybe when they have to defend their beloved program against accusations that it’s really a religious cult.

If you’re doing it on your own, you might bristle at the term dry drunk. I first heard it from a counselor and later by random individuals to describe someone who gives up alcohol but doesn’t participate in a formal program of recovery. It’s equally insulting.

At lunch with my old AA friend, I brought up the isolation I sometimes feel because I stopped going to meetings. I was quick to add that I hadn’t felt that from her or any of the small handful of people I still keep in touch with from AA.

My friend said “I think we’re all just afraid we’re not doing it right.”

I think she nailed it. I used to feel more threatened when I heard about someone’s markedly different approach to sobriety because I was too new to my own. My life was still in a fairly constant state of chaos and upset. I was still relearning how to cope and celebrate and frankly just live without alcohol. Maybe I was struggling too because I hadn’t found the right program of recovery for me personally. Maybe I haven’t found it even now because it keeps changing as it needs to.

Right now I follow a pretty satisfying routine of family time, work, running, writing, reading and seeking harmony in the world around me. I’m not going to list all of the substance-free vices I still indulge in, but I’m pretty sure they’re part of my recovery right now too. The most important part of my recovery are the principles I learned in AA and still use to stay centered and healthy. If I were a different sort of person, I might have learned them from another program or from a book or a blog. To each his own.

One more statistic I want to highlight from Sober for Good is this: of the estimated 7% of Americans with serious drinking problems, only 10% will pursue treatment. (I know the blogging community is diverse, and imagine this number applies to other nationalities as well.) It would seem then that if you’re reading this and you’re sober or working towards sobriety, you’re already part of something remarkable. The blogging community offers a unique view of the many ways to get and stay sober. I’m proud to be a part of it and I hope one day we all find more tolerance and support and that even more people come to know the joys of sobriety.

Sometimes I can be scary

Imagine a grown woman first crouching down behind a tree and then scampering back and forth between several more trees in the middle of a mostly deserted park that is mostly used by runners. Imagine this woman chuckling a bit maniacally and the only thing that might save this woman from looking completely insane is the five-year old child with her. But mind you, this child is rather small and so the woman runner with earbuds might have only noticed me acting like a weirdo.

I thought about calling out to the runner “I’m only playing hide and go seek!” but some reassurances do not reassure. Anyway, I wasn’t about ready to give up my spot (which was a very good hiding spot) so I continued to crouch behind the fattest tree and the woman runner diverted off the running path and got the fuck out of there.

Afterwards, I felt really bad. I had just read Running on Sober’s poignant, ultimately uplifting piece on what it means to be a runner after the Boston marathon bombing. I realized this woman runner I spooked was probably on heightened alert after what happened in Boston. As a woman, I would not want to run in this park alone because it is secluded and I am a scaredy cat.

I got sucked back into a thrilling high stakes game of hide and seek and forgot about the woman runner until I saw her drive off in her car, which had been parked near the trees where my daughters were then hiding. I like to think she saw them lurking and running and crouching and realized our actions were not sinister.

Incidentally, this was the first time we’d been to this park in more than 7 years of living in the area. It was like stepping into a Miyazaki film, which is what I love most about where we live.

Nestled in a huge tract of land, the focal points are an ancient, ornate water tower and mansion, which once served as a summer home and later a retreat for sick white women. I mention the white part because that was apparently a stipulation of the man who willed it to the Episcopalians in 1893. Part of this land is now home to a drug and alcohol rehab where I had a humbling speaking experience last summer. I had been asked to share my story at an on-site 12-step meeting, but was not prepared for the mostly black male audience.

I think of this as somehow full circle from the land’s intended purpose as a retreat for sick white ladies. I was sick from alcohol, afterall, and I am white. Sometimes I even still act a bit sick, especially if you see me crouching behind trees and scaring lady joggers. If you look beyond race and gender and afflictions, I was really just a person playing hide and go seek with with my kids in a spot of heaven on a perfect spring day. Nothing more, nothing less.

The water tower near the tree I was hiding behind, and of course you can’t see me because I am an excellent hider.

An old something I wrote

I wrote the following bit last January, shortly before I took up running. I was a little over 6 months sober at the time. I thought about it this morning when I went running past the house with the Peter Rabbit statue. The old house with the mean dogs changed owners and is currently under renovation…probably being flipped is my guess.

I found out the hoarder house belongs to one of two spinster sisters. The other lives in the house across the street with the tangly yard. They both spend most of their time at a vacation home in the Poconos.

You can learn so much in a year.

If you’re newly sober, I’m not advocating that you take up running or being nosy. Reading or rollerskating will do just as well if they keep you engaged and challenged. I’m just grateful I harnessed the restlessness I felt at the time. I think running saved me in a lot of ways.

p.s. I still haven’t spotted those white deer since.

p.p.s. You’ve probably already seen this link on other sober blogs, but a graduate student asked if I would post a link to a survey for married couples where drinking has been an issue of concern. If interested, go here!

Running – January 10, 2012

Every day I do 30 minutes of exercise, but it’s all very old-lady like, so that’s probably why I’m not cut and buff and ripped and all those hard words fit people throw around.In the basement I have an elliptical machine I bought with my bonus check four years ago. It runs on two D batteries and I only ever put it up to level 3 because level 4 feels like trying to walk through sand up to my thighs. It slips off track if I use the arm levers, so I don’t use the arm levers. I read and tread in small, slightly resistant circles for a half hour to work up a fine bead of sweat and then finish up with 120 situps. I know that sounds like a lot of situps, but I do them on a situp bench, which is like doing 10 situps on the ground, only it’s easier.

My preferred exercise is a 30-minute 2-mile lap around the neighborhood behind where we live. It’s the sort of workout your grandmother could keep up with, plus we would have a lot to talk about during our walks.

For about a month, I saw two white deer almost every time I walked. I only managed one fuzzy picture of one from far away, but I swear they were real. I haven’t seen them in months, though I always look.

This is my favorite house to walk past. It’s a hot mess of old cars, plus someone spray painted Ball Star on the basketball backboard. It’s right across from a park where someone defaced a baby swing by painting a cartoonish penis on the front. To tell the truth, I never much noticed the penis until my older kid pointed out one visit that it was no longer there. Where did the penis go? So many mysteries.

Sometimes when I walk, I see moving trucks and feel like I’m losing a neighbor, though I don’t know them and it’s not even my neighborhood. Once I saw a man in his late 50s bring a box of loose this-and-thats out to a U-Haul trailer. I’d never seen him before, but I knew his house because it was the one with the dirtpile backyard and two mean-ass barking dogs tied up to weak-looking ropes. I transferred my dislike of the dogs to the man and imagined his wife finally had enough of his mean ass. I saw a pickup truck pull up and the man walked over with his box still in hand and talked with whoever was inside – an older couple – and I walked on because it was not my neighborhood or my neighbor or my business.

When I turned and got to the end of the next street, the pickup truck drove past and pulled into the driveway of a house I knew because I’d seen the guy walking his schnauzer before and both were very friendly. Days later, I was surprised to see this Peter Rabbit statue in the friendly man’s yard because it used to be in the mean man’s yard.

I wondered if their conversation had been about the statue.

“Jean told us you’re moving out. Patty and I are just so sorry.”


“Yeah, that bitch can go to hell. You want this fucking rabbit? If you don’t, I’m going to break it into a million pieces and feed it to the dogs.”

Though what kind of mean man has a Peter Rabbit statue in his yard? It is possible I snap-judged him wrong.

Maybe you think I’m too nosy, and this may be. At least I’m not like the neighbors who came outside to openly stare when police pulled up and walked to the front door of the house where an old woman lives. I’d seen her many summer nights sitting in a camp chair in front of a one-car garage, which was open and packed to the ceiling with crap. It was all stacked neatly, like some impossible game of Jenga because it was all real stuff like broken chairs and tea kettles and empty wooden frames and folded army tents.

The policeman wore a brown short-sleeved shirt and brown shorts. I had no idea policemen could wear shorts until that night. I was walking past – staring discreetly, not like those neighbors – but I saw the policeman talking and pointing to her open garage in a respectful, almost apologetic way that made me feel equally sorry for him and the old lady. Hoarders is my least favorite show of all time, outranking even The Beverly Hillbillies, so the whole short scene just about broke my heart.

Lately when I walk, I feel like I want to start running. Maybe it’s boredom with routine (though the route has plenty of hills, so it’s challenging) or maybe I’m anxious to get back and get things done (though the down time and fresh air are wonderful), or maybe I don’t want to see any more heartbreak in things.

If I go by faster, things will look different and I will get a better workout. I’m ready for a change.

Warm and fuzzy math

If you had told 7th grade me I would one day use math every day at my job, I would have said get the fuck out, minus the fuck because I was a pretty good kid. I was not good at math, though, and in fact struggled so much I was downgraded to a class for math misfits. I muddled through, with strong hope that I would at least not need to remember algorithms and linear equations. And I don’t, but I do a lot of simple math every day.

Yesterday I went back for the third time to the early morning runner’s group I joined to learn to run faster. The first time I showed up late and had no idea what we were supposed to be doing. Everyone else ran really fast and I left feeling pretty discouraged. The second week, I showed up on time but didn’t understand the directions and everyone else ran so fast I lost the group altogether and felt even more discouraged. Walking back to my car, I started talking with a veteran member, who told me his pace one day increased mysteriously. Yesterday I showed up and again didn’t really understand the directions and again was passed regularly by herds of runners who remind me of light-footed gazelles. But yesterday I also beat my old personal record from October. I did some math and calculated a 27% increase in speed from when I first got my running watch in June. I’m elated and motivated and so glad I didn’t give up.

I’m also doing the Camp Nanowrimo thing this month, though I’m only 6.7% through my self-prescribed word count goal and already 10% through April. I’ve decided I won’t get 100% bummed if I don’t make it because, you see, for the first time ever I’m sitting down to write creatively and so far I love it. Plus I still have 90% left of April. And please don’t correct my math if I’m wrong because I didn’t even do any better in that 7th grade class for math misfits. I transferred back out because if I was going to get a C in math, my parents figured it might as well be in regular math.

I’m reminded once again why it’s important to stick with something. Oftentimes I have this quiet but persistent voice in my head telling me what I’m doing won’t work and why. Occasionally, another voice that is never my own will offer another point-of-view. It will tell me I can get faster or write something substantial and all I have to do is keep running and writing, though never at the same time. If I just keep putting one foot in front of the other or huddling over the keyboard in my spare time (ha), I may one day not recognize myself anymore, but in the best possible way.

How metta

After writing how I’d only tried meditation once at home, I felt pressure to try again. Doing it once a week in class is fine, but to reap all the benefits, I know I need to practice regularly. Yesterday morning, I found myself vexed over a difficult person I am forced to spend a lot of time around, and it dawned on me that meditation might help.

I guess everyone has someone like this in their life. My person is consistently negative, two-faced, ungrateful and oblivious to it all. Lately, everything about her rubs me the wrong way and the other day I overheard her whispering to someone else (yet again) and I think it might have been about me. Gossip is all fun and games until it’s about me.

And what do I do with all this negative energy towards someone with an already abundant supply of negative energy? Ignore her? Oh I wish. Tell her off? Not my style and not an option anyway. Pray for her? Maybe something like that.

The other day in meditation class the instructor had us do what’s called a metta meditation, also known as a loving kindness meditation. Instead of focusing on the breath, you silently repeat a series of phrases focused around wishing someone freedom from harm and distress. Usually you start with yourself as the subject and then move onto the people you love, animals, strangers, and even enraged people that gesture wildly at you from the safety of their own car.

This is an example of a traditional metta meditation directed towards another person:

1. May she be safe and protected.

2. May she be peaceful and happy.

3. May she be healthy and strong.

4. May she have ease of well being and accept all the conditions of the world.

Because I have a lifelong inability to memorize songs or phrases plus a handy tendency to just wing it when I need to recall unfamiliar words (as a kid, I knew you were supposed to follow the speed lemon and that my babysitter loved watching soap boxers), I made up my own list of four things I wished for this person. I don’t think the words matter so much as the sentiment. When I repeated them, I genuinely meant them. I was wishing goodwill towards her for ten solid minutes.

Speed lemon (thanks google images, this makes up for all the scary searches!)

Why would metta meditation work? Does me sitting in my kitchen thinking positive thoughts send them drifting over like puffy clouds, which shower her with rainbow-glitter-happiness? Probably not, though that does sound kind of cool (or creepy).

I suspect it works by retraining the way I think about her. The metta meditation reminds me very much of the two-week resentment prayer I heard about long ago at a 12-step meeting.

If you have a resentment you want to be free of, if you will pray for the person or the thing that you resent, you will be free. If you will ask in prayer for everything you want for yourself to be given to them, you will be free…Even when you don’t really want it for them, and your prayers are only words and you don’t mean it, go ahead and do it anyway. Do it every day for two weeks and you will find you have come to mean it and to want it for them, and you will realize that where you used to feel bitterness and resentment and hatred, you now feel compassionate understanding and love.

I am not a pray-er because praying still calls to mind asking for a better grade than I deserve or immediate repeal of unfortunate consequences after I did something really stupid. Meditation is my version of prayer, plus there’s no mention of doing a metta meditation every day for two whole weeks.

Does it work? I did feel better afterwards. I felt less consumed by my own negative feelings. I felt more peaceful and focused, which is usually the case immediately after I meditate. Later in the day, I felt myself get riled up again, so maybe there are no shortcuts on the two week rule.

Because I can’t change difficult people or let everything roll off my back, the only thing I know to do is try and retrain the way I think about them. There have been plenty of people in my life that I’ve viewed in a more positive light than they probably deserved, myself included. Even if metta meditation is just a trick of the light, the end result is a greater good.

The master sticks to her tools.

                  - Lao Tzu (and probably more than a few fortune cookies)

For the past couple of months, I’ve been going to a weekly yoga/meditation class. It’s on Sunday mornings, so I’ve missed a couple when we were out of town, but I like the instructor and the class,  so I keep coming back. It’s hard, though. I consider myself in pretty good shape, but I’m about as  limber as an arthritic elephant. Instead of the usual gentle beginner’s yoga I’m used to, she has us do poses that stretch ligaments and fascia. The idea is to make it more comfortable to sit  for long periods of time and meditate.

About the meditation. One morning I sat for 15 minutes in my quiet darkened living room and kept bringing my focus back to the breath each time another thought scampered across my monkey brain. It wasn’t a bad experience – no worse than any in meditation class – but I haven’t done it since. Morning time, for now anyway, is for navel-gazing journaling and working out at home when I know I won’t be able to get out for a run or to the gym. I don’t want to fiddle with a routine that works, though I plan to  join a runner’s group that meets one morning a week for speedwork.

In my last post I said I wanted new writing and running goals, and both floated into my inbox within several days. The running goal came via an e-newsletter from our local running store.  The writing goal came in a post from Rising Woman, who’s off to writing camp next month. I may join her and you can too because the best part about this camp is it’s held in the comfort of your own life, which will require discipline but at least there won’t be poison ivy. It’s an offshoot of NaNoWriMo, which I’ve always wanted to try but the 50,000 word count loomed too large in my mind. Camp NaNoWriMo is still outside my comfort zone, but I can set my own goals. Now on to the simple task of picking what the hell I’ll write about.

The universe always seems to give me what I need. I’ve had another rough week that really bears no explanation because this is just Normal Life Stuff. And I’ve found help dealing with it in the handiest of places, like the internetz and from the people I love and even this book my yoga instructor recommended called Meditations from the Mat. It’s a daily collection of easily digestible teachings based on the eight limbs of yoga. I liked this book even before I learned the author is in recovery himself. (I love when I’m reading a book or blog and learn that. I feel like I’m meeting another member to some secret club.)

From Day 11 in Meditations from the Mat…

We get the job, we don’t get the job; we get married, we don’t get married; our family is well, our family is troubled…our demons are melting away, our demons are at the door; we wake up with a love for life, we wake up with free-floating anxiety…Through it all, though, we come back to the mat…we do the next right thing.

The mat is literally a yoga mat in this case, but doing the next right thing became my higher power early in sobriety, so I like its real-world application. I do usually try to do the next right thing, but sometimes I don’t realize I’ve missed the mark until it’s too late. I can feel sorry for myself or deny any involvement, but the quickest way out of a low seems to be in accepting that life simply sucks sometimes and then looking at what I can do differently next time.