730 times

It’s been 2 years.

2 years
365 days
plus 365 days
or
24 hours
strung together
730
times.

I suppose I could go on with all kinds of numbers, but I’m terrible at math and the day must go on. That’s what they do, you know. The days go on, sometimes walking and sometimes running and sometimes marching. Oh the ones that march, they are the stompy and defiant ones, annoying and hard but entirely necessary.

This morning I woke up to Elsie Talk, crackling at me over the monitor.  I went to get her and nursed her in bed and when she was done she looked up at me and made the silliest face you’ve ever seen. Then Miles came in and sniffed her head and sniffed her head some more. It’s his favorite thing to do. We got up, we three early risers and I made coffee and thought my thinks about being sober for two years. Or, I sort of thought about it momentarily because there was spit up and Nutella and the answering of questions. That’s how it is, I suppose. I don’t get a lot of time to think about much, but when I do think about how many days have been pulled together with no alcohol, I’m still astonished.

While I still struggle with so many of the same old things so much of the time, everything is different. My brain constantly wants to fall back into its ‘isms’ and I get very little time or energy to fight that, and yet, glorious grace abounds in the way that I am still sitting her un-hung-over. It is there in the face of a baby I have no idea if I would have had if I were still consuming copious amounts of red wine and tequila and whiskey, and my heart implodes at the thought of not knowing Elsie Jane. Then Grace h0vers around the way that I can pull it together for these children, to make it just a few more hours with some semblance of patience intact in a way I never could before. And it is there when I totally don’t have patience and I’m able to forgive myself.

It is there in the way that I’m learning to accept myself just exactly as I messy am every once and a while, and it is there in the hope that I can do more of that, as more days pull together.

Here we are, two years later and one recent night I was driving home and it had been a hard day with Big Things in it and I thought, I don’t have to drink. I used to think something akin to, I don’t get to drink, maybe like I felt sorry for myself for not being like normal drinkers. But it hit me, I was a person driven to booze like a moth to a flame, one who could not focus on much other than the carrot at the end of the stick and now, even on that not-so-good day that would have driven me straight to a bottle, I could drive along and not be driven.

That’s a miracle.

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