Hold this space

for some changes are afoot.

Hope to add the old stuff by the end of the summer, add links to other blogs, and generally get things organized.

Dry, clear-eyed, and all there

Two weeks ago I put down the bottle, got off the sauce, began a dry spell. I’m on a sparkling water-fueled trip to purer isles, where the cocktails are virgin and the beers near-. It’s not like I was slugging back Kahlúa with my morning coffee or slipping off to nip off a hidden bottle of Cognac. I never missed work because of booze binges. I maintained the proper ratio of loose to uptight between 5 and 9pm, generally remaining in a sometimes-hazy equilibrium on one to three glasses of wine a night. .

This was my way to relax and destress, but also to absent and anesthetize myself. Alcohol muddles the sharper feelings into indistinct, blameless aches. My sleep was crap and my mornings cranky. I started to wonder about the function of the evening ritual, how the warm blanket of cabernet sauvignon helped me to deny, ignore, or disregard my internal world. I also worried about the example I was setting for the boy about alcohol and routine, stress and substances — and what my nightly escape said about my desire to be present. I wanted to be a better example, clear-eyed and all there.

Adolescence can be a shifting, unstable place, where the temptation to disappear, to sink into something that softens and obscures, is strong and potentially dangerous. I’ve been drinking in one form or another, usually on the side of a bit too much, since I was fourteen. It started as a way to cope and quell anxiety, to not notice I wasn’t being noticed. It’s been decades since I was a messy drunk, a self-destructive youngster who craved the attention of another, whose dives into naked vulnerability generally ended in shame and the headache of morning. I’ve had fallow periods (pregnancy and the early days of motherhood), more intense spells (depressions; dissolutions), and now this, a break, perhaps something permanent. 

Or not. In theory I miss it, the blurring of the lines and deadening of sensibilities. Or I miss the anticipation of that first sip. Generally staying away from alcohol hasn’t been hard, which is confusing — if my consumption was ok-ish and taking a break not difficult, why stop forever? Why not allow bit of haziness on occasion? But it feels important to consider it, to imagine an alcohol-free future, facing the present as a full participant. 

One day at a time, as the saying goes.

Connection writ in blood and cell

There are reminders. 

My son’s long, tapered fingers are versions of my Dad’s. His ears are echoes from his paternal line, his feet an amalgam (arches from me, foot shape from the other guilty party, other parts unknown). Some characteristics link him to people whose names I will never know, broken family connections wrought by my mother’s adoption, while others click into the known (color blindness that ripples through three generations on my husband’s side) and the misty (clearly he is color blind in part because of my mother’s family contribution, which remains partly mystery). 

Some associations to people of the past are more material, like the cast-iron pan I roasted Brussels sprouts in last night. This pan, from my father-in-law’s collection, was originally seasoned with bacon and sausage fat. In my hands it has gone from carnivore to herbivore, more likely to shimmer with olive oil than lard. It does a lovely job at caramelizing Brussels sprouts, however. And I think of my father-in-law whenever I use it, imagining it on the stove in his apartment of the last 15 years, marked with a thin white sheen of bacon fat. It’s not the same as connections written in the DNA, but it still brings a person, a life, to mind. 

I can’t tell whose hands I have (is that you, Mom?), but my feet belong to Dad. Knowing this, staring down at my long toes, experiencing the occasional twinge in one of those high arches, does not have the same soothing effect as seeing my son’s hands. It is easier to mark outside of myself. Perhaps, I hope, it is there in other, less measurable parts of my boy as well – a certain clear-eyed sense of what is right, a complicated intelligence. Sometimes it is hard to tell what is the raw material and what is simply who we are and choose to be.

When my father focused on genetics, he often looked at dark trails of depression, heart disease, diabetes, and various autoimmune disorders. I still have the emails from my son’s year of fevers, my dad outlining the family maladies to help us connect the dots. So let me say this: my father was intelligent, funny, athletically gifted. He had an artistic sensibility. He could be brusque and too quick to sum things up. He was compassionate. He could sometimes be cruel. His fingers were long. His arches were high. He struggled. He kept at it until he didn’t have to anymore.

Our connection, writ in blood and cell, is primitive. It is physical. Reductive. I steal glances at my son’s hands and see my father’s hands. But I also remember the stories, the experiences, the ineffable essence of who my father was: irreducible to a series of maladies, separate from DNA. I remember. And so he lives on, in one way or another.