“My mom goes better with gin,” was my typical answer when someone asked. She lives eight hours away, so visits tend to last several days. This was the first time I visited her sober in twenty years. My mother and I generally get along and there’s a lot of love between us. However, she inserts barbs where I still don’t expect them. I react despite years of therapy. 

“Do you think those pants are getting a little tight?” is one of her favs, & any reply that starts; “You think you’ve had it hard?” Being tipsy helped smooth over those little cuts, let me float right past them without having to think about how much they hurt. I don’t get visibly drunk, as that would create its own problems.  My mother is an adult child of an alcoholic and she does not cope well with obvious intoxication. I ride a good buzz for the days and try not to piss her off, and this has “worked” for some time.

But this Thanksgiving was different. I am newly sober. My mother has a well-stocked liquor cabinet for entertaining. I knew there was a bottle of my favorite gin that I had hidden the last time I visited. All of this added up to some pretty significant anxiety about the holiday. I got those awful internal quivers as I drove up to her house, my heart started to beat faster, and I sat in my car for a while slowing down my breathing before I knocked on her door. 

My sponsor and I had a plan. When I arrived the day before Thanksgiving I would find the hidden bottle of gin, pour it down the drain, and text her. The plan went perfectly! No more booze I could sneak. But as the day went on, I began to get that old feeling that I needed to have a drink to cope with Mom. In fact, I not only needed a drink, it might be a very good idea to go to the liquor store on a pretend errand so I could have “just a few” shots to get me through the evening. Instead I went to an AA Zoom meeting. I shared about my feelings. I called several people from my home group and asked for help.  

But what made it harder was the fact that my stepfather, who died a year ago, had a bar in the basement where I stayed. There was no booze there anymore, but the whole damn room was a literal shrine to alcohol. I had never really noticed it before, but now that I wasn’t drinking it was like a tsunami of triggers coming at me all at once. The display cases of shot glasses. The empty wine bottles with silly stoppers in them. The Guinness signs and drinking glassware and beer steins and bottle openers and a HUGE neon Budweiser sign on the wall. All of that was suddenly staring me in the face. I knew I was still in trouble. 

So… I did something. I removed that damn shrine with all its triggers and hid everything in a closet. The only thing I had to leave in view was that god-awful monstrous Budweiser sign which was screwed to the wall. And then I went to get my mother. I led her to the room to apologize for what I’d done, but before she even noticed it, I did something completely unexpected to both of us: I looked at her and for the first time ever I told someone outside the rooms of AA that I was an alcoholic. 

Holy shit.

My mother looked at me for a long moment.  Then she reached up and gently held my face in her hands. “I know,” she said, and then we were both crying, holding each other while she whispered, “I love you no matter what,” in my ear. After a while I showed her what I had done and apologized and was honestly surprised that instead of getting angry she said, “I’ve been thinking about getting rid of all this stuff, anyway.” The relief and gratitude that flooded through me was almost palpable. I didn’t have to hide and sneak and lie to her any longer. Not like I’d been doing that successfully at all, it appeared.

We ended up having a good visit. I was able to shrug off her occasional digs and let them go instead of running to a bottle of gin. She seemed more relaxed because she knew I was sober. I began to realize that my mother didn’t have to be paired with gin for us to enjoy each other’s company. I am not so naïve as to think that from now on all will be sunshine and unicorns in our relationship. She is still my mother with all her old painful behaviors in frequent use. What has actually changed is me. I am now a woman who doesn’t have to experience the reality of my world through the lens of alcohol but can instead be fully present, visiting my mother with gratitude and grace instead of shame.

Contributor to The Sober Curator: K. Ruede

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