Being a mom is hard. Being a sober mom is also hard. I’m not sure one is harder than the other, but being sober means no wine breaks for me at the end of hard days (replace that with a meeting or zoom meeting nowadays, or maybe a complaint call to my sponsor and or a friend, or praying in the bathroom if I get reaallllllyy desperate).
Recently every day seems to be a ‘hard day.’ Four-year-olds aren’t meant to do everything from screens and not be able to actually see their friends. Parents aren’t made to work from home while teaching from home while not losing their fucking minds (maybe some are, but I’m 99.9% sure I am not). How the fuck do stay-at-home moms do it?
I tend to see everything from a really selfish and narrow lens when I’m feeling overwhelmed. Currently, I feel like I am drowning and it’s only been two weeks of being inside. I sometimes forget there is a very serious thing happening outside my front door because I am so focused on the quicksand in my own home. Tensions are high and the snacks are running out.
At almost ten years sober it’s still surprising to me how fast I can slip back into my crazy bullshit. When I first got sober the idea of not getting loaded for that long seemed completely unreasonable. Now I know it’s a day at a time. No, like really, a day at a time (a pandemic really makes that very clear).
Not since I got sober, strung out and desperate enough to take direction from someone other than myself, have I REALLY been living one day at a time. Now I am being pushed (or dragged screaming) into practicing that again. I guess parenting during a pandemic is the new kicking heroin for me.
I want to start looking at this through the lens I was gifted with during my early sobriety, that things happen for a reason, and there are no mistakes. I’ve been trying to take a breath before losing my shit, writing gratitude lists when I remember they exist, and reciting the set aside prayer so I can have a new experience with my family (that doesn’t involve screaming and crying) and stop living in self-centered fear.
I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing this because I am not the center of the universe and everything that I go through is not unique to me, nor is everything ABOUT me. The mayor of LA said this lockdown could last months, so I guess I have a lot of time to work on being a better parent/partner/person. Wish me luck.
