Daily Gratitude List 12.26.22

The Real Gift

I’m grateful for a really lovely Christmas. I’m grateful for a Christmas-edition of pork and sauerkraut. I’m grateful for a soft, pretty morning.I’m grateful adventure on the horizon. I’m grateful for a gorgeous walk in Central Park. I’m grateful for all of the things I thought couldn’t happen. I’m grateful to be sober today.

I hope that if Christmas is your thing, it was lovely. It was very, very lovely here. My son is on leave from the Navy and arrived yesterday. We had made the determination that, even though it was Christmas, since we won’t see each other on New Year’s Day, we would have pork and sauerkraut for dinner. In case you didn’t know this, pork and sauerkraut on New Year’s Day, is essential to securing the lucky bounces for 2023. He regaled me with stories of his time at sea (so far, a ten-day live fire and helicopter operations training cruise). It was hard to hear many of the details he was so vividly discussing, because I was trying to wrap my head around the idea that other adults on a combat ship call him “Sir.”

You see, in my mind’s eye, he’s still wearing pajamas with feet in them and getting all excited after watching “Space Jam” for the 132nd time. We repair to the Fisher-Price basketball set-up in the basement and I get posterized again and again. There is ferocious dunking going on, amid garbled three-year old trash talk, “Take it to the Hooch,” he shout-giggled as he crashed towards the rim, oblivious to the fact that I had established position and he was clearly going to take a charging call here and have the “hooch” waved off. He didn’t care. It’s a vicious, two-handed Daryl Dawkins “glass is flying, Robinzine crying, ain’t no playing, get out of the waying” dunk. The impact knocks me off my knees and he falls on top of me with his rumbly, Winnie-the-Pooh belly laugh. He scrambles up, so that he can stand over me, laugh derisively and proclaim:

How you like me now?

I don’t know where he learned all of that. My official position is also that I’m unaware of how exactly he learned all of the words to “Dude Looks Like a Lady” when he was five.

My drinking and the ensuing divorce, was pretty hard on a certain 15 year-old. It definitely left marks and it breaks my heart a little to see them. The cute, cuddly, always-laughing boy had to go through a lot. There are lots of moments I wish I didn’t have to remember, but he does, so I do, too. I think healing isn’t about forgetting; I think it happens when two people hold on to some common pain, and each other, until things get better. And things get better, they really do.

One of the worst memories I have is a dinner with M. in 2019. I was proudly proclaiming how sober I was, how great things were, how my newest relationship was the thing that was going to save me. Look, it’s already working! We were at our favorite Chinese restaurant in DC and I was drunk. He knew it the whole time. Things got pretty frosty after that, and there was more bad stuff to come. When he decided to join the Navy later that year, he made a point of not telling me. At some point, he had the “talk” with me: He would always love me and be grateful for everything I had done for him, but he was a grown-up now and got to choose who was in his life and I was not really going to make the cut.

That was crushing. And it was worse when I let myself think how bad it must have felt to him, to have had enough happen to say that so cooly and calmly. Yeah, it all left a terrible mark and it’s still hard for me to look at him and know what I put him and his sister through.

But last night, we sat in front of my pretty tree with the colored lights and opened presents (well, he did, he forgot mine at his Mom’s house). He put on the high performance stocking cap I got him, for those late nights and super early mornings on the Bridge, while he’s there scanning the horizon. We ate pork and sauerkraut, took a late night, very chilly walk around the upper east side and then he played Skyrim while I dozed on the sofa. I woke up to a soft tap on the shoulder, “Good night, Dad, love you, Merry Christmas.”

I get pretty riled up when I hear people talk about “the Promises of AA” and mention “cash and prizes” in the same breath. I just want to shake my head, “can’t you see the real miracle that’s out there,” I want to ask? It’s a miracle that I got sober for sure. The much greater miracle is the way my heart and the hearts of the people who loved me, have grown together again. It took a lot of courage for us to do that, not the bravery in battle kind of courage, but the kind of courage that comes from letting your heart do the work, the courage that comes from putting your heart at the center of your life. That’s what sobriety has done for me and the people who love me. M was pretty upset that he forgot my gift. He’ll see, soon enough, just how great a gift he did deliver this Christmas.

Thanks for Letting Me Share