Day 68: Bittersweet

I really love how Sober At 53 has included her sober day within each title, and I'm going to continue following suit.  It makes it easy to personally keep track of what day I'm on, and also enables folks visiting to click right to the day they are interested in reading more about.

I've also found peace with the sobriety counter puzzle I'd been trying to solve. I felt weird saying I was, for example, 60 days sober, if it was only Day 60 (thus not a full 60 days...only 59 and 1/2, etc).  It's like I wanted to ensure that I was obsessively honest about my amount of sober time...I mean, who knows, maybe that Day 60 I would go off the deep end and go to the liquor store that evening, thus never making my true 60 days?  And so, this type of overthinking has finally led me to officially being cool with being a Day XX gal.  It's just easier and less mental energy to say "I'm on Day 68" versus "I'm on Day 68, so technically I only have 67 days sober, but I seriously doubt I'll have a drink or go on a bender this evening, but you never know, and one day at a time, and.."AHHH! :)

Happy Friday to all.   It is the start of a long holiday weekend here.  For a moment while I was doing the dishes I had a sigh of huh, no drinking this weekend.  It was 7:30am- you never do know when those urges will come.  It was a little mournful.  Then, as has been the case, the sober part of my brain came in and said, you know, it lies. The alcohol lies.  You don't need it and it will never be just one and the weekend is going to kick butt because you will be with your lovely family.  And then I didn't want to drink.  It was so nice.  Mrs. D talked a lot about retraining your brain, and I think I've begun to successfully do this.

So, this long weekend is quite a bittersweet one.  I am so, so looking forward to having an extra day with my husband at home.  We are going to love being together with our little man and little dog.  No plans to go anywhere, no racing to be a certain place at a certain time, nothing like that.  Very rare, normally we would need to be doing that as part of a holiday or occasion.  Not that it isn't great seeing family, because it truly is....but sometimes time with just ourselves gets a bit squeezed out.  So yes, very much looking forward to this time together.

The tough part of the weekend is that it's the one year anniversary of my dad's death.  It has been very tough coping with this loss, as you know.  I am extremely emotional about it and the grief has by far been my biggest trigger.  I get to thinking who cares, it hurts so much, drinking is meaningless compared to a loss like this.  Which is completely faulty thinking, I know.  It's just how it begins for me.  I'm feeling strong right now, but you and I both know how quickly that can change.  So please do wish me well.

One last thing- I haven't been writing as much about my grief because I have wanted to refocus this blog back to the whole point of me starting it: to document my journey of stopping drinking.  I just like including feelings about the loss because I have not found much at all written about the relationship between getting sober and dealing with death.  It is also very healing to write about it.  Much love.