Now that it’s happened, it seems like it was inevitable. Last night I drank. Today I am hazy and dull, with a hangover not only from the alcohol but also from the emotions and the desperate need that I felt – to either stop and process them or escape them – for the last two weeks. Unfortunately, the latter won out this time – I tried to escape from their grip with alcohol. After a sunny day of celebration filled with conversations, social pressures, and champagne – which I resisted with ease – the night came and I caved to my desire to drink. Sitting around a warm fire with nothing to say, I felt that I might as well, and so I did. One glass finished the magnum of red, and the friends left. My husband went to put a child back to bed after a nightmare, and then it was just me and an empty glass, alone. I remembered the bottle I’d opened the week before, something nice, made by friends. It was under the sink. I’d left it there the day of my mother’s internment service, last Friday, when I’d first caved. Though then, I hadn’t liked it. It felt like a poison, the taste and then the feeling of the alcohol in my blood, a toxin needing to be rid of. This time I was ready for it, and enjoyed it.

Alone by the fire, I had another glass while I stared into the flames and tried to process. I tried to be aware of my own desire to drink and drink more. I probably had about three glasses in total. It’s hard to say as I only filled up a bit at a time, bargaining with myself over when I would have enough and go to bed.

I remember in a meeting recently someone said that the relapse starts well before the first drink. This stood out to me, tangibly, as if everything else just silenced for a second and this concept just hung in the air, resonating. I could relate to this viscerally, as if something I’d always known but had never been able to put words to was suddenly explained for me, to me.

I’ve also read recently that a sign of healing is falling back into old patterns, finding comfort in the familiar. I would assume that the second, healthy part of this is recognising them and moving forward out of them. Instead of beating myself up about this relapse, I can try to look at it as a sign that I am healing, that I just needed a return to the course I’ve known, to see the feelings and patterns from a new perspective, one that has, ironically, been made possible by almost 8 months of alcohol-free living. So what have I learned from this and how have I changed?

I now know this about myself – I am sensory seeking, creative, and sensitive to my core. I am still reeling from the pain of losing my mother, and from the loss of so many years and moments during which I did not understand her, and I expected things from her that she was just not capable of doing or being. It is normal for me to feel this way, to feel sad and lost and alone. This is the right way to feel, the appropriate, necessary thing, but it still sucks to be so tired and empty from all of this.

I am detached from my father. I don’t know why, I wonder, but have no clear answers. For starters, the man he was at the end of his life was not the man I knew growing up. How much the weight loss, the result of an unhealthy, improperly done gastric bypass, effected him I can only imagine. His body was completely changed, at the end he was a skeleton. Ultimately, I think, alcohol killed him, as his addiction to food transformed into an addiction to alcohol, and could never be fully satisfied. That is the problem – it’s nearly impossible to satisfy this urge to completely self-obliterate but oh how we try – through food, or alcohol, or cannabis, for starters.

My mother is easier to feel the absence of, as she was so present in my life in the end of her life and her death is so recent. I began to understand her mental and emotional shortcomings, the new ones that had arrived through experience and the ones that had been with her my whole life. The mechanics of denial had instructed her thoughts for such a long time, they had made well worn paths in her mind. These paths had begun to influence other thought processes, of comprehension, understanding, and remembering, all very interrelated functions.

My desire to drink came from a place of needing and wanting to escape all of this, a life where I feel out of place, disconnected, living a lonely existence while my children’s childhoods pass me by. I don’t know what breakthrough I am hoping for, waiting on, but in the days of recovery after this at least I won’t have to think of everything all at once, the quiet misery and then slow victory of recovery will be quite enough. After that, who knows, maybe I will have to face the objective reality of my life from now on, finally. Perhaps it is time.