Don't Just Try, Do -- or, when to give ourselves grace?

My husband and I have started following a meal plan. The primary goal of being compliant with this meal plan is to feel better.

For the last two years, we have tried to move toward eating better. My husband has quite a bit of inflammation and chronic pain (some of which stems from PTSD and military service, but that’s another story). I am still adjusting from just eating cheese and crackers and a bag of peanut butter M&M’s when I was newly sober and still single.

The other thing we’ve been doing over these past two years is blending our family of 7 (3 mine, 4 his) and the shitstorm that came along with everything outside of our control.

Oh, and I had our one “ours” baby. I often have to remind myself that a baby can wreck a couple. One single baby. Can put strain on a couple. Not a baby plus 7 other kids (some of which have been traumatized by things outside our control).

In short. We’ve been busy.

But now, we are genuinely wanting to be serious about food and how it makes us feel, so here we are, working with this husband-wife duo, who also have a focus on lifestyle change.

It feels alarmingly like getting sober.

Food. The final frontier.

In addition to providing the meal plan, this company (recommended to us by my brother) is all about lifestyle change. I had a check-in phone call with them yesterday.

Since our kids are out of school next week, I say, we’re going to try to get to the Y, but I really can’t predict what it will be like with my work schedule.

The gym we go to has childcare, but it is only in the morning, and on Mondays and Thursdays we shuttle children back and forth to taekwondo all evening, so the timing of when we can get to the gym is a bit of a challenge and all the stars have to align for us to make this happen. And we try to move heaven and earth to make the stars align, but sometimes, they just don’t.

I don’t like the word try, he said. Just do. Set a goal and do it. If you say try, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

I “try” every minute of every fucking day, I thought, seething. I don’t care to accept excuses, either. And I am prone to a perfectionist mindset, I am prone to anger when things “don’t get done” as I wanted them to be done.

I would like to just do it, it being go to the gym, but : how, during this season, do I find that between work and taekwondo practice and baggies of goldfish and breastfeeding and sweeping and mopping and picking up and answering big, awful, terrifying questions from my 6-year-old stepson like, Are we going to nuke Iran?

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But what I also remembered was this : when I was getting sober, I did have that mindset. I got sick and fucking tired of my own bullshit. I will not drink today, I said. Not I’ll try not to drink today.

I won’t drink today.

But, I think. I wanted it. I wanted sobriety more than anything in the world.

This coach, who I like very much, also says thinks like, I don’t like the word excuses. Then nothing ever changes.

I’ll have to think more on it, I said.

This idea: where are your priorities? If it meant something to you, you would just do it. I believe this with every fiber of my being. This is what I said to myself when I got sober.

Get it the fuck together, Kristen, I would think. And I finally believed that drinking or not drinking was a life or death decision.

So I did. I didn’t drink. I didn’t drink then, and I don’t drink today.

So this concept that I was just going to try, or that I would be making excuses, was, as my husband gently observed, triggering to me.

Triggers reveal where we need more healing, I think. How’s that for a fucking positive mindset shift?

I do thoroughly believe if I want something, I have to get it. Which obviously feels miniscule in the scheme of these questions my six-year-old is asking about Iran and the world, but we are trying to focus on what we can control.

Maybe it is this simple, figuring out the answer to this question, as the oft-referenced Mary Oliver quote goes: What do I want to do with this one wild and precious life?

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This meal plan is fairly simple, the standard : lean meats, lots of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, that kind of thing. In short, real food.

There is one thing about food that is different than alcohol : we are given a “treat” meal. With alcohol, I do demand 100% compliance, complete abstinence.

But no one ever ate a cheeseburger and then accidentally slept with someone, wrapped their car around a telephone pole, or woke up in a strange place as might happen, so the stakes are quite a bit lower.

They call it a treat meal, rather than a “cheat” meal.

Last week, Billy and I got North Carolina barbecue for our “treat” meal to celebrate our anniversary. We brought the kids with us to pick the food up, and got them McDonald’s to eat in the car while we drove to get our barbecue.

As is our habit, and because it was Treat Meal evening, we ate some of the McDonald’s fries.

We ate a few.

Oh my god, my husband said, smacking. My mouth is so dry.

There is so much salt, I said.

Are we just not used to this level of sodium? he said, reaching for his water bottle.

“Did McDonald’s fries just get ruined for us?” we wanted to know.

I remembered waking up the last few times I drank after a spell of sobriety. My fucking god, I would think. Am I really getting older? Did I really feel like this every day?

Our bodies, becoming accustomed to healthy foods, completely and totally alarmed by the salt on these fries.

Maybe this is just evolving in sobriety? Maybe this is it, the time to refine and recognize, two and a half years in, there are more ways to feel better — the healing expanding. Having grown up in the 90s, surely my ideas about indulgence began with food. So maybe this is it?

Balance, my mom always said. You have to find balance.

But I preferred excess.

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I already lean toward intensity. When do I choose to give myself grace, and when do I choose to not accept “trying?”

When I was drinking, my world was so, so small.

Drink less, smoke less. Write more, exercise more.

That was the list I wrote for a million years (more of which I’ll get into in a future post in my series about metrics and data, since “more” and “less” were often hard to track).

So I look up.

What do I want, with this one wild and precious life?

Jamie Lee Curtis says getting sober will be the best thing she has ever done. Getting sober is the best thing I have ever done.

And now what, I want to know, looking beyond the horizon.

I want to love my babies, I want to be there at their school events and their taekwondo and tuck them in at night (or rather, read and cuddle with them, say goodnight, or, often, later scream GO TO BED when they don’t settle down).

What do I want? My world made so big, because of this gift of sobriety.

To find balance, I suppose?

Last week was our kids’ last week of school (year-round-school). We attended end-of-year for the five of our six elementary schoolers who had celebrations : two on Monday afternoon, two on Tuesday, and one on Wednesday. It is peak season for my work, so I am scrambling to keep up. And the children, these precious children, well — they need snacks and juice and clean clothes and a million other things all day long.

I want to be there for my babies. I think of two of my favorite animal metaphors — the mama duck pulls her feathers out to make her nest; and the flamingo loses her pink just after her baby is born.

Photo by Sharisse Bullock on Unsplash

But that season doesn’t last forever.

Perhaps the lesson is in finding the balance — giving some amount of grace. Having gratitude, as I did in the early days of sobriety, that my children were safe and loved and I knew I was doing right by them.

And this great big wide open question — what do I want to do with my life — all the rest of it is made possible by maintaining my sobriety, in this one wild and precious life.