Friday Afternoon is still a drag sometimes

2 and a half years later, I still want a treat on Friday afternoon

It is the second Friday of three weeks the kids are out of school on track-out (year round school), and while we treated ourselves to the 5 little boys going to camp, it was still a very long week.

The baby is either teething, or has become a rageful milk monster, but either way, she didn’t sleep well, and is pissed every time she sees me. We are worried she isn’t eating enough solid food, although her weight is just fine. She is just still partial to breastmilk.

My central nervous system is still frazzled and recovering from so much of what we’ve been through this last — I think to say a few months, but when I look at the calendar, I realize it’s been over a year that we’ve been fighting this fight. There are respites, to be sure, and it’s possible we are in the longest respite we have had in the chaos in some time, but still — the body remembers.

I don’t know what I want, I say to my husband. Something.

I wish I had a drink, I say.

No you don’t, he says.

I know, I say. No, I don’t. But something like a drink. A treatier-treat than cookies, or a Coke Zero.

I ask the boys if they want to walk up to the pond to look at the tadpoles — they were so big last time, they have to be froggier by now.

No thanks, they say.

My husband shrugs.

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A few weeks ago we finished watching The Sopranos. While I found the portrayal of twelve-step programs to be fairly one-dimensional and pandering when it came to the character of Christopher and his addiction/sobriety/relapse/twelve-stepping, I did recognize all the slogans, and I found his relapses to be tender, tragic.

“There’s no chemical solution for a spiritual problem,” Christopher says.

I had almost forgotten that one.

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I used to sit on the green grass in folding chairs, smoking cigarettes and drinking afternoon beers with my best friend when we were in graduate school.

I’m not sure what it’s doing, we would say, of whatever piece we were working on, whatever piece we took so seriously. We would remove a comma. Then we would add a comma. Try a semi-colon. Try the comma again.

Her husband tended the vegetable patch. Her little pup, a 4lb Yorkie named Noodle, followed us everywhere. We rode to drive-thru coffee shops, little mini-houses on every corner in the Northwest and got coffee. We had nicknamed this Cadillac Jack Kerouac. Or maybe she and her husband had.

You just need to get inside your essay and do this, we would say.

We would laugh. We would light another cigarette. We would open another beer. The sun would move across the sky and we’d work, work, work. But it didn’t feel like work then, and it doesn’t feel like work now.

As I’ve said, my pink glasses for grad school are in the extreme.

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We settle for Frozen 2 for the boys. This is a movie that has a special place in our hearts. This is the movie we played for our children the first time they met.

I pop popcorn and the baby inevitably gets a piece in her mouth, which I dig out with my index finger, which sends her into a tailspin.

I don’t want you to choke, I say to her. But she’s still pissed.

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The boys are in bed. We sit on the couch. I hold my husbands’ hand. We have moved on to The Righteous Gemstones.

Do you think we’ll need to water the grass tomorrow, I ask him.

I should be grateful for these problems, I realize, that the problems we have between the two of us is that we can’t seem to get grass to grow on the soil we own outside.

Outside, the thunder claps. You can hear the rain on the roof. The lights haven’t flickered yet, but they might soon. Tomorrow we will drive up Sunset Lake and there will have been a down tree, cut right at the road.

I just read The Berenstain Bears Count Your Blessings, I say to Billy. They talked about counting between the thunder and the lightning.

Who chose it? Billy asks. Did you know it was going to storm.

Llew.

Llew knew, he says.

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How do you get through Friday afternoons?

If you’re reading this, you should know this : you have innate worth just by virtue of being human. You are worthy of love, and you are worthy of making choices for yourself that reflect a person who believes they are worthy of love.

I don’t regret those summer afternoons drinking beer in the grass in Idaho. We were young. We had a lot of fun. Not all of my drinking memories are bad ones, and I’m not ashamed to say that. We didn’t have kids to care for, for one. The consequences had not yet caught up to me, nor did they ever catch up very severely.

Two things can be true at the same time : I had a lot of fun drinking back then (but also a lot of dark days) and it is best for me today to lead a sober life.

The treat of my Friday afternoon is that I wake up on Saturday morning feeling good : feeling good about myself as a person, feeling physically good; ready for the day,

The Friday afternoon treat does not serve instant gratification, as I liked back then on the grass in Idaho and as I still long for sometimes now.

But the treat is in pacing myself, in making the next right choice, in making a loving, kind choice for myself and in the recognition, the admission that the the kindest, most loving choice I can make for myself today or any day is not to take a drink.