One day at a time

That’s how recovering drunks/addicts are advised to deal with their sobriety. If you look at the whole rest of your life being as hard as today is, you’re likely to pack it in and run, not walk, to the corner liquor store.

I never had that problem with shaking the monkeys off my back, luckily. When the opportunity to stop drinking presented itself, I just jumped on for the ride. No weirdness, no Meetings or sponsors or trauma or drama. I was ready. Same with meth some 15+ years ago. I was ready.

But now I’m applying the 12-Step credo where it can actually do me some good – parenting.

I am, ultimately, an extremely selfish guy. I need stuff my way; I need my life to make sense, and have some serious structure. In the absence of structure, I am a fucking menace. Ask anyone who knew me as a kid.

Now I’m a parent, and every day brings new compromises and introduces new chaos into my carefully constructed order. When I sit down and look at the foreseeable future, I just want to get in the car and drive far, far away and keep driving till I fall off the end of the world, or Dumbleyou achieves “victory” in Iraq, whichever comes first.

And not wear a seat belt.

So I try not to take the long view, because seriously, the long view scares the shit out of me. We’re in a small town, hundreds of miles away from our family and friends infrastructure. Babysitters are practically impossible to nail down because they’re all college students and their schedules change A) every two months and B) on any random whim.

Because we live hand-to-mouth, our domestic circumstances are meager. The Man Cub shares a bedroom with us, which means that every day starts hours before dawn with piercing shrieks and drags on like molasses till I escape into slumber as soon after sundown as I possibly can.

I’ve been battling clinical depression since the day he was born, and with The Missus’ impending 8-5, M-F work schedule looming (starting next month)… the prognosis is not good.

When I was single, I had all the Me Time in the world. Too much, if all the booze, pills and snort was any indication. After we got married, we worked out a deal where I got the better part of one day a week of Me Time. The Missus bent over backwards to accommodate my needs, and it was good. It was tough sledding at first, but we made it work.

I’m sure you can see where this is heading.

Yes, my Me Time in now virtually at zero, and soon to be plunging into negative numbers.

If I cast my thoughts several years down the road, I can see a happy outcome. We’re in a house, the boy is in school, the wife is climbing the ladder of success and I have a little bit of Me Time back and I’m no longer at the jumping off point to insanity almost every moment of almost every day. I just don’t see the bridge between here and there. I honestly don’t see me making it till then.

I can barely see me making it to bedtime tonight.

And that is why I never write about my personal life, and concentrate almost exclusively on politics and pop-culture ephemera.

Questions?