Awesome Sober Moment

I cannot stop smiling at what happened tonight! 

So, I was in my lovely kitchen, chopping all the vegetables I planned to cook for dinner while my five year old son regaled me with stories of the firemen that showed up at summer camp today.  The food looked gorgeous, the night is beautiful (not hot, yay!) and all was well.  Until.... I reached for the olive oil and found that it was ALL GONE.  In that split second, I not only realized it was empty but that I also had zero money to go get more at the store (payday is tomorrow and I overspent, again).  I stood there looking at all my lovely veggies, my perfect evening, and my complete lack of anything to cook them with and realized... I was calm.  My only thought was "Oh, well.  Maybe I'll just cook this tomorrow".  There was no anger... and anger, rage, fury is exactly where I would have gone.  I suddenly thought - ohmygod, if I were drinking I would be in an absolute tirade about this. 

But then I thought more about it and realized - no way.  If I were drinking, I wouldn't be in a rage because there never would have been a home cooked dinner!  My son knew what to order from a Thai menu by age two.  I used to hold incredible, belligerent pride in being a Woman Who Does Not Cook.  I've always been devoted to healthy food (yeah, except the whole two-bottles-of-wine-a-night issue), but it's easy to get endless variations of this anywhere in nyc without ever even knowing if your stove works.  I actually had one apartment where I used the oven for winter/summer shoe storage, since it wasn't getting used in any sensible manner.

Sobriety has given me so many surprises, and one of them is that I loooooove to cook.  We even have a fairly big garden now (rare in brooklyn, so it is much loved), so I often find myself in the middle of cooking and stepping in the backyard to get a few more tomatoes, or purple basil, oregano, orange mint, thyme.  Incredible.  But here’s the most important thing ~ I realized that the rage would have come… in untreated sobriety.  I spent over two years trying to get sober without consistent AA meetings, without a sponsor, without working on any of the tools so many of you swear by.   If you have never been a “dry drunk” let me tell you now – it sucks.  In non-drinking sobriety, I would have flown into the WORST rage.  Dragged my poor son to the store and used a credit card to get the “goddamn oil” along with 50$ of other things that I don’t really need but I think will make me feel better, damnit.  Dragged my poor son home with the stupid olive oil, raging at anyone walking too slow (everyone) or driving badly (everyone) and gotten home to rage that now it was too damn late to cook, damnit, so let’s just have some toast, okay?

That didn’t happen.  Not even close.  Instead, I opened the fridge and found vegetable stock.  Hmmm, I thought, why not just use this?  I asked my son what he thought and he decided it was a great idea, so we cooked together and talked about fireman until the sun went down and moon shone in the garden.  Bliss, I tell you.  Bliss.