Weight
Shortly after my first binges began at the age of 21, my petite frame grew outwards. Clothes that I had collected in New York were folded into an ever growing pile of “someday I’ll fit back into that.” I would run a few times a season, eat a salad every other week, and scoff at the scale as the numbers ascended. In addition to drinking a minimum of 1,100 calories a day, I began most days nursing my hangover with grease and dairy. A chocolate milkshake with a cheeseburger would be chased with a cigrarette and a hair of the dog. I weighed a mere 120 lbs when I started drinking, and stepped off the scale at 205 the day of my last drink.
Within the first two weeks of sobriety, ten pounds vanished. In the following months, my reflection became more and more tolerable. I accepted a humble gardening job over the following late spring, and the final layer of lard slid off in the high noon heat. A month before my one year anniversary, I was back down to 130. As my closet became too loose, I reclaimed refuge in my skyscraper pile.
Overdraft Fees
Over the four years that I was wasted, there was one consistency that forever tailed my drinking; my bank account. Never choosing the same liquor store to revisit in a 48 hour period, I maintained my innocence based on the fact that the staff would never know I was a drunk; having only seen me once or twice a week. The major flaw that escaped my flooded brain was that alcohol costs a ton no matter where you buy it, so long as you buy it enough. My husband would wake up, check our balance, and mutter with a low sigh.
“Are you fucking kidding me, Kathlyn?”
“Cool, we have five dollars in our account.”
“I thought you said you had cash already!”
“WE OVERDRAFTED AGAIN. NEGATIVE THIRTY FIVE DOLLARS. WAS IT WORTH IT?”
The saga continued for years up; ravaging our bills, accounts, and squandered savings. It stole my employment from me outright, leaving me utterly broke to wade through my debt.
According to my NOMO Sobriety Clock, at 1660 days sober, I have saved a whopping $35,576.75. Ballpark, ten thousand dollars a year.
I used to spend my vacation money to escape. Now, that means I can afford to go somewhere.
Sick Days
Snooze, snooze, snooze, snooze. Ten more times. I awoke to what felt like a broken windshield being beaten again and again by a baseball bat. Rolling over and wiping my eyes with shaking palms. Sprawled out, I was already deliberating the day ahead. Would I live through it? My heart was rattling around in the cage as if it was electrified. Before I could give every horrible feeling its own label or location, a gag. A rolling convulsion. I would roll and run from the bedside to dunk my head in the toilet.
When I was done exorcising the bile from my stomach, it was time to hide my withdrawal behind dairy and grease. My mother in law once said that she always had a milkshake when she was hungover (three times a year) so I ran with this practice almost everyday. It got me nowhere but upwards on the scale. Starch was invited too, any taste and any false filling to distract from the hell I created for my body.
When my day would finally begin post shower and bacon grease, it was shake time. No, not a milkshake, that was already done. The involuntary quaking that no clench could steady. Whoever was stood in front of me; a friend, a coworker, the dreaded customer, would witness a tremoring series of nods. Sometimes, I was successful in blaming it on a chill, but mostly, I was a terrifying sight. If my swollen red cheeks didn’t already give me away, then the shakes usually would.
And this is all assuming that I didn’t call out of work, which was my default weekly option. Treating restaurants like watering holes only to blame the food for my “weak” stomach, my coworkers hated my guts for deserting them on a regular basis.
Plans, Postponed
We purchased our one hundred and fifty year old home for the charm, but mostly for it’s location. Seated atop a hill, it looks out over a sweet little forest and a river snaking through its tree’s. At the time of the sale, I was determinded to dig out a path to the river. So determined, that I sat on drunk on my front porch and stared at the bushes trailing along the edge of the lawn. Hours turned into years as the next summer.
There was a host of reasons not to start; I needed new gardening equipment, the hours were too hot, I was working, and I was fat. The thousand yard stare would guilt me into walking inside because I couldn’t handle the sight.
The first week of my sobriety I filled a five gallon bucket with nothing but a garden trowel, and hand rake, and some gloves. My bare knees knelt into the rocky earth, and only moved to go forward. Weeds from every direction slowly turned into squares of brown. A path formed and snaked it’s way through the trees. Finally, my now athletic build suddenly tipped as I looked up to see I had made it to the hill above the water. On the backside of the slope, the ravine lapped against a cluster of rocks. Within a week, I had made it to the clearing on the riverbank.
The next month I became less strict about refusing aid for tidying up. A chainsaw, a weed wacker, a shovel, and my husband were recruited fro the finale. Pricker bushes were dug out of the ground and invasive weeds were plucked from the ground. Everything else stayed. It was just as I had envisioned six years before as a prospective home owner. Slowly, my weary feet sank into the rocky floor of the water. If sobriety was my religion, this was my baptism.
A year later, my husband and his father built a staircase up the back hill as to ease the eventual passages for our newborn son. The following summer he started crawling up, and walked down by the first days of fall. My daughter will make her maiden voyage this spring, and will be walking up come fall. What was once a drunken dream has been made possible through sober hands.
Kathlyn Ramsey Moore 