My First Sober Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving always brings to mind time spent with family and massive meals that lull you to sleep. From the time I was a child, I always thought of too much food shared around a noisy table of happy discussions when I thought of Thanksgiving. One important aspect that I don’t remember in the Norman Rockwell painting of Thanksgiving is wine. Yet, that became a part of our family’s tradition when all of us reached adulthood. At least one or two large, sometimes more, bottles of wine filled crystal wine glasses during the afternoon meal. That changed forever with my first sober Thanksgiving.

Before we can get to that first sober Thanksgiving, you, dear reader, should know that I have distinct memories of Thanksgivings past that always fill me with warmth and joy.

The best one is arriving from college at my oldest sister’s house where the family chose to gather that year. I was officially on my own, living in a double-wide trailer and finishing my final years of college. It took five-hours to reach the Thanksgiving table, I arrived just as the food was placed on the table. Scented candles mixed with the smell of two fresh-baked pies filled the air. The house was warm an inviting.

There was a flurry of excitement when I walked through the door because there were no cellphones, then, so my arrival was a surprise. After warm greetings, our family headed to the table, and there in the middle, right beside the carved turkey, was a large bottle of wine. I remember clearly that it was a white zinfandel wine and condensation beads were forming on the glass.

At any meal we share, we always hold hands for a prayer. On Thanksgiving, before we pray, we take turns saying one thing for which we are thankful. The things we listed being thankful for that year have long since faded from memory. I don’t remember what anyone said, I don’t remember how much I ate, or whether it was a great meal.

However, the bottle of wine waiting on the center of the table and the beads of condensation ready to slide down the glass are stuck forever in my brain. We opened a second bottle before we got up from the table. That one, I had a large part in finishing as we began milling around the house in conversation as a natural progression of after dinner cleanup.

That is one of my favorite memories of holidays with my family. I was fully present as a full member of my family. That particularly day, I drank relatively normally, and I did not feel rushed to be somewhere else. I didn’t have another supply of booze hidden safely way for the pregame and postgame of the event. It was very much a South Georgia version of a Norman Rockwell painting.

My last Thanksgiving in active addiction

Twenty years later, my last Thanksgiving in active addiction was anything but a happy memory. My life was in shambles. I had abandoned all hope of returning to a successful career as a teacher and basketball coach. Just prior to that, I had moved from a large house on a pond surrounded by 8 acres of pecan orchards to a smallish house just a short walk from my parents. The trade led to rent-free living because my parents owned the house. My four-person family could barely fit in the house, and with two dysfunctional, addicted parents, there was nothing happy about our home. As what little money I had left dwindled to nothing, I could do nothing but drink.

I battled with constant shakes, sweating and a racing heartbeat if I didn’t drink something every hour and a half. The nights were the worst. I would awaken, nauseous, my stomach and throat burning and wander through parts of the house, hoping I had a bottle hidden somewhere. If I was lucky, I would gulp a few sips, smoke a cigarette and go back to sleep until the next wave came. If I was out of booze, or couldn’t find where I hid it, I would gag and dry heave until I could get to a store just after sun up.

I would buy enough to get me through the day, I thought, but not so much it would be easy to find, and then gag my way through a bottle hoping to keep enough down so that I could stop dry heaving. Then, I would spend the day staring at nothing on TV, smoking, preparing for a shower I could never figure out how to take, and drinking just enough to bring on sleep. In no way was I high-functioning. I was completely broken.

Fortunately, on that last Thanksgiving before rehab, my family decided to attend our cousins’ Thanksgiving affair. In my early teens, there would be more than 100 of my mother’s relatives gathered at a church social hall, eating too much food, drinking sweet tea and swapping stories about the year almost passed. Even I knew I was in no shape to make the trip. And, being honest, I had not been to one of those gatherings in more than a decade. My duties as a basketball coach turned my Thanksgiving meals into concession hotdogs choked down before a game.

My parents did not protest my decision to stay home. From the state I was in, I can’t blame them. I didn’t eat anything that particular Thanksgiving. Food had lost its taste and rarely stayed in my stomach. I was convinced that I had some type of stomach cancer that only alcohol helped to ease.

The store where I bought my cheap wine, was out of the brand that I tolerated the best, so I bought a few bottles of something I thought to be similar only to find that I had an even harder time choking those down. Thanksgiving Day was unusually warm that year. After spending a little time in the sun, I managed to get a shower and wash away two weeks of grime and sour smells.

I sat in a rocking chair in the carport, smoking cigarettes, and reading a cheap, western novel most of the day. In between trips to my truck to guzzle from one of the bottles I had bought, the thought occurred to me that I had to do anything different. Later that afternoon as the air turned colder, I drove to the gravesite of my best friend from high school. I sat by the grave, alone, talking to a head stone until the sun went down.  A few days later, I made a call to a treatment center to see if they had a bed available.

Anxious on Thanksgiving

One year later, on the morning of my first sober Thanksgiving, I was nervous. I wasn’t worried that the celebration might involve others drinking, I had already experienced this at a cookout. (You can find out what I learned from that experience here.) I had a new teaching job, two in fact, I was 10 months sober, and I was beginning to piece parts of my life back together. I was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings three to four times a week, and I planned to be at one that night. An old-timer and I had volunteered to make sure the doors were open.

Still, I was anxious. This would be the first family celebration I had attended in more than a year. I spent Christmas and New Year’s Day in rehab. Because I was totally incapable of functioning as a human one year earlier, I hoped I would find the joy I remembered from past family gatherings. Unfortunately, I still wasn’t fully comfortable around Earth people even if they were family.

I fully expected the adult Thanksgiving that I remembered so well from my early college days. My sons and I walked over to my parent’s house. The now ex-wife had explained she was feeling sick and could not go. When we arrived, the house was full of movement and loud talking as the last side dishes were put together. My soon-to-be brother in-law added to the noise as he sawed through a turkey with an electric carving knife.

My sons soon found my nephew in the back of the house and began doing whatever cousins do when they reunite after months apart, and I pitched in helping get the last dishes to the table. That’s when I noticed the missing wine glasses. I glanced around the room and there was no sign of wine bottles, all the glasses in hand, or nearby where some family members were sitting, contained water or sweet tea.

I mentioned the missing bottle of wine, and my middle sister said simply that they had forgotten to pick one up and no one really wanted a drink any way. I admit I was surprised, but I took the answer at face value. After all, I still don’t fully understand the drinking habits of Earth people.

We soon scrunched in around my parents’ table, all sitting elbow-to-elbow. In addition to the added grandchildren and soon-to-be in-law, my nephew had brought his girlfriend at the time. During the traditional round of what we were grateful for, I was thinking how glad I was to be sober. Instead of sharing that with a room full of normies, I just said I was grateful for family.

As we ate too much and talked too loud, constantly interrupting each others’ stories, I felt almost at home. Still, something was not complete. I no longer seemed fully a part of the celebration. Jokes that would usually be told at my expense seemed to be passed over. No one asked about my work or how I spent my free time. I was surround by an invisible wall. I could see everything going on, and the people I loved, but they were just out of reach. They treated me as if I was a guest who vaguely reminded them of the brother and son they once knew.

I escaped shortly after the dinner was over. In an hour I was home, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes with an old-timer on the front porch of my home group. I figured we would be the only ones at the meeting unless a traveler in recovery stopped in. I was dead wrong. Soon people began to flood in. All of them breathed a sigh of relief to be away from family and to find some place safe for recovering alcoholics.

Most of the people who came in had been in recovery longer than I, and apparently had shattered the invisible wall that kept me enclosed. I wondered about my own Thanksgiving experience as each person shared. I could not decide whether it was worse to be treated as if I am different, or to be thrust, face first, into family problems that show up once per year.

The meeting topic dealt with staying sober during drinking occasions. There was a particular emphasis on family events where drinking was the norm. I listened to others explain the struggle of being around people who “really need their own program.” All of them came to a similar conclusion. If it weren’t for the fellowship and the use of spiritual tools (a phrase I hated), the temptation to drink may have become overwhelming. I felt nothing like that. I simply felt a sense of loss and a suspicion that my family was trying to protect me from temptation.

Facing a truth

After the meeting, I decided to stop back by my parents’ house. This time there was a bit of a confusion and scurrying of people in the house at my unplanned arrival. My dad turned around from his solitaire game at the computer and reached for a glass that had disappeared. My middle sister, and her husband to-be, walked out of a back room of the house to greet me.

It dawned on me that the scurrying was an attempt to remove all of the alcoholic beverages from sight. My stomach churned as I felt ashamed and angry at the same time. I was ashamed that they were worried they might tempt me to drink, and angry that I seemed weak enough to need the protection.

I pushed those feelings away as best as I could and greeted everyone cheerfully. My cheerful mask mostly hid the emotional turmoil that churned inside me. I am terrible about accepting things I can’t change. For a better example of how to do that, read Nina’s post, “When Dogs Bark…”

Soon, I sat on the couch and joined in swapping stories like my family always does when we are together. I walked out of the room for a minute and as I returned, caught a snippet of conversation about opening a bottle of wine. My nephew’s girlfriend asked one of my sisters if she wanted a glass. She quietly said, “We don’t drink while Stan’s around.”

“Why is that?”

“Because he can’t drink,” she said, a hint of embarrassment or something in her voice.

I rounded the corner and exclaimed, “I can’t drink! What do you mean I can’t drink?!”

Everyone in the room was silent. My sister’s faced reddened with embarrassment. A couple of other faces paled as if shocked.

“I can drink! I think my years of drinking prove that the one thing I can do well is drink,” I grinned. “Stopping on the other hand. That’s different story.”

My mom started laughing and the rest of the room laughed, too.

Soon the topic of conversation changed, and I spent another hour hanging out. In that moment, I think I chiseled a hole in the invisible wall. The tension that I had felt that afternoon eased, and for a few minutes, I was one of the family again.

It would take years, and several more funny stories, before the wall would be low enough to feel a part of my family instead of apart from them. I don’t know if the wall will ever be fully removed, though. More firsts in sobriety would follow, but that first sober Thanksgiving– a Norman Rockwell painting without a wine bottle– will always stay close to my heart.

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