Happy Sober Weekend! It's a beautiful day here - sunny and crisp cool, but no freezing in my part of the world. Kid sports are low key and I just get to putter a bit and try to catch up on some work and domestic chores/life dealing. Nice and quiet, the way I like it.
Tonight we have to go to a wedding. Mr. SR and I have reached the stage in life where you go to weddings of your friends' children, argh. This one will be glitzy and all manner of fancy booze will flow - probably trays of bubbles before the ceremony, premium call bar, high end wines, you get it. I am hoping they have a LOT of tonic water. I did enough of these types of weddings in my first sober stint to be pretty 'skilled' at it (main tip: enjoy the food, especially the cute little hors d'oeuvre, that would be missed if wedding was being treated as guzzlefest; secondary tip: do whatever it takes to get OUT after a couple of hours, don't get trapped into the wee hours, sheer torture after about 9 pm). Tonight will be extra easy because Mr. SR has been sick and is taking a formulary of meds that will preclude HIS drinking...which means he'll have limited patience for all the hoopla and the whole thing will be less than three hours. Perfect for me (well not as perfect as just skipping it and sending a gift, but that's not an option, so...).
We went to a wedding about halfway through the 'year of unpleasantness' (my extended relapse). Started with warm up wine while doing make-up, more wine in go-cups, interminably long Roman Catholic mass (no bubbles on trays before THAT service), then got to the hotel for the reception and Mr. SR thought a drink(s) in the bar was a good idea. Followed by three or four booze soaked hours at reception, which are sort of a fuzzy memory, followed by a more memorable hangover. And of course I DO remember the various snipings, rants, miscues and all the other communications snafus with Mr. SR - those were a hallmark of a good drunk, which is never fully complete without at least a measure of domestic drama.
IF I feel some delusional nostalgia for the drinking days or the wedding bubbles tonight, all I have to do is pull up that file from the drunk wedding about a year ago. I don't want or need that, and the whole thing confirmed what I already knew - booze doesn't enhance that scene for me, it makes it worse. Way worse. In a perfect world, I'd probably just skip 99% of those occasions - my sober self is a bit introverted and could do without all that, easily - but I don't live in a perfect world. So I'll go to this thing, and if I am not careful, I might see the good or even enjoy most or all of it. But I'll do it sober no matter what. It is what it is.
I'm grateful that today it doesn't feel like a sacrifice, it feels more like a blessing. I wish that perspective for anyone who's struggling with the idea that their social life 'needs' alcohol to make it work or be fun. Really, if you 'need' a drink to make it fun, do you 'need' to be there at all? I don't, but I CAN do it if I have to (like I do tonight) - and when I have a choice, the answer is probably not, I'd just as soon be home with my kids and the cats and some Netflix. I like that. A lot better than the cocktail scene and all its wreckage.
Hugs,
SR
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