Growing Pains

Growing Pains

Emotions are wild.

I say this as if it’s some sort of major discovery because, well, for me it is.

For the decade plus I was drinking, I wasn’t feeling my emotions, just numbing them. Whenever I started to feel an emotion (good or bad) creeping in, I would immediately extinguish it with alcohol.

For me, one of the hardest and most rewarding parts of getting sober has been letting the emotions back in without a wine pairing. At first, I struggled with the idea of not cracking open a beer to celebrate, or downing a glass of whiskey to drown stress. But now, I actually feel my feelings, good or bad, and I don’t know what better way to describe it but this: it’s a trip.

In my first year of sobriety, my emotions were all over everywhere, like a drunken sailor looking for his sea legs. I would be overwhelmingly happy one moment, then weirdly emotional another.

It was a roller coaster, with the same ups, downs, thrills and elation as the real thing. Over time, I began to welcome all of the emotions, because it’s the darkness of the lows that has made me truly appreciate the sun when it shines. Yes, drinking let me feel nothing, but that meant I felt nothing. Nothing could ever make me sad, but drinking also kept me from feeling good, happy or even okay.

The joy, the happiness, the gratitude I feel sober is unlike anything I ever allowed myself to feel when drunk.

The longer into my sobriety I’ve ventured, the more my emotions are finding their footing. I’m able to feel them and accept them and learn from them, which for a girl who spent more than a decade sedating her feelings into paralysis, is an amazing thing.

This past weekend would have been my grandmother’s 103rd birthday. My Grandma, my namesake (my middle name is Ayako) was my best friend. From the moment I was born we were in cahoots. Just look at this picture.

My grandmother adored me and I her. She was a constant presence in our house and a huge part of my upbringing. To this day I credit her with so much of who I am.

My sister sent me that and a few other photos of Gram on Sunday in tribute to her. All of a sudden I was laughing and then crying, struck by sadness and overwhelmed by how much I ached for her. It struck me so much I said out loud, “I miss her.”

I used to protest going to sleep at night so I could spend more time with my grandmother. Patient as a saint (and willing to do anything for her little Amanda) I remember Gram telling me I didn’t have to fall asleep, but just to try. She’d turn down the lights and work around me and my room, tidying up and folding laundry, narrating her tasks to me in-between renditions of my favorite lullabies.

“Tura Lura Lura,” she’d sing. My grandma, this little Japanese woman sang the best Irish lullaby. Her voice was angelic.

“And I’d give the world if I could hear that song of hers today.”

I can still hear the creak of the closet door in the hallway outside my room where she’d put away stacks of freshly folded towels and made sure I’d cleaned up all my crayons from playing phone booth in there earlier.

Even as I got older, Grandma remained my best friend. Sleepovers at her house were a constant in my life, even when I grew through middle and high school and traded sleeping in bed with her for the guest room.

The best mornings were always ones waking up at Grandma’s, to fresh squeezed orange juice and pancakes so perfectly round you could trace them with a compass. Any pancake that dare violate her standard of perfection was fed to the dog, because at her breakfast table only the best was served. The only eggs I would consume were Grandma’s “pink eggs,” over easy just enough to turn a light pink so subtle it was like a whisp of a sunset, until the rest of the colors arrived when the egg was broken over a bowl of rice.

It was Grandma who I spent hours in the kitchen with, never learning to make a chocolate chip cookie (thanks Mom, for covering that essential!) but mastering the absolute dos and don’t of her cooking code.

Never stop stirring the gravy, serving lumpy gravy is unacceptable

Don’t eat until everyone’s served and has everything the need, including hot gravy

Be careful with the salt on the rice balls, it has to be just right

Don’t add too much sugar to the spare ribs

Always start a lemon meringue pie early enough in the morning that you have time to make another if the meringue collapses of wicks.

For that matter, 5 a.m. is the appropriate time for the breakfast chef to wake up.

While I don’t follow all these rules strictly, the number of times I catch myself doing something in the kitchen “because that’s how Grandma did it,” is notable. One of my greater regrets is that I didn’t soak up more of her wisdom before she passed away.

Grandma and I after one of my dance recitals. She always had bouquets custom made for my recitals. It was always my favorite part of the night.

Grandma died when I was a sophomore in high school, in the spring around graduation. I vividly remember how assertive she was until the very end, when the young doctor came in to chat politely with us as her health was declining, she asked him to “please stop talking,” so she could enjoy the time she had left, not listening to the details of her demise, but hearing about my latest lacrosse game and my sister’s Brookline apartment.

Today, I feel the pit in my stomach when I think about the day my grandma died.

I felt it on Sunday looking at those pictures.

It registered so deeply with me because I never really allowed myself to feel this before I got sober.

I distinctly remember going to a Senior’s graduation party the afternoon after she’d passed away. Telling myself it would be social suicide to skip it and not to act sad or tell anyone what happened, I soldiered on. I had appearances to keep up. Or so I told myself.

So I ignored the grief. I stuffed it away, until I drowned it with the rest of my feelings in my alcoholism.

Aside from telling people where my middle name came from, I barely talked about Grandma for years. I was crippled by pain and terrified to feel my feelings about her actually being gone.

In the lowest points of my drinking, when I was begging to stop I’d think of her. Of what she’d think of where I was, how far I’d fallen. I knew how much it must have killed her to see me like that. “But she’s already dead,” I’d told myself in more than one drunken stupor, continuing the years of stuffing the feeling down.

In the darkest moments, my Dad would help me hold on to hope by reminding me that he trusted that my Grandma was looking out for me. She had a plan. It might have been confusing at times. She may have taught me some hard (and justified) lessons and let me get my ass kicked when I deserved it- but still it was all a part of her plan. It had to be.

For a while Gram was my higher power, because safe in her arms I knew I was going to make it. I can’t even count the times she got me through, the times I got so desperate I didn’t have anything to hold onto except faith in her.

I wish she could see me now. Can’t imagine what she’d think now that we’ve finally made it.

But of course I know she already knows. I know that as much as it must have killed her to watch me struggle for so long, she knew the bigger picture. She knew where I’d end up today, with it all being worth it.

Since getting sober, I’ve mourned the loss of this amazing woman for the first time. I feel it more regularly, but I also feel her more regularly.

In getting sober, I’ve become acutely, miraculously aware of the fact that she never really was gone. Call me crazy, but I remember seeing a cardinal circling outside the window this last time I was in treatment and realizing, just knowing, that was her.

When I was drinking I was numbing out her. Today with my sobriety I have her back.

I’m getting teary eyed thinking about it now. As if I started this post without tears.

But today I welcome them. Because today, I’m finally processing my feelings about my grandma.

It is another one of the amazing and unexpected gifts sobriety has given me.

Today I can say that I miss her and feel every last bit of feeling I have about that. Not only do I welcome the feelings, I’m grateful for them. Because I know that their presence means I’m doing this the way I’m supposed to, the way she’d have me do it.

Because of them, I know she’s proud. Because I can feel it.