Ladies on a Mission: The Official Site

[j-vo]

Pepper, my parents are snowbirds so they live in Florida 6 months and Phila. 6 mo. We usually talked at least once a week, but since mom's been sick, I try to call as much as possible. I like the idea of making New Year's Day special. My husband's a new year's baby, so we do usually have a family get together and a little cake.

I'll be flying back north tomorrow evening. Won't get home until about 11 p.m. So at least I'll see Mr. jvo and pup before midnight. Son will be going downtown ice skating and dinner with friends.

I posted this in Gratitude thread and wanted to share here:

This is my final night with Mom and Dad. I know I"ll be back in a few weeks (this upcoming trip was planned months ago before things began progressing faster with Mom) but it was nice being able to help whenever either parent needed me. Not drinking leads to the ability to be completely reliable and responsible. And believe me. Mom and Dad have seen me at my worst, so I'm sure they're grateful that they had the sober me this week. And they'll have it again in the near future.

Being reliable is a really good feeling. But I did break down a bit and cried as I'd been holding it in all week. Not a lot of crying, but just to tell them I feel angry at this disease mom has to endure for the rest of her life, and it only gets worse. I'm sad. My emotions are kind of all over the place right now. I'm glad I talked about this, because we all feel it. Mom and Dad talked about what they were feeling. It was good for us to do that. I told them it felt a little hard at times, as I'm facing all of these emotions without numbing myself with alcohol, and they're glad I'm not using alcohol to do that. I talked about MWO being a huge help. So thank you for being here for me.:love:

[little beagle]

J-vo I'm glad we're here to help you get through this. I think of you daily. Talking about how you feel and listening to your parents talk about how they feel is a great thing. That has to help bring you all together.
Pepper a special dinner sounds wonderful. I think I might go downtown and talk a special walk or something on New Years Day. I am really looking forward to the end of the Holidays. It's a lot of extra work for me and I'm exhausted. Bit my biggest plan for this weekend is to rest. Maybe sew a little.

[narilly]

JVo, I am sorry you are going through such a hard time. I'm thinking of you. I agree it is a gift to be able to sped time with your parents while being sober. It's hard to imagine dealing with all this stuff while being drunk.

Pepper that is a nice idea about the dinner. My daughter is a New Years baby like your hubby JVo so we get Chinese Food every New Years Day. It is such a treat. I love Chinese Food!
LilB, resting on New Years sounds good. I think we are all taking it easy on New Years. Maybe we should check in here and say hi on New Yeats Eve. I'm going to be watching TV with Elvis and am really looking forward to it.

Looking forward to an UnHung Thursday morning and just 1/2 day of work.

[Guitarista]

New years day feast/get together sounds gr8 Pepper.

4:40 p.m. NYE here and 38C so fairly warm! Have been for a really relaxing easy long swim in the bay and back home with some ice cream and fruit pies. Might have a quiet one here partly given the heat, plus many of my friends remain across town since I moved bayside, so a bit of a trek through the NYE city madness to and fro. They can wait until new years day for my fashionably late but humble appearance. Looking good and with a clear head. :thumbsup:

Take care out there.

[treetops]

Happy New Year Mr G. Its nearly 7pm here. Not as hot as where you are but warm here. I made prawn curry for dinner and then some ice-cream. Just me and Mr GB in the house tonight. I am doing some reading and watching a bit of the screen. He managed to kill a wasp's nest today. Quiet but that doesn't bother me.
My parents and sister's family used to always have a big New Year's Day dinner or lunch.

[jane27]

Happy New Years Eve Gloamers! Jvo, your post made me think of the very unique sound and feel of hitting a golf ball perfectly and watching it soar in a straight line for a long distance. You did an awesome job processing your feelings, engaging your parents and sharing them here with us. If I had to show someone a textbook example of how to manage feelings without drinking, your post would be my model.

Hitting the sack but looking forward to back reading & catching up more tomorrow. xoxoxxo

[Choices]

Hi everyone. 9pm NYE here. I made a picnic for our little family and we ate at the beach. It was a hot day.,, not as hot as where you are G, but slowed me down for sure. The day had cooled off a lot when we ate and the wind was up, but it was fun. I somehow made mr choice mad on the way home, by not listening well, he said he's just tired.. But I feel stressed. Just going to leave him alone and take a bath. I bought myself a new book about essential oils so I'll read that and maybe watch some TV. I think I'll leave the healthy eating worry until my girl goes back to school. And take it slow. It's hard for me to go slow.. But I seam to stress less when I do. Shame hubby is in a bad mood as we got daughter off to sleep early... Oh well.. I think I've decided.. Good nights or days are spontaneous happenings, expecting the weekend to go wonderful is never a good idea.

[Choices]

Hi everyone. 9pm NYE here. I made a picnic for our little family and we ate at the beach. It was a hot day.,, not as hot as where you are G, but slowed me down for sure. The day had cooled off a lot when we ate and the wind was up, but it was fun. I somehow made mr choice mad on the way home, by not listening well, he said he's just tired.. But I feel stressed. Just going to leave him alone and take a bath. I bought myself a new book about essential oils so I'll read that and maybe watch some TV. I think I'll leave the healthy eating worry until my girl goes back to school. And take it slow. It's hard for me to go slow.. But I seam to stress less when I do. Shame hubby is in a bad mood as we got daughter off to sleep early... Oh well.. I think I've decided.. Good nights or days are spontaneous happenings, expecting the weekend to go wonderful is never a good idea.

[peppersnow]

I bought myself a new book about essential oils so I'll read that and maybe watch some TV. I think I'll leave the healthy eating worry until my girl goes back to school. And take it slow. It's hard for me to go slow.. But I seam to stress less when I do. Shame hubby is in a bad mood as we got daughter off to sleep early...

Hi Choices - I love essential oils, and wish I'd used them when I first quit. There's no magical cure for the anxiety, cravings, feeling like sh** etc. those first several weeks, but every tool at your disposal helps. My 18 yo, who is taking a med for anxiety (which she will wean off of beginning in spring), responds really well to a mix of Bergamot/clary sage/frankincense and I find that a blend of lavendar/clary sage helps me calm down and center. Like you said, slowing down your mind/thoughts also is really key, but the oils may help with those stressful feeling you're describing. Someone else may have already mentioned this, but L-Glutamine is awesome as well for calming down your nervous system in the beginning of your quit. It works well on sugar cravings, and alcohol is a sugar...there's a supplement dosage schedule on MWO that recommends 1000 mg after breakfast, but I found it more effective around noon. I gave up sugar in July and started taking it again temporarily, and noticed a definite correlation between my cravings for sugar treats and days when I did not take it. http://www.mywayout.org/supps/update.pdf

Happy New Year to all - Nar, I forgot that you and I are within a few days of the same quit date, I think - so here's to two years soon! And to an alcohol-free 2017for all!

[narilly]

G, Choices, TT, you all are living in Heaven! Warm enough to go swimming outside in The Bay? Nice! It was -15C this am and I went for a walk with my puppy, whom I had to tuck into my coat because he doesn't have much hair. I had to wear my Parka, Gloves, Earmuffs...so I am totally jealous of you peeps living in warmer climates right now.

Prawn Curry sounds delish, I am going to see what I can make tonight for New Years. I am not sure yet. I do love essential oils Pepper and Choices and use them once in awhile. I haven't used them lately though. Maybe I will get some going tonight.
I used to party every year and New Years was a great opportunity to drink but I always had to be careful because my daughter's birthday is on Jan 1st. That sort of kept me out of trouble since 1995. I had my moments though, on her birthday 3 years ago I had to keep leaving supper to throw up I was so hungover. How stupid is that?

I am at work right now and there are about 5 of us here. So lame that they make us come in today. so I will leave first chance I get. At the last place I worked they totally closed down for 2 weeks during the holidays. I loved that. I am not sure how much I like this job but it works for now. There have been over 35,000 people laid off in our City due to the oil price drop so I can't complain. I am grateful to have a job and my husband is working too which is great. Grateful for my sober life and grateful for all you wonderful Gloamers.

NS, I miss your posts. Make sure you drop by today :heartbeat:

JVo, hope this next year is better for you. It certainly is a good feeling when you know you are reliable. AL certainly changes that. I am so reliable now its scary, lol!

Pav, Jane, Cowboy, Lil B, Ava, Rox, Pie and anyone else I missed, thank you for all your support and great posts.

Happy New Year!! I will be back before New Years Eve....

[jane27]

I am at work right now and there are about 5 of us here. So lame that they make us come in today. so I will leave first chance I get. At the last place I worked they totally closed down for 2 weeks during the holidays. I loved that. I am not sure how much I like this job but it works for now. There have been over 35,000 people laid off in our City due to the oil price drop so I can't complain. I am grateful to have a job and my husband is working too which is great. Grateful for my sober life and grateful for all you wonderful Gloamers.

Nar, Thank you for another awesome example of managing feelings sober! I liked it so much that I broke it into steps to create a template for myself:

acknowledge the disappointment (working on NYE)
spend a moment understanding why (the last job closed during the holidays, so working NYE feels like a bummer)
fold the corner of the page to revisit (not sure you like the new job, but it is serving a purpose during a challenging time)
conclude by reflecting on all the good stuff (gratitude).

I still feel like I'm swimming in a mild current (depression). The new medication was adding lbs as promised so I ditched it after a week. Also battling a sinus infection. Was reading the other day that depression and inflammation go hand in hand and this makes a lot of sense to me (when I'm going through one I almost always feel achey everywhere).

I am eternally grateful for you guys and the Gloamer Chalet we have built. Hard to imagine life without you guys, and luckily I don't have to. I'm also over the moon grateful for my sweetie pea, Red, and for my sobriety. When I think that I could be feeling down + be back in the thick of drinking addiction, it makes me shudder. THAT would be something worth feeling really badly about.

Wishing everyone a safe, happy, healthy and sober NYE, New years Day and New Year to come. xoxo

[NoSugar]

Hi, Gloamers!

This thread is so full of people living the lives they want, it always makes me happy to read it. Even when things aren't perfect (:hug: for Choices, Jane, J-vo), they are so much better and more manageable than they would have been if we were drinking. It is wonderful to hear how well you're doing, Peppersnow. I'm not a bit surprised but it's great to witness another success.

As we approach 2016, I've been thinking a lot about how I'm living now compared to 3 years ago when I felt like I was reaching a point of "do or die". Nothing was that much different than it had been for awhile but for whatever reason, I couldn't take it anymore. To not have every single day be focused on an internal battle, with my actual life pretty much a peripheral series of unexperienced events is one of the greatest gifts imaginable. And to the extent that we can control our lives, I love feeling like I'm back in charge and not adjusting just about everything to feed an addiction.

I've been spending my free time exposing myself to the Three Principles in much the same way I learned everything I could about addiction in 2013. Understanding the biological and psychological mechanisms of addiction made the whole thing so much less scary to me and made the only solution - abstinence - fairly easy to accept. I don't remember the date, but the day I decided that no matter what, I was done drinking - that I didn't have to ever drink again! -, was one of the best of my life. I can still remember the feeling of relief wash over me. Understanding the 3Ps is similar (although for me, not quite as dramatic). Understanding mechanisms removes uncertainty and fear and reveals where we're fooling ourselves. I wish now that I'd been exposed to these ideas 3 years ago - it would have made recovery simpler than it was. I was addicted because I thought I was -- and the proof in that is that I haven't been actively addicted since the day I decided I wasn't. We really are all one thought away from health. We can change at any time.

Happy New Year to all of you - and thank you for continuing to be part of this community. Our shared history is very special. Love, NS

[paulywogg]

Happy New Year Gloamers hope its a safe,happy one,Jane,have you looked into turmeric supps? It helps with inflammation and depression+other things,I used to complain about chronic stuffy nose and since I started this they've been pretty clear,its worth a look into,have a great night everyone

[little beagle]

Jane I've been using Thieves oil for cleaning lately and that has really helped my sinuses too. The Eucalyptus in it is pretty good for that.
Happy New Year Gloamers.

[Guitarista]

Wishing all my much valued friends here a happy, healthy and magical new year. Love this thread. Thanks J vo for starting it and everyone for your consistently fab and thought provoking contributions. G :heartbeat: