May 16, 2010

Today I am Grateful for:


My Life. I'm so Grateful that I am visiting my family. I'm able to just sit back and look at everyone and appreciate who and what they are for exactly that. Nothing more. I'm not expecting them to be or do anything different other than what they are doing.


I feel like I am reading a novel and I have to laugh at some of the characters. I'm appreciating my parents and seeing why I am the way I am. (I can really see the genetics and how it plays a part in the way I am.)


I've never been more Grateful for my sobriety than today. I've actually gone to a couple of bars and can see what a mess people are from alcohol. My niece is a bar tender which is one of the reasons I ended up in a bar. I wanted clams since you really can't get them Houston. Where my niece works they serve them. My other niece who is 21 was with me and we sat at the bar to visit with my niece the bar tender. The fellow to the left of me was getting drunk and my nieces are both very beautiful girls. So he decided to buy shots for them and me because he wants to show his style to them. I kindly decline and tell him I don't drink. This fell then says to me, "Congratulations" shakes my hand and then says something about he should probably not be drinking. (He was right, it didn't seem like the place to do service work, he was a man about town at that moment.)


But I flashed back to the moments when I drank and slowly became louder and thought I was the cat's meow and how people must have thought I had it all. But to see the loudness, the slurriness, the lies that couldn't be kept straight in the simple conversations we are having as stool mates. It was a clarity for me that I was Grateful to have. It was knowing I was going to safely get into my car and drive home without a worry if I was pulled over. I was Grateful to know I would just wake up tired this morning and that is all. I was Grateful to know that most of the money I had in my wallet would still be there because I didn't have to end up feeling like I had to buy the whole bar drinks. I am Grateful because I could pray to God this morning about what I am Grateful for not to make me feel better and to get rid of a major headache or the guilt of some foolish act I may have committed.