“My mind is like a bad neighborhood; I try not to go there alone.”—Anne Lamott

The despair is back. It’s so familiar that its return is almost comforting like seeing an old friend until you remember that friend is misery. I am miserable.

It is mid-February. I have made it through the big three without incident: Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. My sober family had a party on January 2 to celebrate getting through the holidays without a drink and hopefully a minimal amount of amends. I proudly celebrated one year of sobriety on January 8.

Things were going well until they weren’t. I wasn’t blindsided by these feelings of despair. As I said, this is familiar to me. A part of me feels victorious. This is how you really are. Stop pretending you’re “happy, joyous, and free.” This miserable SOB is the real you.

A deep anguish causes a throbbing tightness in my chest. The feeling reminds me of a toy my kids have.

“Award-winning geometric expanding/contracting ball,” the Amazon description said when I purchased it for Christmas. If you pull the plastic rods out in one way, the toy expands to a foot-long sphere. But then if you push the rods together, it contracts to a five-inch ball. My chest is stuck inside that plastic contraption, and I can’t figure out how to pull the rods the right way so that it will expand, and release me from this pain. All I want to do is make this feeling go away. The contracting ball makes me feel like I can’t breathe properly, and I keep sighing in an attempt to loosen the tightness.

“What’s wrong, Mom?” six-year-old Raymond asks when he catches one of my sighs over breakfast one morning. I’m afraid Ray has inherited my sensitivity, which I know through doing the Fourth and Fifth Steps with my sponsor Mary is a selfish defect, always worrying about other people’s moods, always worried that you are the cause of their bad mood. I smile at him and assure him it’s nothing, I’m just overwhelmed.

Nothing is wrong, I tell myself as I complete a retainer agreement for a new matter at work, as I place cereal in my shopping cart at the grocery store, as I chop onions for the burritos we seem to have for dinner every other night. Stop it, I yell at myself. But I can’t and the ball contracts a little more and tears stream down my face. If Raymond sees me at this moment, I’ll say it was the onions that made me cry.

If I wanted to, I could find a reason for these tears. After having a wonderful holiday together, my husband Chris and I are disconnected again. Snapping at each other and taking score over who is doing more for the family. I’m grateful for my flexible, part-time job but working for my father has its challenges. Michelle my therapist says it’s unhealthy and keeps pushing me to find alternative work. I’m overwhelmed—working, taking care of the kids, getting dinner on the table, and keeping a clean house. Oh, and did I tell you my mother is slowly dying from lupus and pulmonary hypertension?

Pick a reason, any reason for the despair. But I know these are all excuses. They are not the real causes of this emotional pain. Just like I used to justify my crying bouts when I was in my late twenties. After getting properly sloshed on whatever alcohol I had in my New York City apartment, I’d hole up in the bathroom with my drink and my Sony Walkman. I’d stare into the mirror and bawl over the deaths of my siblings while listening to Kate Bush’s “This Woman’s Work.” I’m not saying that their deaths aren’t tragic and sad. They are. But that’s not why I was crying. That’s the excuse I gave myself to drink and feel miserable.

“Poor me,” they say in the meetings. “Pour me another drink.”

I want to drink now. I know that it would make the tightness in my chest go away. I close my eyes and imagine the relief from the first long gulp of a vodka cranberry. The sting of the alcohol going down my throat would turn into a warmth that would radiate through my body, releasing the clench of my insides. The relief would be temporary I know, but the want to feel better, even if only for a couple of hours, is powerful.

I know I’m supposed to call someone. A newcomer. A sober sister. My sponsor. But Mary is just going to say I need to go to more meetings. And I don’t want to go. She will say I need to get a sponsee. And I don’t want a sponsee. She’ll say that I need to be of service to someone else in order to stop thinking about myself. In order to let my Higher Power in.

I’m of service to everyone every day! I argue with her in my head. I make the kids breakfast, then pack their lunches, then drive them to school, then go to work. I pull on my mom’s compression socks and take her to the doctor. After work, I stop at the grocery store. Then, I pick up the kids at school. I make them a snack, help with their homework, make dinner, clean up the kitchen, and then put them to bed. My entire day is being of service! Yet, I still feel like crap. I feel like I want to die. I have visions of slashing my wrists. Quick swipes of a razor producing thin red strips of blood. Not to kill myself but to release the pain that’s stuck inside. 

You are a mother, I scold myself. You shouldn’t feel this way. My motherly love should overpower my chest-clenching sadness. But it doesn’t and I feel guilty. At least, I’m showing up for the day when all I want to do is hide out in my closet, lying down in the dark next to the dormant running shoes and dust bunnies. My daily duties feel like Herculean accomplishments to me. Wiping peanut butter on bread and sticking it in a lunch box feels like I’m hiking a mountain. Throwing my hair up in a ponytail and putting on jeans to take them to school feels like I’m running a marathon. One day, I can’t even put on jeans. I stay in the sweatpants that I wore to bed all day long.

How do other moms do it? When I pick Raymond up at the school at 1:30 p.m. to take him to his allergist appointment, I feel like I’m super-mom. See, I’m doing it? I want the world to take note. I’m doing it, even though I want to hide in the closet with a bottle of vodka. But the super-mom feeling fades when the allergist asks the names of Ray’s current medications, and I can’t remember. I meant to write them down and bring them to the appointment, but I forgot.

Can’t you see I’m doing the best I can?! I want to yell at the allergist who turns away from us in his swivel chair to type something into Raymond’s file on the computer. Probably something along the lines of: “Mother is a fuck-up.”

On my way to work the next day, I drive past an old Presbyterian church. Its huge red door is decorated with a wreath left over from Christmas. I have a strong urge to pull the car over and go curl up on the stoop, like a homeless person. Just leave me be. Just leave me to lie on this cold cement stoop. I imagine the roughness of the cement on my cheek. I want to feel physically what I’m feeling emotionally. Hard, cold, loneliness.

There is nothing wrong, I remind myself again. You have a nice house with a big backyard in a small town with three wonderful children and an understanding husband who wants to spend time with you, who helps out around the house after he works hard at his job. But the more I try to will the sadness away, the more the ball contracts, squeezing out tears.

On Saturday, the sadness hits me again in Ikea. I’m there to buy a desk for my daughter’s room. I volunteered for this task because it seemed like the lesser of two evils. It is easier to drive to the City of Elizabeth than to be around my kids with the chest-tightening and the sighing. Last night, I read Kay Thompson’s Eloise to my four-year-old daughter Julia while tears streamed down my face. She asked what was wrong and I could only shake my head and wipe my tears with my sleeve. What psychological damage am I doing to my kids?

“My mom wept while she read books to me at night,” Julia will tell her therapist.

On the way home, I’m driving past the oil refineries on the New Jersey Turnpike when my cell phone rings. The minivan’s screen tells me it’s Angela. Angela had six months sober when I first came into the rooms and appeared to know everything about AA. I followed her around for weeks, literally mimicking her. Angela thanked the speakers, so I thanked the speakers. Angela gave her number to newcomers so I gave my number to newcomers. She had what I wanted—a confidence and a lightness—so I did what she did.

For two seconds, my finger hovers above the screen between decline and accept. I don’t want to talk to anyone in this state. I have nothing good to say. But I accept the call with a pang of regret. Through the Bluetooth speaker, Angela talks for a bit about her newborn son and then asks, “How are you?” I try to say “fine” but the tears start to flow and I’m sobbing. I tell her about how I’ve been feeling. I tell her the truth.

“It’s going to be all right,” she says. Her calming voice is an immediate balm on my pain. It feels good to admit my sadness out loud to someone, to get it out of my head.

“Feelings aren’t facts,” she says. It’s a dorky phrase but when she says it, it makes me smile. She is a kindergarten teacher and I feel like one of her snotty-faced students on the first day of school. I tell her that I’m not okay. That maybe I’m depressed. Like clinically depressed. She asks if I’ve talked to our sponsor Mary about this.

“No. . .” I admit, which seems ridiculous when I say it aloud. Why wouldn’t I talk to the person who has vowed to help me? Angela says that if I have to, I should seek outside help. By this, she means maybe I need to go back to my therapist. I had stopped seeing her when things seemed to be better. 

“I’m afraid that Chris will think I’ve done something bad again if I tell him I need to go back to therapy.” It wouldn’t be unreasonable for him to think that as that’s what happened two years ago.

“It’s not your job to manage his feelings,” Angela says to me, probably for the hundredth time.

After I finish the call with Angela, I call Mary. She picks up immediately, which she will do if she hasn’t heard from me in a couple of days. I tell her what’s been going on, how I’ve been sad all the time when there is really nothing wrong.

“Why am I still like this?” I whine at the Bluetooth microphone. “I should be better by now.”

“Oh my God, Liz,” she says. “We are not cured. There is no cure for alcoholism! We get a daily reprieve contingent on our spiritual condition. It says so right in the book: ‘When these feeling crop up. . .’ Not ‘if,’ but ‘when.’”

Everything she says makes sense. I am always amazed that when I come to her with a real problem, she always gives the right advice. I’m surprised because she doesn’t always have her shit together. She has told me more than once that she wants to punch her mother-in-law in the face and I’m sure some doctor has noted her parental mistakes in a file. Once, I commented on the fact that she always seems to say the right thing. She said it had nothing to do with her. That she prays for her Higher Power to speak through her. That sometimes she doesn’t even remember what she said. Now, as I drive in my minivan on the highway with an Ikea desk clunking around in the back, she (or is it her Higher Power?) speaks to me through the car’s speakers. Later, when I try to remember what exactly she said, I can’t. But I know that she offered me absolution for my sadness. “We cannot control our feelings.” And she gave me advice on what to do to stop feeling like this. A way to pull on the contracting ball so that I may feel better. A way to let my Higher Power in.

I’m almost to our exit, almost home, but I call Chris anyway. I tell him I need to go to a meeting tomorrow. The 8:30 a.m. beginner’s meeting so I can seek out new sponsees. The plastic ball trap around my chest expands, and I can breathe.

-Elizabeth Jannuzzi

Elizabeth Jannuzzi is the operations and communications manager at Project Write Now, a nonprofit writing organization. Her work has been featured in Pangyrus, Cagibi, and Mother Always Write. In 2018, she received an Honorable Mention in Memoir Magazine’s Recovery Contest. Elizabeth lives in New Jersey with her husband and three almost out-of-the-nest kids. In her free time, she is slowly section hiking the Appalachian Trail. Elizabeth is working on a memoir, Sober Mom, about her recovery from alcoholism. Find her on Twitter @elizjannuzzi and on Instagram @lizjannuzzi