Beating Off the Black Beast

This was the weekend I was gonna do it. I was gonna go outside the Bat Cave, get on a subway, see things, do things. I even took Monday off with the idea of getting a Qi Dong massage after seeing my psychiatrist. While abstinence is never in the bag, it's time to start working on Phase II, which includes getting a life beyond Hicks Street.

Then, on Friday night, the phone rang. My brother called to tell me my mother had fallen and was in the cardiac care unit with a broken hip. Upon arrival, her blood pressure was extremely low, her electrolytes were doing jigs, she had water in her lungs again and her kidneys were close to failure. I got off the phone, made plane reservations and called my father to tell him I'd be there Tuesday. "Oh, you don't need to, honey: I just got off the phone with the orthopod and nothing is wrong."

So I called American, got a sympathetic agent who canceled everything at no charge and promptly started freaking out.

I got up Saturday in a nervous twist. I looked at the clock. I had to shower, dress up, go to a meeting and then up to Lincoln Center, then home to a dinner party. I began to gag. I was rooted to my chair. I couldn't move. I watched the clock tick past the meeting time. I did some major hoisting of boxes and clothes around and looked at the clock, now ticking toward the School of American Ballet workshop performance. I froze, unfroze long enough to take Daisy out, came back and went to bed with America's Next Top Model, which has now superseded Seinfeld for availability. All Tyra All the Time. I called my friends who were having the dinner party to tell them what was going on, straggled through the shower and, while I was dressing, called my brother. They had misspoken about her hip. It was fractured. There would be a surgery as soon as her vitals were back up.

I know that my mother could not survive surgery.

My friends are very, very close friends whose ministry is old people. I believe everyone has a ministry, whether you believe in God or not. Mine is Fat Ladies. Theirs is old people. It was a good place to be before I trudged home to wait out my brother's word on booking a flight.

I woke with a dimming headache on Sunday and went back to bed as Daisy ate her breakfast. I called the friend I was going to a dance performance with and begged off. By that afternoon, she was back to no fractured hip. She has a fractured pelvis. Jim and I decided I'd better get out there.

All of my neuroses about leaving the house had leapt up and I was starting to think the Black Beast was waiting in the hall. I was shaking and addle-pated. I couldn't leave to go to the store. All I wanted to do was stay in bed.

Somewhere in that miasma that Sunday became, I was sitting in the kitchen, smoking a cigarette and drinking instant coffee. I really needed to get to the store but I knew I couldn't. Some dishes had accumulated. I looked at them and knew I couldn't wash them. It was going to be bed for me again. I was very, very scared.

I got batshit at Mom and Dad's house. It's 100 degrees there, their pace is slow and needy, there is nothing to do. I eat. I eat all the time. I picked up my 90-day coin two weeks ago and had, Sunday, 106 days of abstinence and a loss of 41 pounds. What would I be in a week? I've worked SO hard this winter and spring, getting abstinent, writing, getting my depression into remission. I was facing a trap in which the only exit is sugar.

I decided to wash one dish. I washed all of them. I decided to brush my teeth. I decided to go to the store. I decided to put some stuff that sprayed out of my reorganization project away. I decided to take Daisy to play ball. We ran into Boomer and his owner and we had a good talk about what was going on. Daisy got her ya-ya's out.

I made my reservations.

Then I went to the Safeway website and ordered the food I need when I walk in the door on Wednesday night. And then, despite being a couple hundred dollars shy of paying in cash, I made my flight/hotel reservations for Prague in the first week of September. I need that trip to be real when I get to Arizona. I need those dates set in concrete so that no one expects me to be anywhere else. I need to hang on to the Frances I want to be in 91 days.

I went to bed late but made real coffee, washed my hair and saw my psychiatrist. Everything in New York seems to be a do-over. Chase could process some of my banking but I ended up having to finish it in Brooklyn where there is a WA-MU unit. I had only last night realized my passport expired earlier this year so I'd run out the application but needed photos. The photographer wasn't there so I had to go back. I had to go back to the bank, as well, because I hadn't left a comfortable margin in my checking account. Then I had to go to the post office and send off my passport, which they're saying is taking 4 - 6 weeks.

I'm kind of packed. I need to do laundry and my Psychology Today blog, but I need to put up a post here saying I'm still scared about Arizona. My father just made a comment about people we should notify and then said, oh not them unless she doesn't make it. I'm scared I'm losing my mom and I know she's in such terrific pain that she's starting to want to go. I respect that. But I want to be there -- THERE -- for both of them, and that means not having my head in a loaf of bread. I want to come back on the 10th being HERE, for me, for my nieces who are coming to NYC for the first time in mid-June, for the work I need to do -- get out of the Cave, start interacting with the real world -- in order to be THERE in Prague. And I need to be prepared for the wide trans-continental planes on which I may be between five people. Do-able if I don't lose it in the 10 days to come.

I'll post while I'm away -- that's part of my plan, as well as going to meetings (I wonder what a senior citizens' community eating disorder meeting is like?) and staying in touch with my sponsor. I'll trade the Black Beast off for the Red Beast if I have to and march around in a fury. But I hope I simply get through it and come back to my own ecstatic yellow dog who doesn't much care what I weigh.

Thanks for reading.