Seemingly Slim Pickins

If fear burned calories I'd be anorexic.

Last two weeks condensed: Broke, stunningly bored and bewildered with idleness, after reaching out again to friends and former co-workers I finally landed a job. Back with my former employer of the retail nature, I find that not only are things there not the same, but I am not at all the same either. The last time I worked full-time retail I had a husband and another income coming in - and an overflow of coping juice in my lifetime supply pool to wash over me should I find myself in any situation that called for it. My pool ranneth over.

Today my little puddle be cracked and dry, and I pray daily not to have to cope with anything bigger than a bad hair day until the coping rains come back and fill my reservoir again. Instead I got a retail schedule that would leave me home only when Sasha's not here and at work when she is. Thirteen is hard enough, but 13 and still in the throes of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is monstrous. Take that and add in the absence of any parental unit for over a week and what do you get? The emergency room on the evening of the fifth day in a row that mommy doesn't come home until after dark.

Poor Sasha was so agitated and desperate that I barely recognized her and I found myself in a fear that I have never experienced before. Kind of like the opposite of the day she was born, when I found myself in love in a way I had never before experienced. Holy crap, I have proven to myself that I can take just about anything, but when it comes to my kid - I become frightened and lost. No messing with my kid, Universe, I can't take it.

So she's been home for a week, flat on the sofa and I have attempted to show up for my job until today. This is simply not going to work.

If I could get away with drinking, believe that I would be wasted in a heartbeat. For certain.

But - I am 24 years clean and sober and supposedly have my wits about me, so I know that of all the choices out there for me, that is not one of them. Crazy, right? All that time and all I still want is my bottle to comfort me? And that freaking bottle is singing so rowdy right now that it's awfully hard to get around it to find whatever else my choices may be.

So what now? Hell if I know.

Today I'm grateful that it's Friday and I get to go to my home group and simply sit and take in other people's sprinklings of sanity. It may seem like a small thing, but it's the biggest and the best I got.