Where the Sidewalk Ends

I recently got an education in Sakrete.  Yes—the bag of sediment that you buy at Home Depot—just add water, give it a stir, spread with a shovel and voila.  Suddenly Joni Mitchell is calling you up and asking what the hell you’ve done to paradise.

                The product was not entirely unfamiliar to me—when I was a kid, my dad was constantly trying to turn our backyard into the organic version of The Chocolate Room in the Wonka Factory and planted every kind of fruiting tree and vining plant that had the potential to thrive in Piedmont soil.  I recall dusk at the end of a warm Spring day, and my father yelled for my sister and I to come down to the garden.  He had dug two postholes behind the carrot bed and was filling them with shovelfuls of a gray, oatmeal-like substance from the wheelbarrow.  Once the holes were filled level to the ground, he had Maren and I make handprints on the surface and he used a paint stirrer to write the year underneath.  They became the foundation of a small trellis for a grapevine that never produced a morsel larger than a pea. 

                Things like Sakrete, Superglue, anchored screws, and any other fastener you would find in a Midwestern dad’s workshop, make me consider the marketability of things advertised to be “permanent.”  Permanence is one of those conceptual commodities that humans crave and fear at the same time.  We want the security of knowing that some things will last forever, and the relief of knowing that some things won’t.  We love the idea of permanence when we fall in love, then we love the idea of impermanence when we feel the pain that comes with heartache.  We love “forever” when we buy our first house, and hate “forever” once the termites, plumbing issues, and black mold show up to party. 

                The constant vacillating between permanent and impermanent is what keeps a lot of addicts from committing to sobriety.  It certainly had me on the ropes for a while.  There’s conjecture about a common stumbling block called, “fear of the last drink.”  In summation, when we get to the point in our addiction where we know we have to quit—and quit forever—we struggle to take the first step of having our last drink be our last drink.  Or our last bottle being our last bottle (see what I did there?)  It means it’s really over.  The best friend/buddy/companion/lover that we have grown accustomed to has to leave, we just don’t feel like we’re ready to say “goodbye.”  Especially if we can keep putting it off for just one more day…

                You may need to be an addict to understand this, but addiction really is akin to a toxic relationship—and you try desperately to make it work.  But you can’t.  Its nature is to run wild, and it will jump every fence and snap every tether you attach to it.  The only difference is that addiction is a relationship with only one cognizant human, so we have to be the one to end it.  We can’t keep trying until the other person is the one to leave.  And it’s incredibly difficult because we know how much it hurts when something we thought we could always rely on turns out to be a fleeting fancy, and we are left to sit in silence and figure out who we are without them. 

                Part of me wants to make a clever statement about how alcohol is the Sakrete approach to companionship, self-esteem, happiness, blah blah blah—but it turns out that Sakrete is actually quite permanent.  It’s not like spackle, it’s more than a patch-job kind of compound.  Don’t let the simple recipe fool you, if you let it sit for 72 hours, it will withstand the weight of many trucks with payloads of hay loads before it cracks.  It ruins my working theory about temporary fixes for permanent problems, but it’s also a nice thought, isn’t it?  If things that we believe to be permanent can break our hearts by being weak and transient, then it should be a relief to know that the things we believe to be emergency reinforcement can become foundationally reliable.  Sure, it still leaves us in the agitating gray-area of not knowing what will stay and what will go, but isn’t that true of everything?

                My sponsor, Greg, is a 72-year-old man and he has a habit of frequently asking me how my love life is going.  For the record, I’ve never given him a satisfying answer.  I started seeing someone back around my 1 year mark of sobriety and I remember wanting to be excited about it, but being absolutely terrified by it.  Greg asked about the situation and I told him that I was worried that I would never be able to trust a man or a relationship again, after my steadfast husband disappeared.  I could hear Greg shaking his head through the phone, and he corrected me with a philosophy that I intend to carry with me for the rest of my life.  He said:

                Don’t worry about whether you can trust another person or another relationship.  You can’t control anything that involves another human being who is making choices for themselves.  All you need to be able to trust is yourself.  Not your intentions, not your role in a relationship, not your ability to commit, but you have to trust that—no matter what happens—you will be able to handle the outcome.

                I love that advice because it doesn’t change the way that I love or the way that I make promises, it just changes my perspective on how I am, and have been, capable of loosening my grip on things that I never wanted to let go of.  I never thought I could stop drinking and I never thought I could live without the man I married, but I stopped drinking when the price was the man I married.  And when all currents came together in what I thought would be a catastrophic tidal wave, I learned how to let go.  There was no impact, just a crescendo.  I thought I couldn’t survive without either, I am living just fine without both.

                Greg’s advice also wasn’t as dooming as it sounds.  He didn’t say not to dream, or fantasize, or get excited about any possibilities ever again—he just said that I, we, everyone, needs to handle their shit when it doesn’t work out.  Like the resilient, adult, human creatures that we are.  People falter.  Relationships crumble.  So does Sakrete, so does expertly mixed and laid concrete, for that matter.  The earth’s own crust shifts and splits from time-to-time, ask anyone who has property insurance in California.  That which demolishes your Malibu beach house does not have to demolish you along with it. 

                If we act on our fear of permanence, we’ll never beat addiction.  If we stagnate on our fear of impermanence, we’ll never do anything again.  There will be times when the Sakrete structure solidifies, while the relationship that built it falls apart.  Or, or, you could be left with a wheelbarrow full of gray sand, reaching a manicured hand out to a man with a hose who politely refuses to add water because he doesn’t want to mix with you anymore… It hurts.  It sucks.  Tears are a solvent—cry about it over your wheelbarrow.  Then mix yourself some Sakrete and slather it up into the shape of a castle.  Wounds of impermanence are like all other wounds—they will heal with a little time.  That’s not a platitude, according to the bag you only need 24 hours to bear foot traffic and 72 hours for weighted vehicles.