[Note: I wrote this early this week and have been trying to rewrite it since and I just can't.]
I'm starting to think that regret will be the defining emotion of my life.
I had a wonderful 3 hour lunch with my old friend on Saturday, we parked ourselves in the very center of a small and crowded restaurant smack in the middle of the Loop and didn't budge. The waitstaff were lovely about it, even if they did assume that our tip was a big tip and didn't bring us change.
She's decided to stop drinking. She was upset and crying, I couldn't tell if it was because of my miscarriage or the drinking, probably a little of both. I love her so much.
I wasn't expecting her news, I hope I responded properly, I told her how proud I was of her decision. If infertility is going to teach us anything I hope it's how to confront other people's life tragedies with respect and tact. And for me, how not to run away, and how not to be silent. One of the posts I'm linking to in my Favorite Posts From Elsewhere, Fucking you gives me a headache, has the best description of the effect of silence that I've ever read. It's towards the end, but read the whole post, slowly, because he's an amazing writer.
But I'm tired of life lessons. Frankly. I would like to go a month, a week, a day without looking back at my behavior and regretting it. I didn't need infertility to teach me another lesson, please, no more lessons.
We did drink a lot, starting in college. She never had the switch, she says, that tells you you've had enough and it's time to stop. I remember many many times seeing her with one eye going in one direction and the other eye going the other. She used to piss the bed. She scared me to death once when she visited me after college and threw up after she had passed out. She didn't even wake up, I just happened to hear her from the other room and came out to see what was going on.
We talked a lot about the way she's been using alchohol. It wasn't the binge drinking, it was the reasons why she drank. That's why she's finally decided to stop.
She is the second person I know to quit drinking within the past year. The other was my ex-boyfriend. I love my occasional beer or glass of wine, and will still get tipsy from time to time, but I profoundly regret alcohol. Alcohol and sex were a terrible combination for me, and I do suspect, in my deepest darkest heart of hearts, that the combination has led me to the terrible place I am now.
The first night I met my ex, we were sophomores in college and horribly drunk. We slept together that first night. We were only together a few months, then broke up, but got back together late in junior year and were together until about 6 months after graduation. I went on the pill after a few months and we stopped using condoms. There was so much drinking. We used to get drunk and go swimming, naked, in their apartment complex pool with 4 of our friends. I dove in the shallow end once and smacked my head really hard on the bottom. I was driving us home from a bar one night, drunk out of our minds, and got pulled over by a cop for having my brights on. How I was not arrested on the spot I'll never know. I eventually found out he wasn't just getting drunk and fucking me, he was fucking a lot of other people, most I didn't know but two I did, two of my close girl friends.
Even though he was a shit, it's my own behavior that I regret. How could I not have seen it? If there hadn't been so much drinking would I have made better choices? Why did I think it was cool when it was so obviously not? Why didn't I stop? Unfortunately he wasn't the last drunken relationship, there was another mistake in there before I met my husband.
They never were able to tell me definitively what caused my pelvic infection. It put me in the hospital for 2 days, and you know they ran every test imaginable but couldn't culture anything specific so they treated the infection and let me go. For a while I let that be enough, let it sit, ignored it, pretended it had been a mystery infection, I don't know what I had, didn't know what it was, didn't know how I got it.
I haven't talked to either of those two girlfriends since, but one of them just had her third baby.
