I won’t have any, of course. In case you haven’t caught on, I’m about 22 weeks pregnant, and I haven’t had a sip of anything resembling alcohol since Thanksgiving (if you’re doing the math, I was pregnant then, but I didn’t know it yet, and apparently according to my doctor and all of the internet that is fine.) Then I went cold turkey.
It hasn’t been that hard since I’ve never been a “glass a night” type of gal. But, sometimes I like to get lost in the buzz of a half shot of good whiskey or a glass of some kind of red (it usually ends up being more than a glass since my husband hates wine and that bottle ought not go to waste.) Whiskey is much more convenient. But tonight, I’m wanting for Merlot.
That buzz of a few sips fueled by pure exhaustion at the end of a long week — just sending your body the signal its time to slow down and listen to whatever silence you can find, or shut your eyes and drift off to peaceful sleep.
It won’t be until well after my child is born that I indulge again, and that’s fine by me. The reality is my social drinking had a rough patch in my 20s, and it’s good to have a forcing function to avoid the stuff for a while. But, even without, I can — safely — fantasize about an evening at my apartment complex’s hot tub with glass in hand, the cool blue glowing at the bottom of the pool and specks of white steam dancing up against the crisp night air. Or, maybe, lying with bare flesh against the cold tile of my bathroom floor, a sip or two in, feeling my shoulder blades press into icy porcelain.
The exhaustion here in that I haven’t really slept well in a few weeks. I guess that’s part of pregnancy. I’ve slept, but I’ve woken up at 3am or haven’t fallen asleep until 12 and was up before 6. This is all, I imagine, designed to get me used to not sleeping at all in a few months when I become a human milk cannon.
If only, that warm, toxic tingle — slipping down my throat, etching the end of a week into my body, one intoxicated molecule at a time, drip, drip, dripping down to my fingertips, down to my stomach, down to my legs. Letting go of all the tension, the uncertainty, the stress, the anxiety. The obsessive thoughts. All the spin round and round in my mind like a broken record player that needs to be lost inside its own dimension of a gentle buzz, buzz, buzz.
So, instead, I dip my toes into a warm bath and allow it to engulf my flesh (except my stomach and future child, peaking out from its surface.) To swallow me and my everything, in warmth, I close my eyes. I breathe. I attempt meditation and fail, at least twice. I spin to more thoughts of all the million things to do. All things that will never be done. The water cools quickly or my skin normalizes its temperature, either way — that buzz is gone.
But I’m growing tired, and wander back to the bed, to curl up in my pregnancy pillow my husband calls “the squid,” and to create fantastically realistic stories in my mind of the paths life would never lead, which, in their impossibility, allow me to escape reality, for just long enough, to drift to sleep.
life with interest 