On Friday night, I poured myself a drink: a strong one.
It was a deliberate decision, the opposite of a reflex. I looked up a recipe. I used a shot measure and a shaker; took a glass from a rarely opened cupboard.
The next day would be January 13th: seven years since my first miscarriage.
Unlike all the other non-anniversaries from our pregnancy losses, which now mostly slip by unnoticed, I still go into January with a certain amount of trepidation; how careful with myself do I need to be this year?
Because weird things can happen around January 13th for me. Insomnia. Periods that are either too early or too late, with all the attendant anxiety and wild, plummeting moods you’d expect from that. Viral-type illnesses that come on hot and heavy and then vanish just as quickly. Or an overnight loss of energy; a sapping of all motivation and optimism. Often, I only clock the timing of these seemingly unconnected weirdnesses after the fact.
Every year, like clock-work, I’m reminded that the body really does keep the score.
It makes me consider everything as a potential, unconscious trigger at this time of year: a cold snap, the grey skies, ice on pavements, news flashes about winter flu and hospitals running out of bedspace (a depressingly familiar annual occurrence) – even the first daffodil in the bunch coyly revealing itself from a vase in the hallway.
And alcohol? Specifically, not drinking alcohol. Could a dry January unwittingly be part of this complex collage of sense-memories from a time I went from pregnant to suddenly…not?
This was my justification, anyway, as I mixed gin with cava; with lemon juice and sugar. Why not try to disrupt the pattern my body can’t help but remember?
I wasn’t drinking to get drunk, out of sorrow, or to numb. I made that drink in an attempt to remind my body that we’re here, now, and not back there.
It’s complicated, of course. While right now a Friday-night cocktail feels like a ritual to keep ghosts at bay, for a long time it was not drinking that felt like the only way to stop myself being haunted by the past (with all its pregnancies that never made it into my future).
Not long after my third miscarriage, drinking alcohol became untenable. Intolerable, even. So I stopped.
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