Easter!

Things are going well here for me in my housewifey sober life. I am busy - the whole family is - but it doesn't feel out of control.

I've been doing this mindfulness course through a great book and am blogging about it daily on my new blog called 'Mrs D Is Going Within'.

Maybe one day I'll start writing a blog called 'Mrs D Is Sugar Free' but I can't see that happening! I try hard to control sugar intake and manage to most of the time. Occasionally I have a binge (usually when I'm in a funk, no surprises there).. but I can recover from it pretty quickly.

If nothing else I am definitely very mindful about when I am going hard at the sugar! That's a step in the right direction isn't it?!

About to head away for our annual big extended family Easter holiday extravaganza in a remote isolated place. I'm really looking forward to it ... but it definitely does present as a wee bit of a challenge for me as I am the only sober person in the extended family. I've just written a long post about this on Living Sober. You can see it here.

But in general I am feeling calm and good.

I am still utterly delighted and grateful that I recognised booze was a problem for me and worked bloody hard to get it out of my life.

And I am still endlessly fascinated how things shift and change the longer I am sober. It was very noticeable to me after I reached 3 years in recovery that a new set of challenges were presenting themselves. I was starting to experience low-grade anxiety, found myself getting caught in thinking-loops about stuff that was tricky to navigate, and some of my parenting was less-than-calm.

Maybe this was because I wasn't so busy working on my sobriety. Maybe this was because parenting three boisterous boys would be challenging for even the best zen-master! Or maybe this was just something many of us develop in later life (and particularly women as menopause approaches).

I'll never know. But now I find myself delving into mindfulness meditation and it feels so bloody good.

I have a LONG way to go and a lot of practice to do but I'm committed.

Only sobriety would have bought me to this place. I'm grateful, I know Mr D is grateful, and without knowing it our sons are probably grateful too.

In my humble opinion there is nothing bad that can come from getting sober. And so much that is good.

Happy Easter and go easy on the chocolate!! I'm going to try to anyway...

Love, Mrs D xxx