by Diane Mierzwik
I sat at the stoplight, tapping my fingers on the steering wheel, pretending to be listening to the song on the radio for anyone who might just look over into my idling car and see me, when all I was really concentrating on were the words which rang through my head.
“You are the emotional age of when you started drinking.”
Three months of meetings and “One day at a time” suddenly became relevant.
The rest of the meeting was background noise as I calculated and recalculated my emotional age using my mathematical equation which found the exponential value of the times I was sober, found the derivative of the times I was relatively sober, and added them to the age of first drinking. By the end of the meeting, I had found the mean, medium and mode of my current emotional age.
My precise calculations estimated I was between 23 and 27 emotional years old. I wondered if math would help me understand what exactly that meant for a 39 year old. I decided I would need social science for that and wished I hadn’t been drunk through most of those courses, since they are an easy A.
Instead of creating a longitudinal study for that complex dilemma, I began wishing I had the body of a 23 year old. Then I realized I had just been distracted by narcissistic thoughts about how I look, but figured since I was emotionally only a twenty-something year old, it was fine. To be expected in fact.
I wondered if there was some crash course in aging emotionally I could take which would help me to catch up to my chronological age. Like an Evelyn Wood speed reading course for recovering drunks who needed speed maturing.
Little did I know, my sponsor had already enrolled me in such a course, called “Making Amends.”
Previously, the only experience I had with making amends consisted of a Malcolm in the Middle episode in which a woman apologizes to Malcolm’s mom for having an affair with Malcolm’s dad. She, like me, was a black out drinker and had her facts all wrong.
I worried about the disasters my amends might cause, kind of like worrying that when speed reading skipping those “and” “if” and “buts” might ruin your literary experience.
And I was right. I did find that my apologies were off the mark, but not in the way I imagined.
Several weeks later, after awkwardly “catching up” with my lunch date, the woman who used to be my best friend, being careful not to double dip in the common bowl of salsa and waiting for her to finish her chicken enchiladas and have her plate cleared so there would be no across-the-table-aimed-at-me-flying food, I began, “I need to apologize…”
I unfolded the slip of paper I had pulled from my jeans’ pocket and began reading the list of embarrassing actions I had engaged in all in the name of throwing a few back, pausing after each one to make appropriate eye contact and to make a fitting sad, contrite face.
“… for snapping at you when you went out to dinner with other friends after I had spent the day helping you paint your daughter’s bedroom. ”
Downturned mouth, raised eyebrows to indicate how ridiculously petty I had been.
“… for calling you a liar when you told me the weather in your town was beautiful. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings with my joke.”
Steady eye contact to indicate how there is nothing funny in a joke only one of you gets.
I ran through the long list of things I had done wrong, emotionally immaturely wrong, and resisted the desire to point out how I had been likewise maltreated. According to my speed maturing tutor, this was blame-shifting and would make my amends null and void. The point was not to even the score, but to accept my responsibility in the situation… or situations.
When I finally wound down and had folded my list closed, I smiled weakly, waiting for the “oh, that’s okay. It wasn’t all that bad” response I felt I deserved.
As I sat back in the booth to soak up the reassurances and began scripting how I would tell my sponsor “I told you so” in so many not those words words, my lunch date leaned forward, narrowed her eyes, and began.
“What about the time you threw water in my face or the time you…”
I was so glad I had leaned back, out of spitting mad range.
I let her wind down, drinking the rest of my water then chewing noisily on my ice then rubbing the condensation on the table under the glass into a peace sign then tearing my napkin into a small white flag I waved in front of my chest, finally apologizing profusely, and barely pointing out that I didn’t remember any of it. I decided against explaining to her that they call it black-out drinking for a reason. Instead I paid the bill quickly, before she remembered anything else.
I hoped there was such a thing as black out amending.
I hoped this torture was helping me to emotionally catch up to my crow-footed eyes, sagging body parts, and graying hair age.
Over and over I sped through “situations” which required me to soak in criticism and blame for my behaviors, when all I really wanted to do was drink a few beers, then a few more, and settle into my haze of ignorant, emotionally-stunted bliss.
Besides, my eyesight was failing. Without my glasses, my chronological age was easy to deny. And I thought it was quite amusing when my teenage son told me to “act my age” as if he had a patent on immaturity. Maybe failing the course wouldn’t be such a bad thing.
But I am not a quitter, except when it comes to drinking that is. So I slogged through all of my amends until I got my “course completed” stamp from my sponsor.
I’d like to say that at the end of my speed maturing course I was an equanime yogi. But, as an emotionally mature person, I know that these labels are not for me to dispense, at least not on myself.
I am looking forward to putting my sponsee through the course… for her own emotional well-being, obviously. Not for my entertainment because that would be juvenile, or at least twenty-something behavior.