My mom is on the phone again. “And who’s with you?” she asks. “It’s just me, mom,” I say.
The time difference is two hours and she doesn’t give a fig about calling me well after 10pm.
“Oh,” she says. “I really don’t think we’re meant to be on our own.”
“Well I’m fine here on my own,” I say. Which was not always the case.
Time was when I couldn’t abide my own company, when I couldn’t stand being with myself.
This led to an addiction journey into a state of bitter self-loathing and despair and to the brink of self-annihilation.
My so-called rock bottom. I’d heartily recommend it, by the way. Why?
Because my recovery journey has helped me accept, then dismantle and reassemble that former self.
I’ve learnt to love myself, as crazy as that sounds.
In recovery, we’re taught to stand in front of the mirror and say “I love you and I’ll take care of you” – something many of us find embarrassing, even impossible.
We’re also told by others in our fellowship that they’ll love us until we learn to love ourselves.
This love for myself, and deep gratitude for this brief life I have, is the thing that makes all other love possible. It’s as simple as that.
The truism is that we can’t love anyone else until we love ourselves, and not until I got sober for a good few 24-hours was I in a position to experience this.
In your first year of recovery, you’re told not to have a romantic relationship of any kind.
Rather try looking after a pot plant for a year, they say, and see if you can manage that. So, baby steps.
Because honestly, relationships of any kind were not our forte.
Yes, I did love my children before I got sober, absolutely, totally, fiercely, but perhaps not with the calmness and clear-sightedness that I do now.
I’ve learnt that my presence and time shared is the greatest thing in my parenting or indeed any other relationship, after discovering that self-love, as awful as that used to sound to me, is really just self-respect.
If self-respect is absent in a so-called loving relationship, it’s just a case of hostage-taking and the setting of emotional ransoms.
It seems to me that my declarations of love in the past were mostly attempts at trying to convince myself I actually felt love. Perhaps I did, to varying degrees.
I do love my ex-wife, but as a mother, and it’s more about empathy and respect than anything romantic. But these declarations were more like acts of reassurance to myself and others.
Attempts to cross a divide between my own self-hatred and what I’d read about and seen around me and wanted for myself. Romantic delusions.
But I really don’t blame myself. I was trying my best.
I thought that if I performed well, others would love me. It was a fraudulent idea that emanated from the way I was raised, that’s all.
I don’t blame my parents either. They too tried their best.
But this model didn’t serve me, I was to discover in mid-life, with quite a lot of pain. It needed an overhaul, root and branch.
Luckily, this true sceptic found the 12-Step Program, and it somehow fitted the shape of my anguish and confusion.
True love, I think, is compassion for self and others. It is selfless, in a way.
More than anything, this means acceptance and understanding, with a lashing of humility.
There is no “magical other” or “the one”. Perhaps just a 0.67 person that I can round up to 1.0, according to the advice columnist, Dan Savage (if I’d listened to him earlier in life I would have conducted my relationships very differently.)
So it’s not about what you get from a relationship but what you can give it that makes it magical.
Take my neighbour and occasional business partner, for example, a semi-feral Celt who pays scant attention to detail. His strengths are not mine, nor mine his.
He sometimes makes me sigh, but I appreciate him nonetheless. I’m sure I vex him too. Yet somehow he is a brother to me.
Several other men too, have become brothers, now that I’ve learnt that I don’t need to compete with other men, but can co-exist happily with them if I practice compassion. We are vulnerable, perhaps that’s the key.
As for romantic love, I never thought I would experience that again. I’ve been privileged to feel that I’ve been in love a few times in my life. I’ve uttered those words and meant them.
But love shifts, it changes, in my experience. Simply because we do too. It can deepen or fade, it swells, it obscures – it can even make us blind. The ancient Romans considered it a disease, and we do talk of lovesickness.
It’s a big, big feeling. I can handle that now. It does not overwhelm me. Instead, I’m perfectly whelmed.
Here I am in love, and it feels like the first time. She is firstly and most importantly my cherished friend, and I want the best for her – even if that means leaving me. Such a radical thing to say. But I cannot possess or own her.
She is free, and always will be, and can always renew her choice to be with me. I don’t have a lifelong pass.
This makes me feel like I’m like a puppy caught in a torrent and swept downstream, scrabbling desperately for a foothold at times, but strangely enough I also feel incredibly secure, having gained some self-respect.
I have changed, thankfully, through hard work and the help of others.
I know that I am not a permanent fixture of this world, which will go on with or without me. That I’m not the most important. That I am not alone, and needn’t be.
That someone else loves me so deeply and completely that it really does feel it will last through the challenges we’ll undoubtedly face.
That for the first time in my life, even in my mid-50s, I can envision, and even dare to hope, that I will grow older with someone I love very deeply, not perfect, a little chipped and a little crazy. But perfect for me – flawed, dented, laughing, kind, beautiful me.
She helps me be the person I want to be, the person I enjoy being, the me that brings me deep and lasting joy.
Naturally, my mom is delighted.