The Epiphany, Part 6 – Finale?

Valentine’s Day came. And went.

Surprisingly, my passive aggressive “taking the high road” paid off. He came to his senses without me badgering him or accusing him or escalating anything.

Phew.

I was curious how that would end.

But….we never did do anything “special” for Valentine’s Day.

Other than spend 16hrs on the phone with verizon, ordering a new phone and spending money we dont have so my brother in law can have a phone because he watches the kids.

So we have finally arrived to Saturday – the day after the day of lovr. It was going to be a fairly busy day today.

Maybe – just maybe, if we play our cards right, we can go out for at least a drink and dessert somewhere.

Or so we had naively declared to ourselves. Nothing is rarely that easy in our world.

A few weeks prior, we started doing family hikes on Saturdays.

But today, it was pouring down rain, and E HATES being wet unless her ENTIRE body can be wet. So hiking today would be a no go.

So, since she had a rough week with a new kid teasing her for being trans, I made a last minute decision (red flag #1) to let E plan what we did that afternoon AFTER our errands

I had to get some stuff done, so therefore we did it before a potential meltdown (look at me use my big brain).

So, last minute, I had daddy ask E what she wanted to do that afternoon – swimming OR the nickle arcade (red flag #2)

I was hoping she would say swimming.

But, she unfortunately did not.

And this unfortunate decision (mainly on my part) led to one of the absolute WORST storms E has had in a VERY VERY long time.

I dont even know why I gave her the option of a nickle arcade.

I know better.

Well….I want to think I know better.

She had been doing so well. She had been managing her storms fairly well.

So well in fact, I was lulled into forgetting about her triggers.

I temporarily forgot that we cannot do typical things that other families with neurotypical children do.

At least not without ALOT of preparation and planning and being constantly vigilant of not only her every move, but also all the potential triggers that lay ahead.

When I am on my game, her storms aren’t that bad after a sensory overload situation.

But I was on cloud 9 for other reasons. My brain reverted to believing we were just like any other normal family.

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Dead.

Wrong.

On so many different levels that afternoon. It was by far a storm that all of us want to erase from our memory.

But I cannot.

So, for the first time in 6/7 weeks, after the kids went to bed, I had my husband go buy me a bottle of liquor – Kissed Caramel Vodka.

And I started drinking. One, and then another and another and another.

Mind you, I havent drank any sort of alcohol for a while before this, so my tolerance is extremely low.

The girls were in bed. The husband was out in the man cave (aka the garage) with his buddy.

I dont remember exactly what I was doing. But knowing me, I was either playing on my phone or watching tv or both.

This is not how I saw this week, let alone this day, going. It went from bad to nightmare in 6 short days.

And then my husband came inside. He sat on his spot on the couch next to me.

And we started talking.

At this point, we were both beyond drunk.

He and I are the “love you and you and you” kind of drunks.

He poured me another drink. And we kept talking.

We aired alot of stuff that we had both been holding in tightly.

We connected for the first time, in an extremely long time.

It was pretty therapeutic.

I think we talked for almost 2 full hours.

But the night didnt stop there. It got even better.

I must have been watching tv. Because I had to keep pausing it because we couldn’t stop talking. We would watch a minute, and then somebody would say something and then I couldn’t follow along on the tv.

I finally decided to just turn off the tv. And then I saw the 2 lincoln log boxes.

At this point, I think I had drank my entire bottle of liquor. I remember believing that Sunday was NOT going to be pretty.

But, this connection that was reignited, definitely worth it.

Oh. It’s time for me to go to my CERT class. I guess this wasnt the finale after all.