MY STRANGE ADDICTION

Guest Post by Joy from ComfyTown Chronicles.

(Unless you live under a bridge you have probably seen one of my 500 messages about the Circle of Moms Funny Moms competition. I have posted up that stupid link so many times that I have even annoyed myself. The one upside to this competition is that it has allowed me to connect with some other hilarious mommy bloggers. I asked Joy from ComfyTown to do a guest post swap. We each wrote about the same topic. You can read my post on her blog. Hope you guys laugh as hard as I did!)

“Hello, my name is Joy.”

“Hello Joy.”

“It’s been about about 12 hours since my last bottle. I have cut down, but I think about it every day, MULTIPLE times a day. I wonder if I will EVER stop thinking about it. I want to stop eventually. I know I NEED to stop. It could ruin everything I’ve worked so hard for, my child’s development…”

“It’s okay, Joy, this is a safe place. Why don’t you just tell us all about it. How did you know it was time to put the bottle down?”

This is my story, it’s not pretty.

I took my daughter to the doctor for her one-year checkup. We talked about her growth, her milestones, and her challenges. She is physically a force to be reckoned with and babbling like she should be, but she does have a challenge my other children did not: An addiction, to her bottle.

I mostly blame myself, as mothers tend to do, because yes, I am addicted to the bottle, too. No, not drinking out of her bottle, that actually takes an incredible amount of time to consume liquid….I mean, I would imagine. This being my LAST baby, I absolutely LOVE and have always loved, holding her and giving her a bottle. I’m seriously addicted. Whatever that hormone is that your body releases during cuddling, I’m hooked. I am an oxy(tocin) junkie.

I never taught my babies to hold their own bottle, or propped it up as I have seen people do. Believe me, I am not judging, especially parents of multiples. I am not strong enough to even think about that. For me the baby stage goes by way too fast, and that is my beautiful, baby-bonding time. It is some of my favorite Mom Time, to hold them, gaze into their little faces and just enjoy the moment, before they learn to walk, talk (back,) and become teenagers and make you doubt everything about your life.

With my other children, as recommended I got rid of their bottles right at their one year birthdays and it worked very well. They barely noticed a difference, loving their cute little sippy cups. My third child (what IS IT about that third child?) isn’t crazy about the sippy cups.

She also doesn’t love MILK, yet somehow she will drink a whole 8 ounces out of a bottle without hesitation. I took a “hint” from the universe, and I just assumed I should keep giving her bottles and bonding. Never mind that she has most of her teeth, and I know the nipples are bad for those teeth; Never mind that she is almost TOO BIG to sit across my lap on my recliner; and never-you-mind that she is becoming a terrible toddler, and will grab that bottle with her fierce claw the first chance she gets, and proceed to dump it out all over me and herself. Can’t be, I tell myself, she’s just a BABY. She’s NOT a toddler, she can’t be, I still have a wee little baby. (And that’s why I still have baby weight. Yeah, that’s the ticket. BABY.)

I was making excuses, all but hobbling her development and my husband who also loves giving her a bottle and pretending she’s still a wee baby, was a full-on enabler. What to do? Counseling? Group therapy? Are there meetings for this? None that I could find. Short of appearing on the show “My Strange Addiction,” I decided to do what I always do in these situations, consult Dr. Google.

I found the 12 steps of addiction programs, and tried to apply it to my situation. Here are the 12 steps, changing a couple of words to apply to my situation.

1. We admitted we were powerless over The Bottle – that our lives had become unmanageable. A bit dramatic, but I was looking for help.
2. Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity. For me, this higher power is brown liquor.
3. Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him. I don’t even know what this means. Next.
4. Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves. I’m selfish, I’m lazy. I don’t want my baby to grow up. Relatively normal stuff.
5. Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs. That’s what I thought I did in the last one.
6. Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character. Uh ok. Sure.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings. Is it me, or are these really repetitive?
8. Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all. In this case my baby, and that’s what I’m trying to do.
9. Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others. Again, that’s what I’m trying to do. Jeez.
10. Continued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it. What is WITH these steps, there should really only be THREE.
11. Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out. Praying feels like mockery to an agnostic. I tend to think I control my own destiny.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to Bottle-holics and to practice these principles in all our affairs. Does anyone fully understand these rules? Or is that what the meetings are for? The verbiage is enough to drive me to DRINK.