Eating while drinking

Picking up the thread of posts like this one, I had one more depressing meal last week and then seem to have banished them for several days. A little background: like last year, I stopped drinking this spring the same time D did, for Lent. (As noted before, D is Catholic and I am not; but I figure this is a way to keep her company.) The exercise hasn't been 100% successful -- nor was it for her -- but I found myself thinking about it a couple of days before Easter.

What I realized is that the hardest part about giving up alcohol for several weeks is, for me, dealing with dinner-time. But this is not because of the traditional association of wine with dinner. No, rather it is because I find myself feeling rather too much anxiety around dinners here, and the wine helps dispel that.

I need to be more exact, because (Heaven knows!) this is nothing like a "food issue." When I dine with D, on one of our dates, I hardly notice whether we have wine or not. I feel no anxiety about those meals. But I find I feel anxiety -- about? stemming from? -- no, no, let me say "in the vicinity of" -- where was I? Oh yes. I find I feel anxiety in the vicinity of dinner with the family in our house. And so for the last several weeks, when I have had sparkling water on the table instead of wine, dinners have been a lot harder. There have been a lot more of them where I have slumped forward with my head in my hands, or where I have had to excuse myself to go back to the bedroom as a refuge. Sometimes I explain this in terms of the levels of ambient noise when the boys get excited about something (such as in this post here). Sometimes I just chalk it up to depression. But neither of those is quite right.

I mean, noise can do that to me, don't get me wrong. But sometimes the noise level isn't anything all that unusual. And so I think there are other things that have nothing to do with objective decibel levels, but which show up for me as if they were noise. And I don't know what they are. I don't know if I'm reacting to the boys fidgeting with their silverware, or to the chronic clutter of paper on the far end of the table, or to the permanently untidy sewing machines on the wall past the table, or to the overall chaos and disorganization and dirt in the house ... or if I'm reacting to the mere fact of sharing a meal with Wife, or if ... well, I don't really know what. Any of those could be a contributing factor, I am quite sure. But which ones are serious enough to make me unable to cope with dinner? That I cannot tell you.

I think I am on to something, however.