Mark and I recently went to a party. I’ve never been a big party person; more than once in high school and college (at the height of most people’s partying lives), I’ve called at the last minute to tell the host of a party that I couldn’t attend, because (although I never admitted this) I wanted to stay home and read a book.
What I like best about parties is getting the chance to catch up with friends and talk. Oh, and the cake. I like it if there’s good cake. What I’ve never found appealing about them is the noise, the music, the close spaces, the meeting of new people, the dancing, the alcohol and the drugs. And if we’re talking about kids’ parties, while they don’t usually run the risk of being big venues for alcohol and drugs, they do often come with bounce houses. Now I’m perfectly happy to stick my kids in to one and have them bounce themselves to broken limbs or a nice early bedtime (whichever comes first), but my kids have been known to want adult company, and I get a little motion sick being in them myself.
The unappealing things about parties have actually gotten worse than unappealing in recent years; they’ve gotten triggering. It puts me in a crazy place to be around a frenzied atmosphere where people are altering their moods and the promise of sex hangs in the air. They’re triggering for Mark too, and we both prefer to avoid them. Fortunately, we’re old and we have young kids. We aren’t invited to many parties that don’t center on cake and a bounce house.
However, recently we were invited to a special event for someone who is important to me, and it meant a lot to me to make an appearance. Mark had some reservations about going, but generally worked himself into a good frame of mind around it. I thought I was in a good place, until I walked through the door and the host greeted me warmly with a hug that smelled of alcohol, and that first whiff of alcohol made me uncomfortable for the rest of my stay there. I felt like I was suffocating: a feeling similar to one I had at an event a little over a year ago with a heavy emphasis on alcohol.
I wasn’t expecting the presence of alcohol to be so powerful to me. After all, neither my husband nor I are addicted to alcohol. But other members of our family are. And clearly I still have some work to do in working through the effects other people’s drinking has on me.
This post originally published at The Second Road on October 12, 2008.
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