Just before I left

As you know, in my head, I am ready to take the summer off. That granddaughter of mine  is beginning to stack those plastic blocks and she needs someone to knock them over.

However, I am still working three full days a week.  People still come in hour after hour, and when I am working I am working.  It is mostly a good feeling.  A couple of borderline personalities call and weep about how it seems to them that their lives are the worst in the world, but others are doing well and that is gratifying.

Yet, just as I was preparing to leap across the work/no work barrier, Arleen came in.  She seemed a bit teary eyed, and a bit more disjointed that she had been recently.  This is a woman who began treatment almost four years ago.  She had been struggling with addictions, she had lost her job, was thrown out of her home by her crazy mother, had lost custody of her son, and became very self-destructive.

With a lot of work, fueled in part by a lot of justifiable anger, some of it at alcohol treatment programs and AA, she was able to not only get sober, but to get herself functioning, begin college, get her son back, and find an apartment close to her parents, to whom her son was still close.

She stayed strong and keep going despite, having to give up the long relationship she had with a married man.  That was followed, a few months later, by his suicide.  But Arleen kept on plugging.

However, a week ago, her sister, who was the older girl who had always been the favored child,  split up with her third husband and moved into the mother's house.  This was a bit upsetting because the mother lavished all kinds of help onto the sister; help which had always been denied to Arleen.

But things fell apart when Arleen came back to her own apartment, and found her sister in bed with some guy she had met two hours ago.  There was beer and Jack Daniels spread all around the apartment, and the sister explaining that she knew she couldn't do this at the mother's place, but what  was she supposed to do, give up sex?  It was then that Arleen opened a beer and felt as if the world was just too much to handle.

She has been drinking a little bit on each of the five days since then.  If she doesn't stop completely it is going to gt worse, and everything she had achieved will fall apart.

I am leaving for a four day weekend.  I am trying to keep in touch with Arleen almost every day to give her some encouragement to stay sober.  We had one good day.  Today she had no minutes left on her phone, so it was disconnected.

Tomorrow I'm supposed to play golf.