Addiction Recovery Story #31, Wild Rose: Tough Flowers Bring the Beauty

Accepting “life on life’s terms” beats at the heart of 12-step recovery programs. When things go right, or things go wrong, or things stay the same, we don’t need to wallow in our substances. We strive to keep our faces to the sun and carry on. Like the wild rose, we reach, we ramble — and we flower. This is the latest installment in the sugar & overeating addiction recovery series I started 1/31/21.

“Wild Rose” watercolor by my talented brother-in-law, artist David Hurley of Maine. Date unknown. His wife, Sheila Costello, is a gifted gardener with an eye for beauty. She tends fragrant heirloom roses, too. Dave + Sheila fell in love and married young. “Did you already have a family when you painted this?” I asked Dave. “We probably had at least two of our children,” he said. They have three smart, handsome sons and a baby grandson who looks just like Dave.

I’m not surprised, are you?

Big shift in our home, with the short Brunetti — so nicknamed, by me, for her shiny brown hair — back in our berth. She returned with bagfuls of teen pandemic essentials, from the Wonderboom Portable Bluetooth Unicorn Speaker (below, first spotted in Seventeen Magazine a few Christmases ago) to mascara, blue jeans, white Converse sneakers, sweatshirts and a Wicca book (even the word scares me) that Dan allowed her to buy last month.

Unicorn speaker.

I feared that after a hiatus at her grandparents’, having Skip (and kid treats) back home would be tempting for me.

But the situation is not shaking out as I thought it would. I pictured food slips, not the mechanics, the working…