Prompt: Write a prompt about an important date

I looked at the date on my fridge calendar circled in red. One year. I fought a sudden urge to self-sabotage but took a beta blocker when what I wanted was a beer. Almost a year, but the desire never went away.

I came from a long line of anxious women. There was my great grandmother—an alcoholic who I knew very little about. But I could imagine that like me, what started as a vice to take the edge off turned into a lifeline—the only way to turn the volume down on thoughts that threatened to pull me under.

Then there was my grandmother. She’d never touched alcohol, but without a salve for her frayed nerves, anxiety got the best of her. The expression “worried herself to death” rang true in her experience. In her later years, she grew mad with worry. Fear was a mold that slowly consumed her, excavating her body and mind until only a shell remained.

Then there was my mother. Her own battle with anxiety she fought holistically—yoga, meditation, spirituality. She sent me links to wellness retreats and mailed me vitamins every time I was going through it, but I couldn’t see how Vitamin D would pack the same punch as a margarita.

She and I had lost touch for a few years when I retreated into the shadow of my shame. I’d felt myself slipping but was powerless to pull myself out. She’d mail me letters, reminding me that she loved me, she missed me, she wanted me to be OK. But I never wrote her back. What was there to say?
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I was the generational pendulum swing, pulling our lineage back in the wrong direction.