This weekend we had a brief visit from my brother and niece. Several weeks ago, when my mother returned home from her stay in the hospital, my brother came to help out. Through a series of events, it turned out that he drove my mother’s car back home to Phoenix. We have been trying to find a way to get the car back and decided that it would be fine if he waited until the family BBQ in LA.

As happens with so many of the “best laid plans”, he was not able to get a rental car and air fares were rather high so I volunteered to drive the two of them back to Phoenix in yet another marathon driving day for your MoM. It’s about 6.5-7 hours each way without stops. I love a good road trip, but it turns out that not everyone thinks it’s as fun as I do!

As we took our seats in the car I found myself sitting next to my niece because she gets “sea sick”. I reassured her by letting her know that the seas would be very calm as we drove across the desert. She thought my joke was about as awesome as the road trip was about to be! She immediately buried her face in her phone and proceeded to not look up for most of the trip. A couple of hours into the drive she announced that she needed her Dramamine pills. When I suggested that perhaps a bit less time on the phone might help with her motion sickness she acted as though I were speaking a foreign language. “Then I’d have to stare out the window and that’s boring.”

15 years old.

It’s interesting to see how patterns begin. How often do I do something that is obviously dumb because it’s “what I want to do”? That’s how we end up in recovery, right?!? It might not be a car sick kid staring into a phone. It might be going to places we know we should avoid. It might be visiting the wrong web sites. It might be trying to manage all of this without the safety of a sponsor or accountability partners in place. What ever it is that is making you feel a bit woozy, put that “phone” down and…

–Rise Up!!