Addiction Miracles

My mom has encouraged me not to get hooked on coffee. My mom has never mocked me harder for anything than not owning a coffee pot. She used to actually say it was bad manners and it made her feel completely ill at ease to spend any time at my house. This regrettable conversation occurred many years ago, before it became socially acceptable to rely on coffee shops for your coffee. Nowadays when coffee-loving people are on their way to my house I just stop somewhere and get the little cardboard cup holder with all their favorite drinks in it, and everybody is grateful I didn't try to make it myself. And over the years my mom has just developed the habit of a. not coming to my house before noon, and b. using a visit to my house as an opportunity to prove she can go a few hours without coffee.

I am a coffee drinker in that I LOVE good coffee and I'm quite snobbish when it comes to what coffee I will actually drink. But I've never been able to tolerate it on a regular basis. The caffeine fries my nerves and I turn into a hyperventilating vomiting mess. But lately...

Lately I can drink decaf TWICE a week -- whoo hoo! AND tea in between. I am trying to not get hooked on caffeine. I'm like still trying to sleep instead, and just use caffeine when the sleep just didn't happen. But you know, I LOVE coffee so there is a bit of a conflict of interest.

So me and my mom were eating pancakes and I whined that I wanted coffee and I thought to myself it's been a long time since we argued about coffee, and now that we're 30 and 50 instead of 20 and 40, I thought it was a good time to ask... "so should I just let myself get hooked, or should I try to avoid that? what do you really think?" And she spoke, in a dead serious way, which she rarely does, "no, don't get hooked. you know I drink it even when it's not good. I like the way it tastes, but I keep drinking it even when I'm sick from already having drank too much."

My own mother advising against coffee makes it seem like anything is possible.