I’m grateful for a bright, sunny morning. I’m grateful to have my daughter staying with me. I’m grateful for a lovely dinner last night and the chance to make breakfast today. I’m grateful for seeing that I can only be me. I’m grateful there was a way out. I’m grateful to be sober today.
These days when my daughter visits are such gifts. She comes to NY for work about a week a month and stays with me. Considering where we came from, well it’s way more than a gift of sobriety, more like a miracle of sobriety. K is whip smart and doesn’t miss much of anything. I remember the moment she was born and her bright, already inquisitive eyes locking onto mine and this exchange on the eve of her brother’s birth, about four years later:
K: I’m worried you and Mom are going to love the new baby more than me.
Me: That would never happen. We love you so much.
K: But babies are all cute and everybody wants to hold them.
Me: Remember when we got Rascal the dog?
K: Yes
Me: You love Rascal, right?
K: Yes
Me: When you started loving Rascal, did you love me or Mom any less?1
K: (thinks for moment) Daddy, Rascal is a dog.
Like I said, this girl doesn’t miss too much. Back in 2018, when things were really bad for me, she came over to my house one day and found a bottle of wine. She threatened to send me back to rehab, but we negotiated and I agreed to start a new IOP.2 She went with me to the intake, drove me to and from the nightly sessions—could not have been more supportive. What did I do? Most nights, I waited until she drove off and then I went to a bar nearby and drank and then frantically tried to cover the smell and my breath when she came and picked me up. I’d make up stories about what had happened that night at the IOP. I use the word “stories,” but they were terrible, devastating, manipulative lies. I lasted about 10 days in that IOP. I can’t imagine how she felt when she got the call that I had been thrown out for drinking and not attending.
I’ve hurt some people terribly. People who did nothing to deserve what happened, other than loving this alcoholic. I lied over and over to my daughter. I lied to her when she was going out of her way to help me. I can’t imagine how scared and frightened she must have been. And how angry. My dad never lied to me the way I lied to my children. There are more than a few incomprehensibly demoralizing, emotionally devastating chapters in my life, but the lies to my children, trying to convince them I was sober when I was not, those are among the worst of them. I didn’t do that to shield them from my drinking, I did it to shield my drinking from my children. That’s pretty hard to carry around.
I didn’t do that to shield them from my drinking, I did it to shield my drinking from my children.
This morning, I heard her alarm go off a couple of times and then I could hear her padding towards the bathroom. “Morning Dad, can I have breakfast at 7:45?” I make her breakfast, it’s the same breakfast I used to make her in the 7th grade, except now she drinks coffee and leaves home with her things in an elegant, sophisticated bag in place of the LL Bean backpack with her embroidered initials. People talk in AA meetings about the promises of sobriety and often use the phrase “cash and prizes” to describe them—That is not even close. I get to make my daughter breakfast these days and she calls out “love you, Daddy, have a nice day,” as she heads to the subway. You’re going to have to work pretty hard to come up with a more valuable gift of sobriety than that.
Thanks for Letting Me Share
I thought this was a really inspired thing to come up with on the fly.
This stands for Intensive Outpatient Program.
I think I have something in my eye. <sniff>
Thank you for sharing this