The first time I got drunk, I was fifteen, cradling a Solo cup filled with whatever mishmash my friend had cobbled together from her parents’ liquor cabinet. I was too young to care about the taste, but I immediately understood the promise it held. I loved the way getting drunk dulled the sharp edges of adolescence and warmed the cold spots I hadn’t even realized were there. As a teenager, I didn’t just drink; I inhaled a generations-old family tradition.
As a child, alcohol was woven into the fabric of my family’s life. My grandmother stocked gallon jugs of dark, chalky Carlo Rossi wine. She drank it from jelly jars, her tongue sharpening with each sip. My grandfather drank “shooters,” cheap whiskey sipped from rinsed-out shrimp cocktail glasses shaped like hourglasses. My mother bought odd numbers of delicately etched wine glasses from consignment shops—so if they break, it doesn’t matter. My father, gregarious, self-assured, favored martinis with lunch: Grey Goose, very cold, up, two olives.
There were drinks for celebration, drinks for sadness, drinks for boredom. There was no vocabulary for moderation in my house, no question of what a constant river of drink might be doing to us. The message was clear: the answer to any troubles always came in a glass.
I followed suit. By the time I was a college freshman, drinking wasn’t a question of if, but when and how much. Over the years, my habit graduated from a weekend thrill to a weekday staple, transforming into a steady rhythm of binge drinking that carried me through my twenties and well into my thirties.
When I became a mother, I naively believed I could compartmentalize my drinking. I could be the Pinterest mom during the day and the wine-mom meme at night. My social feeds were filled with jokes about “mom juice” and “it’s wine o’clock somewhere.” I drank with the same casual inevitability with which I folded laundry or cooked dinner.
Then my daughter was diagnosed with leukemia when she was eight years old. It was May 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and the convergence of crises was overwhelming. I spent the first few weeks of her cancer treatment moving through a haze of hospital rooms, IV drips, and a numbing kind of terror that only parents of sick children understand.
My drinking during her treatment escalated quickly, keeping pace with the stressors I was fielding. It felt both natural and sickening. Natural, because it was the only coping mechanism I’d ever learned. Sickening, because I knew it wasn’t helping. I knew it was making me slower, more depressed, more exhausted, less present for my child. But drinking kept the monsters at bay, and without it I didn’t have the skills or internal resources to manage my terror. The more I drank, the more I needed to drink. I was caught in a spiral of addiction that for most of my life I’d only circumvented.
The breaking point came on a night when we were home from the hospital. I’d finished a box of wine and thrown most of it up into my bathroom sink. Earlier that day, I’d driven through a well-known open-air heroin market in Philadelphia and considered stopping for drugs. More than anything, I wanted to stop running the rat race of single parenting through COVID and cancer, but every time I looked at my kids I realized I didn’t have it in me to leave them.
I wiped my mouth and looked at myself in the mirror. I realized that if I stayed for them but continued drinking to numb myself, I’d risk passing the bottle, handing them the same flawed survival mechanism that had been handed down to me. I could see, then, the trajectory I was setting for my kids. I was modeling the same relationship with alcohol that had been modeled for me, predicated on dependence, avoidance, and self-destruction.
Quitting drinking didn’t provide an instant fix. Realizing that I wanted to was a tidy epiphany, but actually quitting required me to unlearn decades of conditioning. I had to learn to challenge the narrative that alcohol was always the answer. I had to piece together new ways of coping.
My early days without alcohol felt like deprivation. I no longer had a buffer between myself and the raw fear that came with caring for my daughter. I struggled to fall asleep without the blanket of a drink, and I was quiet at family dinners, feeling more on the outside than ever.
Eventually things began to shift. Waking up without the fog of a hangover was delicious, better than any relief I’d ever thought I’d found in a drink. The time I wasn’t spending recovering felt open, a blank canvas of possibility. I spent more time with my kids, read more books, kept our home cleaner. I went to bed early enough that I could wake up at 7 a.m. and still feel rested. I became someone I enjoy being.
It is deeply satisfying to know that I’m modeling a different way of living for my children. In our home, hard days aren’t fixed with a swallow of whiskey and joy isn’t toasted with champagne. Instead, we draw strength and delight from our connection to one another.
I know I can’t protect my kids from every poor decision or hardship. They’ll face their own struggles, and they’ll make their own choices, including how they’ll cope when things aren’t going their way. What I can do is provide them with an alternative: a blueprint for facing life’s challenges without numbing out. Breaking the cycle of generational drinking is about redefining what survival looks like in our family.
When I think back on those old shrimp cocktail jars filled with whiskey and the jam jars that never emptied, I consider how much pain was probably swirling around in those glasses, masked by the clink of ice. I don’t fault my family for the culture they passed down. They did the best they could with the tools they had. I have different tools now, and I’m grateful to be passing those down to my own children instead.
How about you?
We’d love for you to share in the comments:
- By getting and staying sober, are you breaking or changing any intergenerational cycles?
- If you’re a sober parent, how has sobriety changed your relationship with your kids, both in terms of your connection with them and the way you approach life’s challenges?
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