How sobriety gave me the strength to create a healthier, more present life for myself and my kids
By Winged Victory
I used to feel trapped in the domesticity I had chosen, as though the walls of my life were closing in around me.
I was a vibrant, active, loving wife and mom. Like many of my friends, I had my children later in life, after establishing my career. My daughter was born when I was 35, and my son when I was 40. Both were deeply loved and very much planned. But as I approached 50 and my daughter entered her teens, I found myself drinking more and more, yearning for an escape to some imagined, higher plane. Evenings after work became less about my kids and more about “mommy’s wine time,” which had taken center stage.
I’ve been singing the praises of sobriety so loudly and for so long that it’s hard to believe there was a time when I could not imagine living life well without drinking.
Not just drinking but getting drunk. I thought that I needed to get drunk. I thought that I deserved to get drunk. I thought that I enjoyed getting drunk. I completely bought into the justification that wine was my reward for being a working mom who hit the ground running at 6 a.m. doing, doing, doing all day. On-call 24/7 for everyone else and wine was my just reward.
For many years, I used alcohol and eventually abused it. This mom…
became this mom in just a few short years: very drunk and about to get very dark, at 7 p.m. at my children’s Halloween party.
There is a recovery saying that describes it perfectly:
You take a drink.
The drink takes a drink.
The drink takes you.
I stopped for them, but found my way back to myself.
How did this affect my beloved children? My daughter was older by five years. When she was very young, she never saw me drunk because she went to bed early, and my drinking was still quite controlled. She didn’t consciously understand that something dark often came over me at night until she was about 12. And by the time she was 14, it was beginning to trouble her.
When she asked, I would say that I’d get it under control, or I’d stop drinking for a week and tell her that it was no longer an issue. I explained that I now had it under control and that adults simply needed to drink a bit every night because that’s how adults deal with stress.
Eventually, though, I couldn’t make that story work anymore. I stopped drinking for her and for her little brother because I knew that I was becoming a dishonest parent. I could lie to myself over and over, but lying to them became intolerable to me.
I finally did stop when my daughter was 15 and her little brother was 11. My new sobriety passed the one-week point and the 11-day point. I was then miraculously two weeks sober and then two and a half weeks sober!
I remember sitting down with my daughter in the kitchen. I held her hands and looked into her eyes and said, “It’s going to be okay! We’re going to be okay!”
I remember how terrified I had been that I could not make sobriety stick, and that if I could not stop drinking, everything in my world was going to fall apart—that her world was going to fall apart. But I stopped drinking, and it stuck, and then everything in our world began to change for the better.
My need to give my family the love they deserved changed me because sobriety is the best thing I have ever done for myself. Sobriety empowered me, bringing me balance and peace.
Do it for them, and you’ll find that it is absolutely the best gift you can give yourself ever. It gives you back to yourself.
Reminders, practices, and embracing simplicity
I wrote a sticky note to myself and pasted it over the wine glass cupboard on my last Day One. It said: “Keep it simple. Just stop.”
My daughter climbed up there while I wasn’t around (it’s a hanging cupboard) and added: “You can do it, Mommy.”
She didn’t tell me or talk to me; she just quietly added it. The next day, I quietly added another note: “Thank you, Honey.”
We didn’t talk about it… we’d been talking about it for over a year. We just both held our breath until we knew it had finally stuck, and then we said together: “It’s gonna be okay.”
There was another note on the other side of the room that said: “Sobriety offers everything that alcohol promised.” I had read that on a blog, and I was hoping and praying that it was true because I didn’t want to live the dull, boring life I expected sobriety to be. It was true! But it took some time for me to know that. It took a few months of me simply focusing on not picking up the first drink.
On the other side of my kitchen were sticky notes with inspirational quotes from the Tao Te Ching.
“Simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and thoughts, you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.”―Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
Wonderful sentiments that I had written out and pasted up a couple of months earlier, hoping that they would inspire me. Hoping that if I read them enough times, it would get my head into a space where I would not pick up that first drink ever again. But ultimately, I found that what worked for me was simply focusing on the nuts and bolts of identifying triggers and finding tools to turn them off.
Before focusing on wise but abstract intentions, I needed to keep things simple and practical by focusing on HALT—Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired (an acronym commonly used in AA and other addiction recovery programs):
If you are hungry, eat—don’t drink.
If you are angry, breathe—don’t drink.
If you are lonely, reach out—don’t drink.
If you are tired, rest—don’t drink.
And that simplicity—the simplicity of starting to learn how to patiently show myself compassion, rather than drowning every need in a bottle of wine—got me there.
In AA, they say that the only way out is through, and you get there by just doing the next right thing. Those are wise words to live by, and at four and a half years sober, I am thrilled to be in a place where those Taoist sentiments above are simply a way of life.
This is what took me there:
“Being deeply loved by someone gives you strength, while loving someone deeply gives you courage.” ―Lao Tzu
The love of my family—deciding to save the very domesticity that I once felt trapped in—turned out to be the thing that took me to a higher plane. Not Mommy’s wine time—that was a product, a lifestyle, that I had been sold.
If you’ve decided it’s time to stop drinking, do whatever you need to do to avoid drinking today. Surround yourself with supportive messages. Figure out what practices work. Do it for them. Do it for you.
How about you?
We’d love for you to share in the comments:
- Have you used sticky notes or other reminders to support your sobriety journey? If so, what messages or affirmations have been most impactful for you?
- What practices or routines have helped you get and stay sober?
- If you’re a sober parent, how has your recovery affected your relationship with your kids? How has it helped you find your way back to yourself?
And if you found this article helpful, please tap the little heart. It lets others know there’s something useful here and will help us grow this community.
On March 6, 2015, the author of this essay began blogging their journey to loving life alcohol-free, adopting the name Winged Victory as their sober handle. In 2016, on the one-year anniversary of their sobriety, they launched a blog called Boozemusings, which features the voices of many who have inspired them. A year later, they created a Mighty Networks community called Boom Rethink the Drink. Sobriety has become their superpower, and they are passionate about spreading the message that “sobriety offers everything alcohol promised.”
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