I’ll never forget the day the truth lunged at me like a jump scare in a 3 a.m. haze. Another night of broken promises to myself. Wishful thinking to stay in control — don’t fade out, only to lose memory of everything after dessert. I looked in the bathroom mirror but the eyes looking back at me were empty. Hollow.
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Two things were true. Yes, I loved to drink. I couldn’t imagine life without it. But also? I loved my kids like oxygen. Like sunlight. Like a steady heartbeat. And the burden of both of these truths was I could not have both.
I could not drink the way I liked to drink and be the parent I wanted to be.
Perhaps I could learn to drink differently, or maybe I could envision a different approach to parenting than I had once imagined. Would that be a way to keep both things? But in fact that is exactly what I’d been doing all this time. Trying and failing at the moderation game while letting go of every value and priority I once felt sacred in parenting.
I could see clearly that if I didn’t choose — if I continued down this road of tiptoeing across a high wire — I would fall far and hard. And I’d lose everything.
This realization didn’t feel good. If anything it felt panicked. Infuriating. Egregious. Why do I have to choose at all? What kind of sick joke was this? A nod from the Universe of everything I can’t have.
Or was it? Maybe it was a call to something bigger. An opportunity for purpose, meaning. In gaining the awareness of it all, I would have to let go of what I once thought mattered most.
Like Neo in the Matrix, I would have to choose. The blue pill or the red pill. Do I choose my relationship with alcohol or with my kids? And when I looked in that mirror, at those hollow, bloodshot eyes staring back me, it suddenly felt so simple. So obvious.
Easy? Not even close. But name one beautiful thing that ever came out of easy.
That day I realized I could not drink the way I liked to drink and be the parent I wanted to be. I would have to choose one.
Blue pill or red? High wire or steady ground? Laughing gas or oxygen? I choose oxygen. I choose sunlight on my skin and a heart beat in my chest. Bare feet on firm ground. I choose life. For my kids, and with them. Because of them, and through them.
And always, hopefully, among them. As long as there is a foundation to stand on.
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