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A few years ago, a friend of mine found out his wife was pregnant and he asked me a very open-ended question.
“What’s it like? What do I need to know?” he asked.
I said, “Well, at the end of every year, I always think about how my 10 best moments of the year all involved my kids… and so did my 10 worst.”
I was joking, of course, but I do find that to be a decent approximation. Having kids is a rollercoaster, with plenty of ups and plenty of downs. I think the down moments ultimately fade away and the good ones stick around, but I’ve found it to be a constant scuffle no matter how sober I am feeling. My mother-in-law once said, “Good luck, kids will drive you to drink.” I certainly took her up on that for awhile.
And make no mistake, the rollercoaster of sober parenting is a good thing. I feel the joy of the ups and the sting of the downs because I am not numb all day from booze and pills any more, and I care deeply for my kids as a sober dad. Many of my biggest motivations in life are to provide for them.
I’m thinking about all of this because on Christmas, it was the best of both extremes of the rollercoaster. The present-opening began at around 8 am and I was proud to look out at the living room and see nice mounds of gifts for each kid. They all had smiles on their faces. Yay!
Then the Christmas shitshow began. My 7-year-old wanted to open all of hers one after the other, and my two older kids wanted to take turns. We thought they were right, so we enforced the rule of rotating gifts and that went over like a can of fart spray in a church. The next two hours—yes, it took two full hours to just open the gifts because of all the bickering and tears and stops and starts and bathroom breaks—were a brutal display of the kids showcasing their worst tendencies of self-centeredness, acting out, over-reacting, greediness and snippy attitudes.
I found myself clamping down my jaw because I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. But part of that is because what I was watching was my own character defects—they’re my factory settings, too. And it always hits me when my kids act like a mirror in front of my face how daunting that part of sobriety can be.
Not only do I have to not run away with a bottle pills and a cooler of beer, I need to keep working on myself and try to shave down those sharp edges within me… and then I also need to be the kind of dad who helps their kids work through those character defects themselves. Holy s**t, that’s a lot. You should double my pay, God.
After two hours, I wasn’t very helpful to the spiritual condition of the room. So I excused myself to lay down and sleep a little more—the old H.A.L.T. acronym of Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired is a real freaking thing during the holidays. When I got up, I felt quite a bit better and figured I’d try to aim any irritation toward a more healthy spot, so I went in to clean up the kitchen.
As I washed the dishes, I could hear some shitty attitudes flaring up in the other room and I could feel my head start to shake and my teeth start to grind a little bit again. Right about then, I had a small glass shatter in my hand. It basically just exploded. All of the glass went down into one side of the sink somehow, and I only ended up with one tiny piece stuck in my finger. I stared down at the broken glass and felt great gratitude because that could have been a lot worse than it was.
Everybody came in and helped me clean up the glass, and I immediately saw the flip side to the bickering. We love each other. We really do. The bickering is usually because we do care so deeply about each other—I don’t really bother bickering with random people at Walgreens, you know?
So we cleaned up the kitchen, and everybody took some time apart from each other, and the rest of the day was pretty beautiful. We were blessed enough to have each other—and blessed enough to have separate rooms to retire to for a halftime break. Later that night, we watched Christmas Vacation, had some laughs and went to bed.
All in all, it was a top-10 day. Maybe a bottom-10 one, too. But I’ll probably forget that part of the equation in a few days.
This newsletter is a place of joy and laughter about the deadly serious business of sobriety. So, as I will often do, let me close with a joke:
After the husband’s fifth trip to the host’s bar for refills, the wife asked, “Aren’t you embarrassed to go back so many time?”
Husband: “Nope. I keep telling them it’s for you.”
(Credit: AA Grapevine, May 1971)
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