Gifts of Sobriety

Yesterday was the one-year anniversary of bringing our baby home from the hospital. Leaving the hospital on the same day as my baby was not a thing I thought I would get to have happen for me in this lifetime. My other sons had all been NICU babies (you can read more about that here).

I was so happy. Deliriously happy. Glowing.

She nursed well. She was so sweet. I was recovering well from the c-section. My husband doted.

This, too: I was so secure in my sobriety that I could trust when and how many pain pills I ought to take. I had been scared about this, but there was nothing to be scared of: I was being honest with myself, and with my friends in recovery.

Thank you for bringing spring, baby girl, we whispered in her hair. The trees and flowers were coming into bloom.

My husband loved me well, and he loved our baby, and he woke with us when she nursed and he changed her diapers.

I loved to watch the way he looked at her while he held her.

There were no thoughts in my mind of if or when I could nurse after I had been drinking, when would be appropriate to start drinking, of how the doctors in Spokane had said a stout would help my milk come in.

The stars had aligned, I thought. Billy had his four kids from his previous marriage, and I had my three. Our kids adored each other. They were all excited for the baby, too.

She was my sweet gift of sobriety (I had met my husband in sobriety).

We had our baby girl, and we would live happily ever after.

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Life certainly knocked us down a peg over the first year of her life.

Like several fucking pegs.

The tragedy of this story is that it feels as thought it wasn’t any fault of our own. What was supposed to be hard — you know, the having a total of 8 kids together — wasn’t the hard part at all.

We filed for and were granted emergency protective custody of my stepkids 5 days before our baby turned 6 months old. And for good reason. For reasons that involved a lot of alcohol abuse at their mothers’ home.

The boyfriend got fall-down drunk one night over Labor Day weekend, and it scared the kids, and she brought them over. She had promised she would bring them back “if this happened again,” and so, here they were : the 4 kids. The eldest was stoic, the younger three were working to comfort each other. They had all been crying except the eldest, who it seemed had just shut down.

This poor woman, we thought. We invited her in and she cried. She punched the couch cushions. He promised, she said. He promised he wouldn’t do this again.

She looked so broken, so defeated. We could hear the kids playing upstairs. My boys were excited to have their step siblings home.

We listened.

I want you to know, I said to her, that his sobriety has nothing to do with your worth. He very well can love you. That doesn’t just make him get sober.

Are you safe? we asked.

She said she was. Her phone had been ringing the entire time.

I better go, she said. And then she left, without even saying goodbye to the kids.

We fed the kids dinner. They were so shaken up.

The next morning, my stepkids’ mom had done a 180: he was fine. We overreacted. What the hell was wrong with us. He didn’t need to quit drinking. We had better stick to the schedule or she was going to call the police.

So we filed the emergency custody. The order, as it was granted, allowed the mother unlimited time with the children, but restricted the boyfriend from being in the children’s presence. So, at the return trial, the mother settled for two 3-hour visits.

We went from a 50/50, week on/week off custody to their mother having two 3-hour visits for September, October, November, and the better part of December. The order specified the boyfriend couldn’t be around the kids, so she only saw them for those 6 hours a week. She mostly showed up for her visits, but sometimes she didn’t.

During that time: I nursed my baby. I went to work. We made the kids breakfast, and dinner, and carried on with taekwondo.

I went to meetings and we tried to carry on, to do the next right thing.

We tried to negotiate a situation that protected the kids, but we were back to the old song and dance : he doesn’t have a problem.

But the kids were devastated.

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Did it have to be alcohol abuse, I said, when it came to light that my husband’s ex-wife’s live-in boyfriend (or, my stepkids’ psuedo-stepdad, I know it’s a lot) was an active alcoholic.

Like, maybe this is a little on the nose, universe. Couldn’t it have been anything else?

But then again, maybe that’s just how pervasive alcoholism is.

I was having to routinely engage with an active alcoholic in denial. Or rather, I was choosing to, which was frankly foolish, but I thought I could help.

In the months before Abigail was born and those first 6 months of her life, I had been trying to gently tell this man, that perhaps his actions were going to result in a consequence he wouldn’t care for. To try to explain to him that he was living in a moment of “not yet” : the kids hadn’t been hurt yet, no one had needed to be driven to the hospital when he was too drunk to drive yet, and (back then) they hadn’t lost custody of the children yet.

I tried to do this without being condescending or unkind.

Normal people don’t just get blackout drunk when they’re in charge of kids, I had said as delicately as I could. And definitely not multiple times.

It had been going back and forth like that for months before Abigail was born, and continued after she was born. It’ll never happen again, they would say. Tears have been shed. We understand the consequences.

But it happened again. And again. And again.

There was the standard charade of denial. The comparisons. The rationalizations:

It wasn’t that bad.

He just passed out.

What harm was done? It’s not like he beat them, they justified.

Until it got so bad that we had to file (and were granted) the emergency protective custody.

Here’s what I believe about that situation: I truly believe this man did not mean to get blackout, fall-down, stumbling drunk. I truly believe he swore it wouldn’t happen again. I believe that he believed that he had that kind of control.

That’s why they say alcohol is the only disease that lies to you and says you don’t have it.

Witnessing the destruction that this man was causing in my stepkids’ lives, though : that was also a gift of sobriety.

To have the clarity to say to myself, my god, I would never go back there.

What we have had to learn over this year is this: we can have empathy for someone.

But our first and primary sacred duty is to keep our children (and I include my stepkids in this) safe. To protect them from harm.

So with empathy, we must also walk with accountability and honesty.

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We celebrated our baby’s first birthday with a smash cake photo shoot. As is our habit, one of our children came down with a fever and needed to be picked up at school. Grammy went to grab one of our kindergarteners.

The cake was a bit sweet for her taste.

It has been a dark few weeks leading up to her birthday. I have been sad.

We are all still recovering from the fallout from the emergency protective order. There is a new order is in place. The court order specifies rules surrounding alcohol, and it’s only every other weekend, so there is limited exposure for an incident. But there is still the fear in our minds, in my husbands’ mind, in my stepkids’ minds: will it happen again?

But today, our baby is toddling for the first time. She took her first little steps a week before her first birthday, but today, she is truly toddling.

There are miracles happening all around us and I have been having a hard time seeing them in the last few weeks.

With the return of the blooms, and the sun, and the longer days, I’m starting to see them again.

All is the way it is meant to be in the world, happening exactly as it is meant to — which isn’t to say I have to like it.

Learning to juggle empathy and kindness and compassion while doing right by our kids and walking in our integrity has been a tough walk, and likely one we will continue forever.

But this is the lesson, I suppose, and like I tell my boys: the game wouldn’t be very fun if it wasn’t at least a little challenging.