Where Do We Begin?

A personal essay about new parenthood, alcohol, and making sense of the past

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Trigger Warning: This essay references alcohol addiction. This week, I am sharing a personal essay that is more memoir, less educational. If that is not your jam, please hold tight for next week! I am working on more educational articles, including one on how to cope with the emotion of envy.

Photo by Tara Evans on Unsplash

Humans are not algebra, we are never as simple as a + b = c. I always hated math, anyway. I find human equations much more fulfilling. Part of my job is to take a tangled mess of human stories and gently pull the knots apart, illuminating and simplifying, until there is an understanding. Something a bit more linear. But even then, it is still just a story, a narrative that we develop to make sense of what happened, the best that we can. There will always be parts we missed, invisible doors that hide hidden passages, dots that connect beyond our ability to see. We do not find the truth, just a story that is agreed upon.

With my psychologist’s mind I have gone over the story of my husband’s descent into addiction again and again. I line the events up like dominos, trying to discern which one betrayed us, causing all the rest to fall. After about 8 years of marriage, we noticed that his daily drinking was more than a habit, it was a need. As time went on, he needed more and more to prevent withdrawal, until finally, he could no longer work or parent. He went to rehab, came home, relapsed. Then he spent a hellish year in and out of hospitals, detox facilities, and a sober living home. When he went back to rehab the second time, sobriety stuck. I suppose that is the end of the story.

But where do we begin? That part is more difficult. There’s nature and nurture to consider. Does addiction begin with the first drink? The first heartache? The first depression and experimentation with the things we can do to achieve a moment of relief. Does addiction begin in the womb?

And then, there’s alcohol. An easy villain. There is no other substance that is so socially sanctioned and encouraged, despite being responsible for so much death and heartache. Alcohol is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.

But that is not the fable that best captures it. Looking back, it felt much more like the parable of the frog that slowly boils to death, not realizing that the water temperature was rising slowly. I do not know if that is true of frogs, but it adequately describes how my husband found himself so sick with alcohol dependence that he worried about dying from the withdrawal alone. And it’s how I felt once all the denial fell away, and I realized how sick he really was. We were both the frog.

In every new detox or rehab, every intake with a new counselor, they would ask my husband, B, “When did the drinking problem begin?” Although he had been drinking since he was a teenager, B identified his first year of parenthood as the year in which he began drinking daily, whisky neat poured from a bottle that lived on our kitchen counter. That was the year that he transitioned from ‘drinking to relax,’ to ‘drinking to cope.’ It’s not the beginning necessarily, but it was an important turning point.

We were living in the Midwest when our son, W, was born. We had relocated there for my training, and I was working at a residential treatment facility for youth with serious trauma and mental illness. I was, like most interns, tragically underpaid for what my work was worth, considering that I had almost finished my doctorate degree and had completed a yearlong residency. I was in a precarious place called “ABD” - All But Dissertation, meaning that I only needed to complete my dissertation in order to finally graduate. B was working as a teacher, but for reasons I am not entirely sure of now, we decided that B would stay at home with the baby when I returned to work.

B seemed uniquely well suited for stay-at-home parenthood. He had many hobbies and interests, including music and art. He had recently fallen in love with the game of chess and studied it obsessively. In between feedings and naps, he began sculpting unique chess pieces out of clay, entire sets with different themes. One was a nautical set with knights shaped like dolphins. A “spooky” set had pieces shaped like vampires and coiled snakes. After he sculpted them, he began researching the process of 3D printing. As luck would have it, the local library had a 3D printer that the public could use, and B began spending hours printing his chess pieces. Our infant son was along for the ride; he sat on his lap as B played chess with acquaintances in coffeeshops and napped in his carrier beside the printer at the library. Everyone was amazed by the artistry of B’s chess creations, and equally impressed at his ability to include his infant son.

B also plays piano and composes his own music. One of my favorite home videos, caught on an iPad, shows B propping the tablet upright on the carpet in front of the baby, probably eight or nine months old, while B returns to sit at his keyboard. He begins playing a lively piece, while W crawls towards the camera, staring at his round, bald head on the screen, adorably transfixed at his own image and occasionally glancing back at his dad, sitting at the keyboard. This was how they spent their days together, and it was the beginning of an exceptional father-son bond.

At this time, B also took a job as a barista at a local coffee shop for a few hours in the evenings and daytime on Saturdays. I would leave work at around 3, make the short drive home just in time for him to scoot out the door and make it for his shift. We were two ships passing in the night, barely pausing to pass the baby and some details about his day; when he last had a bottle, how many ounces, did he poop, did he nap. 

I’m sad to say that I do not recall much from my own time at home with W during those days, except that I was miserably tense. My job was stressful, I was still breastfeeding an infant, and money was tight. We were in a holding pattern until I finished my dissertation and graduated. Until I successfully completed that document, I could not claim my status as a psychologist and move on to the next stage of my career. I could not hope to make any more than a postdoc salary. And my confidence in my ability to do the work was suffering. For most of my academic career I was at the top of my class. My identity centered solely around being a smart, accomplished student and a high achiever. But even before I became pregnant, I was behind on completing my degree. As most of my classmates were walking across the stage in their doctoral gowns to graduate, I was nine months pregnant, bouncing on a yoga ball and willing my baby to make his grand entrance. I would not finish my dissertation until almost exactly a year later; in hindsight, it was a minor miracle I ever completed it at all. 

In that first year of motherhood, I recall feeling lonely. We were a nine-hour drive from my family, and a plane ride away from B’s. Since we had moved to the Midwest for my training, we had very few friends and no significant childcare help. My parents hated that they weren’t close enough to help us with the baby. I called my mother every day, sometimes for hours at a time. I remember pushing a shopping cart aimlessly around Target, W perched atop it in his infant seat, while I cried shamelessly to my mother on the phone. I did not care who saw me. We were not even there to shop, I was just desperate to get out of the house.

In June of 2016, exactly one year after W was born, I flew to Austin to defend my dissertation. A week later, we left town in a UHaul, moving to live with my family until we both found work. On the outside, it looked like just the next move, but internally, I felt that I was escaping, fleeing home to the warm embrace of my family. It felt like a surrender; I give up, I can’t do this on my own after all. Help me. 

More than once, I sat with my husband in a hospital room or a counselor’s office and heard them ask when the drinking problem started, and each time he recalled that first year of parenthood. Looking back, it is no wonder. I imagine he was just as lonely, overwhelmed, and stressed as I was. All the things that I was struggling with weighed on him as well; we were new parents with no support system, living on less than even one reasonable salary combined, and my mental health was at an all-time low. But B rarely complained. Actually, it’s not an exaggeration to say he never complained. He thrived as a father, enjoyed being a part-time barista, and even claimed to like the small town we were living in. And yet, he was drinking every day, which he would continue to do, for seven more years. 

It’s painful to make these connections. I must re-write the story of my son’s first year to include not just the milestones and first holidays together as a family of three, but also the struggle, the loneliness, and the things we did to cope. If B had not developed a full-blown addiction, then the memories of the painful realities of that first year probably would have faded away, leaving us with only the hundreds of pictures of the baby we adored. But I know we are not the only parents who were drinking behind the camera. Parents are taught that drinking to manage the stress of parenthood is part of the playbook. Mothers especially have been sold permission to fill their Stanley tumblers with wine. The pressures on parents are at an all-time high, with the inundation of parenting advice and endless exposure to Pinterest perfect birthday parties, organic homemade baby food purees, and gentle parenting tutorials. Meanwhile, many parents have lost their village, especially now that it is more common for young adults to move further from their family of origin. Childcare costs are astronomical.

So here I sit, pulling apart the knotted threads of our lives, smoothing the strands and trying to wrap them again in a tidy ball that is easy on the eyes. Easier on my mind. I know there will be a happy ending, and yet the story remains unsatisfying. There is no clear villain. There are many places that we could have taken a different turn in hopes of avoiding the chaos. Perhaps we would have been less stressed if I had finished my dissertation earlier or we had waited to have a baby until I had graduated. Or B could have worked while I stayed home. Would he have still started drinking every day? There is no way to know. No matter how hard I look, all the dominos look the same.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading. This is a much more personal piece of writing, and I welcome your thoughts and reflections in the comments. I believe that sharing our stories is an act of communal healing. If you know someone that may appreciate our story, please share.

To read more about my family’s journey through addiction, check out this post you may have missed:

Disclosure: Dr. Amber_Writes is a newsletter designed to be informational, entertaining, and engaging. It is not therapy. Following this newsletter does not establish a therapeutic relationship with me. Dr. Amber_Writes, and other written communication by Amber Groomes on Substack, is not a substitute for treatment, diagnosis, or consultation with a licensed mental health professional. I assume no liability for any action taken in reliance on my writing here at Dr. Amber_Writes.