Drinking Socially
If death is the ultimate change agent, kids may be a close second. I find myself constantly assessing the long term impact of my decisions, actions and behavior on them. I don’t strive for perfection, in fact I rather enjoy not being perfect and I resist the pressure to be a purified version of myself for them. I’m unguarded about the irrationality of mood and emotion, I’m frank about the power of expletives, and I find myself apologizing frequently for things I’ve done.
Still, I often play out hypothetical scenarios around being challenged about some aspect of my life by a future precocious mid-teen version of my kids. I want to be open, and honest about how I live my life. I want it to be deliberate and defensible, complete with contradictions and flaws. Living with integrity. There are many aspects of my life where I don’t feel like I’m doing a good job of that, so I’m trying to squash a few of the more glaring errors before they start using them against me.
Alcohol
By having my kids see me frequently drinking beer and having them smell beer on my breath as I kiss them goodnight, I’m normalizing a societally costly drug and perpetuating a destructive societal norm of casual alcohol dependency.
I don’t feel good about that, and it undermines my integrity to continue to do something I don’t feel good about. It would be disingenuous of me to want to abstain from alcohol completely, since abstinence of any kind makes me uneasy, and alcohol is an effective tool for an introvert. But I wanted to become more deliberate about my intake.
Around this time, I was reading a lot about what makes for an effective resolution, or how to approach personal change that sticks. Building in flexibility and avoiding sweeping changes were common themes. So I structured my goal around tamping down my consumption through a simple criteria check: I could drink any time I was with someone else who was drinking.
It was harder than I expected; my wife only consumes alcohol to fuel karaoke, and I quickly realized that I’m not very social. The result is that 10 weeks into the year, I’m averaging over 5 dry days a week.
These aren’t giant gains. I can’t post before and after photos, and I can only speculate as to the benefits to my liver.
But in a few years I’ll feel better talking to my kids about alcohol and the hypocrisy of drugs and our dependency on them. Maybe those conversations won’t happen, and that’s ok. I’m just happy my kids can unwittingly inspire me to change.
That ability to affect change and be changed is something I want them to be exposed to as much a possible. It’s important to make space for the positives as we chase the negatives from our lives.
