I Constantly Worry My Kids Are Going to Be Like Me
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I Constantly Worry My Kids Are Going to Be Like Me

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Ben Folds wrote a song for each of his twins, one for his son and one for his daughter. In “Still Fighting It,” he apologizes to his son: “You’re so much like me, I’m sorry.” I always appreciated the lyric as just some of his trademark tossaway snark, but I realized in sobriety that it’s much more than that. I have three kids: two sons and a daughter. Very often, at almost four years sober, I find myself mentally apologizing for some of their personality traits. All of their anxieties, fears and sensitivities are things I feel deeply responsible for, as if I somehow etched it into them, like the grooves of an LP album, back when they were tiny and I was drinking. I worry that I’ve imprinted so much of my horribleness onto them in ways that I don’t even fully understand yet. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame my family for my alcoholic madness. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that I need to constantly worry that my children are going to end up just like me: easily lost, scared, and born without that layer of skin that everyone else seems to have in the world.

As an active alcoholic, I never did a ton of thinking ahead. That just wasn’t part of my wiring. My circuit board had a very limited set of installed resistors, pathways and nodes. I was pretty much designed to find alcohol, fake my way through the day, and then drink some more—no matter the cost (literal or figurative.) Now, the future is all I think about. That’s the curse of not drinking anymore: you’re faced with reality. I tell people that when I first got sober, it was like I’d Quantum Leap-ed into someone else’s body and life. I looked around and saw that I’d somehow gathered a wife, children, a mortgage, a car lease, a mediocre credit rating and all the trappings of a suburban life. Logically, I was there when all of these things occurred, but I wasn’t really there-there. You see, when I was hiding empty wine bottles all over my house, inside and out, I was really confused by people who had business cards or their names on a parking space. That, to me, was ballsy. I couldn’t imagine putting my name on something permanent. I had no concept of what it meant to say I’d likely be somewhere consistently. You could fill the Grand Canyon with the number of jobs I’ve simply stopped showing up to: bookstores, video stores, call centers, shitty temp jobs in forgotten industrial parks. It occurred to me that having kids wasn’t any different than someone’s nameplate on an office door. I was very much planning to return the next day.

No one can really prepare you for early sobriety. But there’s nothing greater than the crush-depth pressure of an alcoholic’s reality settling in on them. As one week became three and three months became a half-year, I could feel my world groaning and buckling under the weight of everything around me. With nauseating awareness, I came to realize that I was responsible for children. Three actual, living, breathing human beings. And I was shaping them in ways that were both quiet and loud. Sure, me drunkenly yelling at my oldest for not turning off a light in the bathroom is loud, but also zoning out for three hours as I tumbled down a Wikipedia rabbit hole equaled three hours that I wasn’t spending time with my kid. That was unforgivable silence. When it was just me in the world, I didn’t care. After all, an alcoholic’s world is weightless. If I didn’t really lock something down, words and responsibilities and promises just floated off into places unknown. Now, my world has gravity. It has real weight and meaning. There were always consequences for my actions, yes, but they generally weren’t anything a few belts of warm vodka couldn’t wash away.

I’ve officially given more thought to my kids’ future in the last month than I ever gave my own future in, oh, 20 years. That’s no exaggeration. My brain is constantly assessing the costs of things as much as the costs of my actions. I’m always mentally spinning out. For example, our youngest is still a toddler and she rides around in a car seat, but it doesn’t keep me from considering what it’s going to take to get her into college. No, I’m always light-years ahead of where they are in the moment. Our sons can be running around in Star Wars jammies, but I see them running around, 10 years from now, in some expensive shorts I hope we can afford. I have a lot of ground to make up—financial and otherwise—and I can’t stop the engine from spinning. My alcoholic brain is used to whirring through details with intense focus. Instead of obsessing about the closing times of grocery-store liquor shops, though, I’m really just obsessed with the hope that my children don’t turn out like me. I’m constantly focused on the future. Constantly. Maybe it’s because I can’t mentally put things off until tomorrow anymore. No matter how hard I tried to stop it from happening before, tomorrow always came.

As my kids get older, I see more and more shades of myself in them and I’m downright terrified. While I love that my son can recognize Richard Kiel as Jaws, I hate that the thought of someone being homeless brings instant tears to his eyes. The world has too many sharp edges for sensitive people like us. And if he’s anything like me, that despair and sadness won’t go away, either. It’ll continue to grow and bloom and spread inside him to the point where it hurts to feel sometimes. But I can only do so much. I can’t torture myself worrying about their future as much as I find myself regretting my past. I have to be okay with the way things are right now. Their paths are their paths. While I can point them in the best directions I know, the truth is that I don’t know much about the world. I’ve spent most of my adult life hiding from it and drowning out its voice. I can tell them what not to do, though, which may be just as valuable. I can show them that blotting out reality and pain with drugs and alcohol isn’t the answer. Just like another Ben Folds song says, I know all the “wrong turns, stumbles and falls” that brought me here. “Here” is a place that I never expected to be fully present for but, in sobriety, there’s no place I’d rather be.

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About Author

Paul Fuhr is an addiction recovery writer whose work has appeared in The Literary Review, The Live Oak Review, The Sobriety Collective and InRecovery Magazine, among others. He is the author of the alcoholism memoir “Bottleneck.” He's also the creator and co-host of "Drop the Needle," a podcast about music and recovery. Fuhr lives in Columbus, Ohio with his family and their cats, Dr. No and Goldeneye.