Drinking and Thriving?

Kari and I have a mad dash from downtown Washington every day to get to Josie’s school in time to pick her up. We have to be heading north on Connecticut Avenue by 5:10 to get there by 6 or there will be hell to pay.

Well, the aftercare teachers to pay. That $1 a minute can add up.

After weaving in and out of traffic, avoiding accidents, getting cranky at red lights or each other for paying more attention to our BlackBerrys (BlackBerries?) than the other one of us, we are usually pretty punchy by the time we get to Josie’s school’s front door. On some days we are living proof that laughing and crying are separated by the same fine line that separates clever and stupid.

So when something strikes us as funny, we laugh until the tension breaks.

The other day, even though it seemed like our typically slow mad dash, we arrived at school in time not only to get Josie but to stop by the pharmacy to pick up some of my prescription refills. Next door to the pharmacy is a county liquor store. (There is irony in that, but it will need to be addressed only in your imagination.) On occasion, when either Kari or I have to get a refill of one thing, we stop by the store next door and get a refill on the other. Virtual one-stop shopping, for all your living-better-through-chemistry needs. If we’re by ourselves with Josie, obviously she has to come inside with us.

Josie is old enough, and smart enough, to understand this sort of efficiency of proximity. So after we picked her up and turned left instead of right – the normal way home – she said in a puzzled voice, “We’re going this way?”

“Yes,” I replied. “Daddy has to get some medicine.”

In a conversational tone, she asked, “Are we going to get beer and wine?”

I burst out laughing, as did Kari. That broke the tension (at least until Josie started to cry when I told her she couldn’t go into the pharmacy with me). “That’s my girl,” I said with a goofy grin. “Josie, you crack me up.”

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said.

Beer and wine is a natural part of Josie’s world. Or, rather, it’s a natural part of Mommy and Daddy’s world. Mommy drinks wine, Daddy drinks beer, and when on occasion that’s reversed, she notices it and lets us know that we’re doing it wrong. Sometimes, I tease Josie and ask her if she wants some beer or coffee with dinner, and she usually makes a face, sticks out her tongue, and says, “Bleah. I don’t like beer or coffee.” I then assure sure she’s making the right call.

During football Sundays I’ll have several beers over the course of the day, not fast enough to get drunk but enough to feel like I drank a wheat field by the end of the night. Josie sees this and points to my glass and sometimes will ask me, “Is that your beer?” I would then point at her milk cup and ask, “Is that your milk?” When she nods, then I equate my beer with milk.

It never really occurred to me that this was that big of a problem. I kid around with Josie all the time and we like to laugh with each other. I’m very clear about boundaries – no beer at kid’s birthday parties, for instance, or often having just one or so after Josie goes to bed. There is alcoholism on both my and Kari’s sides of the family, and we want to try to make sure that Josie understands that beer and wine are nice things to supplement your enjoyment of life, not to be the end in an of itself.

It never occurred to me that this was a problem, until I read a blog post by a stay-at-home dad that was posted in the Motherlode blog of the New York Times. In it, he recounts his problems with alcohol and how his daughter innocently equated alcohol with her father’s life.

Much of what he writes is more focused on actual alcoholism. I am not so far along as he was – I don’t go to playdates with hangovers, for example. But in the latter portion of the post he says something that jarred some complacency loose:

I remember waking up in a cold sweat one morning, my heart thrumming in my chest. It scared the hell out of me to think I might be setting her on the same course, burdening her with the weight of familial inertia and pushing her toward the same problems I and generations of our family before her have fought for decades.

My girl. The future drunk.

I had to at least give her a chance.

I read this and shared it with Kari, who has a much harder time fighting her genetic makeup than I do in regards to alcohol. We want to give Josie a healthy respect and understanding of both the joys and curses of alcohol, but reading this other posting reminded me that the way I was doing it was all wrong.

Hell, I even called beer “Daddy juice.”

The question I now ask myself is: what is the right way to do it? Do I not drink? Do I drink only in social situations or out to dinner? Do I wait until she goes to bed? Some of these? All of these?

I do know, for starters, that I can’t make light of alcohol anymore. It’s not juice, it’s beer, and too much of it can hurt you. I’ve had too much in my past, and believe me, it hurt me plenty.

But solving this dilemma is going to be something I’m going to need to attend to for a long time. I wish that I had an answer. I don’t. But I do know that it’s not at the bottom of my juice glass.