Don’t Drink and Don’t Die

So children were what I wanted most out of life. After six years of drinking and failing in AA, I began a sobriety that would stick. I met a man who was nice enough. I got married to him, and I had two children with him. I made these decisions in sobriety, knowing and understanding as much as I could at the age of 21. In many ways, and in most ways, I did this as a young but responsible person. I chose the man and he chose me, no one was tricked or pressured into anything. I knew and he knew that our actions might result in children. The children were wanted and planned for. I took my responsibilities seriously and did not drink or take any drugs at all while I was pregnant. I quit smoking at that time too. I read, talked to people, and gave great thought to the issues of pregnancy, childbirth, infancy, babyhood, toddlerhood, preschoolerhood. I approached those children as the most important job of my life, as I feel all children should be approached.

These decisions were made possible by sobriety and the AA program. When I was drinking, I did take one half assed chance of getting pregnant in bad circumstances. Had I not stopped drinking, and had by some miracle lived, I can’t imagine what kind of life I would have given any children I had. Every horrifying image I can conjur springs to mind if I try to find what that might have looked like.

I had a friend in AA who had a baby a year before I did. She married a nice guy in AA, and many times I had felt jealousy over the way her life was turning out. The nice guy she married had family, property and roots in our home town. They went on to have four children, and to live where I would have wanted to live. One day after I had moved back to our home town (and was renting a very expensive, very small house there), I was taking my kids to day care because I was working on my master’s and had to be at school early. I felt very bad about this situation. It was not what I wanted for my kids or myself. There came the husband of the situation I had described. I asked mutual friends about him and his wife, their four kids and my dream house and dream life.

The dream house was falling down. It was trashy and neglected. Their marriage was over but they were still together because she was incapable of caring for herself or the children. She had gone back to drinking and taking drugs, and had actually been arrested and been in jail for something drug related. She wasn’t working, but the four kids were in day care anyway because she couldn’t care for them. She and he had stopped going to meetings.

One of the keys to my long sobriety has been paying attention to these alternate routes that lead to nowhere. My life had not turned out the way I had wanted or expected. I got some of what I wanted, but really, not much (not much in number of things, that is - the actual things, the children, could not be quantified). From here I can see that never stopping meetings, never stopping AA, made it possible for me to get through in one piece, and to maybe actually have my children benefit from my alcoholism rather than suffer because of it.

Through the years I’ve known many people who have had sobriety babies. I have also known people to have babies in active alcoholism, or to relapse at some point in the early years. There is no question in my mind that sobriety babies are blessed in many ways. Their legacy is one of recovery, and the alternate route these children don’t have to travel is one that no child should have to know.