Homeschooling at the End of the World

I’ve been thinking about this topic for a while but figured I’d better go ahead and write this before one of us gets COVID, lol/sob.

Yes, so far we’ve escaped COVID (to our knowledge). Major knock on wood here (I literally did just knock on my desk after typing that), but for now we’ve avoided it, and for always we lasted longer than Anthony Fauci himself. I’ve accepted the fact that there’s no avoiding it forever, but we’ve had a ridiculously good run. (And for everyone who has already gone a round or two with COVID, just know that I absolutely attribute our ridiculously good run to ridiculously good luck and massive amounts of privilege more than anything else.)

Now that the final, youngest member of our household is vaccinated, I’m giving us all medals, trophies, and celebratory ice cream and declaring that we have crossed our own personal COVID finish line. We made it to “getting all of us vaccinated.” BOOM. Done. Go us! That has always been the finish line for me, and we made it.

Does that mean we’re abandoning all of our COVID protocols? No. We’ll still mask indoors much of the time and stick to outdoor activities as much as possible. We still have no plans to dine indoors any time in the near future. We’ll still absolutely take the precautions that make the most sense to us, not just in a continued effort to avoid COVID but because I don’t like being sick, period, more than is absolutely necessary to keep all our immune systems in practice 🙃

Does that mean I’m no longer concerned about getting COVID? Not at all. I still would prefer none of us get it, ever. It just means I’m accepting that’s likely an impossible dream, and we are going back to something more like “normalcy” (with the above-mentioned precautions). We’ll probably fly on an airplane soon. We hang out with people with minimal requirements about what they’ve been up to in the past two weeks (basically, zero requirements other than if someone is actively sick with something other than a runny nose we’d probably avoid hanging out with them. And if they just got over a stomach bug we’d definitely avoid hanging out with them, but that’s been the case for decades, not just since COVID). We’ve started doing the things we kept telling the kids we’d do once we were all vaccinated (bowling, bus rides, etc).

After 2.5 years, and a lot of ambivalence during that time about how ready or not I was to go back to normal, this feels like a pretty good “normal-ISH” place, and I just wanted to document it before it passes us by.

I’m sure my 5 faithful blog readers (THANKS GUYS I LOVE YOU!) were really super curious about how Lent went (/sarcasm), and I keep wanting to write about other things but I am a completist so I felt I needed to tie up that loose thread first so here you go:

It did not go great, lol/sob.

I mean, it was fine, I don’t feel like I went back to anything close to the level of pre-Lent-2021 “checking my phone around the kids,” but with us leaving the house a LOT more now than we were during Lent last year, it just felt like I always had my phone with me when we went out and then I wouldn’t bother bringing it back upstairs when we got home so it was just always AROUND. It’s just always THERE and I’m struggling to figure out how to not have that be the case when I do feel like I need it for legitimate reasons when we leave the house. Or maybe I don’t?? Idk. Maybe I really actually don’t–I didn’t have one every time I left the house prior to whenever the advent of cellphones was, sooo…

I’ve been thinking a lot about sobriety as it relates not just to alcohol but to everything in life, and what it would mean to be sober with my phone usage, what that really looks like for me and how to get there… but for now all I have to say is that this year’s Lent did not go as well as last year’s Lent and I’m working on what to do about it moving forward. AND NOW I CAN BLOG ABOUT OTHER THINGS BECAUSE CLOSURE!

It’s Lent, again, so I’ve had a lot of opportunity to reflect on how well my Lent experiment went last year and how I then promptly, you know, slid right back into old habits.

I’m exaggerating – first of all it happened gradually, and second of all it’s definitely not as bad as it could be (most of the time). I’m actually pretty good at not getting sucked into my phone too often, but it’s still just AROUND all the time, and when it’s around, I check it for no good reason and then sometimes just stare at it aimlessly, also for no good reason, because I’ve removed all the problematic apps so I don’t even know what I’m checking it for other than out of habit. Not great, Bob.

(Although I guess now is the part where I tell myself that this is the way things are and I accept that and “It’s OK” and “I’m OK,” as per my most recent therapy assignment. So. It’s OK! I’m OK!)

So, obviously, I am giving up exactly the same thing for Lent this year. I think last year I phrased it as giving up having my phone with me when I was around the kids (other than when we went out or when I legitimately needed to use it for something kid-related), this year I’m giving up having it downstairs at all until the kids’ bedtime (unless we’re going out and I’m taking it with us), and then I’m also giving up having it out/nearby when I’m with the kids (so when we are out, or upstairs, or whatever, only using it for kid-related needs or to make/answer NECESSARY calls/texts).

I don’t know what metrics I’m going to use other than coming here to report on my progress like I did last year, and to report any cheating. I don’t think there was any yesterday, so we’re off to a good start. Huzzah!

When did I start this blog anyway? Well whatever, I updated our header image. The other day I took a picture of the kids that had the same “accidental album cover” look to it that the one of us from 10,000 years ago had so I combined them and now our blog has officially gotten with the times.

Here’s how they work in this household:

AUTUMN AKA HALLOWEEN SEASON: Day after Labor Day through Oct. 31

CHRISTMAS SEASON WITH A BRIEF BREAK FOR WESTLEY’S BIRTHDAY SEASON: Nov. 1 through Candlemas (Feb. 2)

WINTER DOLDRUMS (coincides with late Christmas season, once everyone starts getting a little bit tired of Christmas decorations, Christmas movies, Christmas music, Christmas cookies, etc.): Early January

PARENTAL BIRTHDAY SEASON (also coincides with late Christmas season): Jan. 20ish or whenever I feel like starting to celebrate my birthday through Feb. 14 or whenever we decide to stop celebrating D’s birthday (you’ll notice he gets less birthday time but I mean he can also have Valentine’s Day as far as I’m concerned?!)

“IS IT EASTER YET?” End of birthday season through whenever Easter falls

SPRING: Easter or whenever the weather starts getting nice, whichever happens first, until Memorial Day ISH. If it’s already routinely 90 degrees earlier in May (or, heck, April), congratulations, it’s summer.

SUMMER, INCLUDING WYATT’S BIRTHDAY SEASON: Memorial Day (or thereabouts, see above) through Labor Day

1. Decide you’re simply not going to potty train your second child, because it was downright traumatic with your first child, and you only did it because he was in preschool and his preschool teacher heavily implied after he turned 3 that he should be potty trained. THIS child, this second child with whom you’re going to do things RIGHT, is living through a pandemic and has zero reason to be put through all that. Plus he wears cloth diapers so there’s not even a financial incentive to potty train him.
2. Waver a bit on that decision when you realize that you really, really, really want to get rid of the changing table. Ask your un-potty-trained child if you can get rid of it and just change his diaper on the floor. Be grateful when he agrees.
3. As age 3 turns to age 3.5 with no apparent desire on your child’s part to stop wearing diapers, attempt to reason with your child, who, realistically, has been potty trained since somewhere around age 1.5. Explain to him that since he already knows when he needs to go to the bathroom, and will pee in the potty no problem if he doesn’t have a diaper on, he’s essentially already potty trained! He will often remind you during these discussions that he’s “only pee potty trained, not poop potty trained.” He knows when he needs to poop just as much as he knows when he needs to pee… he just won’t do it on the toilet. You’re not really sure why you’re continuing to push this point with him, since you decided months ago to simply not potty train this child, but you suspect it has something to do with really, really wanting to be done laundering poopy cloth diapers.
4. Bribe your child with buying him whatever toy he wants, to no avail. This child is not motivated by material possessions.
5. Give up and remind yourself of step no. 1. What’s the big deal? We’re homeschoolers now. If he wants to wear diapers until he moves out, so be it.
6. Occasionally read comments on parenting groups that espouse the “wait until your child is ready” camp of potty training insisting that most kids are ready by 4 at the latest and not to worry about it, and wonder if your kid is going to be the exception. Then remind yourself again of steps no. 1 and 5.
7. Give all your potty training books to your dear friend, who is potty training her child, who is a full year younger than your child.
8. When your washing machine breaks and the repairman can’t make it out for 10 days, convince your child it would be really fun to surprise the washing machine repairman by being potty trained by the time he arrives! Because you really don’t want to deal with cloth diapers while your washing machine is broken. Your kid, who is basically always game for whatever other than pooping in the potty, agrees, happily wears underwear and pees in the potty like a goddamn pro, but stops pooping for 3 days.
9. In desperation, promise your child you will immediately go out and buy him a bag of M&Ms if he poops in the potty, because not pooping for 3 days is no bueno. Apparently, while material possessions do not motivate your child, M&Ms do, because he suddenly develops an intense determination to get this thing done.
10. The following day, when your child informs you he needs to poop and starts screwing up his face in his unmistakable “I am currently pooping” expression, hurry him to the bathroom saying cheerily, “We have to surprise the repairman and tell him you’re all potty trained now! We poop in the toilet, remember, not in our underwear! Won’t it be fun when I go out and buy you a huge bag of M&Ms????”
11. Cheer as your child poops in the toilet (the BIG toilet even!) for the first time and tells you that, now that he can pee AND poop in the potty, he wants to wear underwear all the time. It really IS that easy! They really WON’T go off to college wearing diapers!

Congratulations! Your 3.7-year-old is now potty trained, it was not traumatic at all, and he ate a bowl full of M&Ms for lunch.

I really want to call this blog post “Drinking: A Love Story,” but that would be a blatant rip-off of Caroline Knapp’s brilliant book, which I read in, oh, I don’t know, 2009 maybe? Actually, it was 2013. I just checked and, helpfully, I blogged about the books I read that year. But the point remains, I easily could have read it in 2009, or thereabouts. I actually don’t remember exactly when I started to worry about my relationship with alcohol. But certainly by 2013, I had begun to feel uneasy about it, and Knapp’s book resonated with me on a deep level.

I had alcohol for the first time in (public) high school, where I had miraculously found the group of friends I’d always wanted after years feeling mostly like an outcast (with one or two beautiful exceptions, friendships that remain integral to my life to this day) in private school. We were safe about it: only drinking at friends’ houses where we could sleep over, always making sure someone’s parent knew where we were. The thought of drinking and driving was completely out of the question, as was (for most of us) drinking at an unfamiliar party or with strangers. My thoughts on alcohol use in high school are complicated now that I have kids of my own, but I have very few regrets about that period in my life. It taught me the kinds of friends I needed around me, all of us looking out for one another, protecting each other, whether it was alcohol involved or something else entirely.

I think it was because of my high school experience that I didn’t go wild in college the way so many of my new, college friends did. Drinking wasn’t a big part of my life in college, though I did attend a few parties. Similar to my high school experience, though, I only attended parties thrown by my close-knit group of friends, or if I was going to attend an “unknown” party, it was with those close friends. I continued to experience the secure feeling of being with people who had my best interests in mind, as well as their own. We always kept tabs on each other, and we always left parties together.

On my 21st birthday, I went out to dinner with my parents and drank half a glass of wine. It was incredibly important to me to make sure I always had a handle on my drinking. I was not going to be one of those people taking 21 shots and blacking out.

Plus, wine just didn’t taste that good to me.

After college, I moved back home for about 2 years, complicated years that were, for a few months in the middle, marked by me and my college boyfriend breaking up in an intensely dramatic fashion, and me hating my job so passionately, that I felt a constant sense of impending doom. It was 2005, and sometimes watching Lost was the only thing that got me through the week. (If only I’d known how that was going to end.) That, and my best friend coming over at the end of the day with a pint of ice cream and her roller skates.

This brief period was both preceded and followed by ebullient ones in which I (pre-bad times) became obsessed with skiing, reunited joyfully with high school friends who had also moved back home post-college, and learned to love the taste of wine; as well as (post-bad times) magically got over College Boyfriend, went on a dating spree, gleefully ended the school year by chaperoning the seniors’ Grad Night at Disneyland and then bid teaching adieu forever, road tripped around the country, spent five weeks in Europe with my BFF, and then immediately jetted off to the East Coast to hang out with my cousins before my planned return to “Real Life.” I spent the last 5 months of my time living back home in a long-distance relationship with D (we got together during that East Coast trip), seeing each other as much as we could, working my new, much less stressful job, and having a blast with my friends the rest of the time.

Somewhere amidst all this, drinking started to become a slightly bigger part of my life–we drank many of the nights we were in Europe, for example. But I was still spending just as much time sober as I was drunk when I hung out with my friends, and when I was with a guy I was dating, I very rarely drank. My alcohol-tinged memories from this period of my life are bright and cheerful: the time I decided to have some wine in the middle of the day and clean the house, and the way the sunlight shone through the kitchen window on the flowers I’d bought that morning at the farmers’ market after everything was nice and sparkly, and the nap I took on the couch afterward with the breeze coming in through the open windows. Nights spent at the wine bar with my friends, laughing and talking outside next to the pizza oven. I never turned to alcohol during the gloomy days when I was so bereft over the end of my relationship with College Boyfriend that I didn’t know what to do with myself, and the nights I spent drinking with friends were interspersed with just as many nights when we drove out to the roller skating rink we used to frequent as kids, stone cold sober and having a blast. This is probably about when drinking went from a “party/special occasion” activity to a “many, but not all, weekends” activity for me.

I guess what I’m trying to say is during all 3 of those periods of my life, alcohol never felt habitual or necessary. It felt fun, but it also felt entirely possible to have fun without drinking.

It was after I moved to Chicago to be with D (and have an adventure) that it started to feel habitual. His group of friends there (incredible people, most of whom remain precious in my life and don’t, as far as I know, have drinking problems) drank … a lot. Most nights, in my recollection. This is when drinking started transitioning from a “weekend” activity to a “whenever” activity in my mind.

Still, though, it didn’t yet feel necessary, it just felt like … what we did. And it certainly didn’t yet feel problematic for me. Again, my alcohol-tinged memories from this era are sweet and innocent and full of beloved friends: laughing in the condo building’s pool, getting dressed up in formalwear and renting a limo for our own “Adult Prom,” tasting sake for the first time at our many “Sushi Nights.”

And so we come to the Philadelphia phase of my life, where things get murky. We moved there, back into the house D had lived in for years before being transferred to Chicago, after I’d been in Chicago about a year and a half. At first I was despondent, missing the city that remains my very favorite in all of the US, but eventually I grew to love it there. I got the most involved I’d been since college, volunteering at the public radio station and the local farm where we got our CSA share from and the animal rescue, taking pottery classes and horseback riding classes and fencing classes and joining a dance team. I loved spending more time with my cousins, and D’s East Coast friends, who I loved just as much as his Chicago friends–and I even made my own, incredibly dear, friends for the first time in years. We fostered dozens of cats, adopted two more after the one we’d brought into our lives in Chicago, lost our beloved dog and adopted two others. We built a life that I loved, but somewhere in that life, drinking turned from a “whenever … as long as you’re doing it with your friends” activity to a “whenever you want, whether you’re with other people or alone, whether D is joining you in imbibing or not” activity.

Some of my drinking memories from the 7 years we spent in PA are still incredibly lovely: nights full of raucous laughter with my in-laws, board game nights with friends, regular dinner-and-TV nights with D’s best friend, date nights with D. But this is also where the memories start taking on a slightly less cheerful tinge: many, many nights I spent on the couch, drinking alone (sometimes out of a wine glass reading “It’s Not Drinking Alone If Your Cat Is With You”) and listening to mournful music on my record player, or reading, or watching TV, or simply wasting time online, while D worked on house projects or woodworking projects. Of course, there were also many nights he joined me and we hung out together, but on most of those nights I was still the only one drinking.

The thing about drinking during this phase of my life is that I loved it. I loved the romantic, cozy feeling of curling up with a glass of wine. I do have fond memories of those nights, the albums I listened to, the books I read, the fires that were sometimes burning in our fireplace at the time, the dogs curled up next to me, the cats also occasionally gracing me with their presence. But that love started turning to something more like obsession. I had strict rules about when it was OK to “day drink,” and became consumed with the idea of getting to 5pm so it was “OK” to start drinking; then, later, reasoned with myself that it was actually OK to start earlier since I worked 6-2 instead of 9-5. I’d easily finish a bottle of wine a night, multiple nights in a row. (The memory of joking around with a wine-loving friend: “What’s the point of wine bottle stoppers? When do you ever have leftover wine?”) Sometimes I’d run out of wine and play a dangerous game with myself drinking the rest of whatever we had in the house, trying to stretch out the time between going on what were starting to become embarrassing, shameful jaunts to the state store down the street (in Pennsylvania, the state runs alcohol sales).

This little game was dangerous for a few reasons: when drinking liquor (if I was out of wine, that’s what I was going to drink–we rarely had beer in the house), it was more difficult to control my intake, because there wasn’t a nice neat single bottle to finish. You could just keep drinking and drinking. The one thing keeping somewhat of a handle on things was my phobic-level fear of vomiting; it usually ensured that I stopped before things got too out of hand–meaning I just fell asleep drunk rather than getting sick, then passing out. But gradually, I’d start finishing a bottle of wine and then starting the next one on the same night (I guess that’s what one needs a wine bottle stopper for), which of course led to finishing that one and the next one the next night. Or I’d finish a bottle and still feel the need to drink more, so I’d open up the liquor cabinet.

I would tell myself things like “after everything is gone, I’ll take a break from drinking,” and usually I did… for a while. But, while I never drank D’s alcohol (rum–yuck) and there were certain other things I wouldn’t go near (the bottle of Crown Royal, left by a friend at a house party long before I even moved in, remained untouched until we ultimately poured it down the drain while packing up to move out), there were other instances in which I had zero shame. For example, when we were once down to the marsala wine D used for cooking, I drank that.

Always, I would end up going back to my old habits. The longest breaks I took from drinking were fueled not by concern over the road I was headed down, but by a desire to “get in shape” or “eat healthier” or lose weight for some upcoming occasion. It was easy for me to stop drinking entirely–I could go months and months at a time completely dry–and for a while I used this fact to comfort myself. See? I couldn’t be an alcoholic! Later, though, I realized that was nothing more than another symptom of my problem drinking. I heard phrases like “An alcoholic can either control their drinking or enjoy their drinking, never both,” and was filled with anxiety. I would test myself sometimes: can I have just one drink, maybe two, on this particular night and then stop? Sometimes I could, but, of course, those exercises were more stressful than enjoyable for me. On the nights I spontaneously stopped myself, without thinking about it, going to bed with a clear head after just a couple drinks, I felt incredibly relieved: it was possible. But those occasions were few and far between.

So, it was somewhere around this hazy period of time that I started to worry about my drinking. Reading journals from this era is a painful exercise in watching myself loop endlessly between miserable “I need to stop drinking so much” pleas to myself and effervescent “I did it! I quit drinking! I feel amazing!” pats on my own back. I never stopped for long, unless there was motivation (my own wedding, another person’s wedding I was going to be in, that sort of thing), so these loops are rollercoaster-esque in how quickly they shift from one phase to the other and back again.

A few observations from this time period in my life: I constantly worried whether other people thought I drank too much. Once, I spilled my drink at a party, and practically died of shame, despite the fact that I don’t think anyone else thought much of it. I felt relieved in the presence of other people whose drinking habits seemed similar to mine, and very relieved if their drinking habits seemed worse; I felt anxious around people who didn’t drink, or didn’t drink as much, wondering how my drinking looked to them. After Knapp’s book, I became a bit obsessed with “quit lit”–sometimes reading people’s stories of quitting alcohol while sipping a glass of wine. I tried to figure out ways to lie about how often I drank on those doctor intake forms without lying too much, because I felt guilty. I convinced myself that drinking helped me to be more or do more: be more creative, do more of the things I needed to get done but procrastinated on, read more, write more, clean more, organize more, get caught up on things more, whatever. Sometimes this was true for a while, but more often than not, there came a point in the evening where whatever pursuit the alcohol was supposed to be “helping” me with was abandoned in favor of lying around on the couch mindlessly scrolling my phone or computer, watching TV, or just going to bed.

This was the era when alcohol started to feel not just habitual, but necessary. I was filled with anxiety, restlessness, or both at the thought of occasions and interactions that were, for whatever reason, not going to be lubricated by liquor. I cannot emphasize this enough: I truly did not understand how one would “do” a holiday, for example, sober. It was unthinkable to me, despite the fact that I used to regularly do all sorts of things sober, and had a fine time. For this reason, I often forced myself to do exactly these types of things sober, but it always felt like powering through.

Sometimes I would, very tentatively, ask D if he thought my drinking was a problem. He was always very reassuring, even after the time I drank so much while his mom was staying with us (stressful!) that I threw up on our bedroom floor–as I said above, a rare occurrence, but one that still fills me with shame to this day. I don’t know why he was so reassuring: whether he really didn’t think the drinking was a problem, or just didn’t want to confront me with it because he knew how devastated I’d be to hear it from him, or maybe because he thought it would lead to a conversation about his addiction (smoking) that he didn’t want to have. Possibly it was because we did have a couple people in our life whose drinking was clearly causing problems for them (DUIs, etc.) and I was clearly not acting like them. Maybe he’ll tell me his reasons after reading this blog. In any case, I was comforted that he didn’t seem to think I “needed help.” I also attempted to mask the issue a bit by knowing who it was “safe” to drink a lot around and who might be suspicious of me, and by forcing myself to do certain things sober to throw people off the scent, and for this reason some of my friends might be surprised to read this blog (others, I suspect, probably always had an idea).

That’s how it was, until I got pregnant. Until after I got pregnant, actually: because the universe apparently needed me to have one more shameful story, I got pregnant with EC (unknowingly) while in Mexico for one of my best friend’s weddings. I also got a number of sand flea bites on that trip, and they are no joke. I was miserable for much of the next few weeks, which I spent pantsless, slathered in various anti-itch lotions and creams, drinking away the pain and discomfort. I was tracking my period at that point, but we weren’t actually trying to get pregnant, just not not trying, and I think I was on day 28 or 29 when I got on a plane to California for Thanksgiving. That didn’t seem particularly odd; I’d gone to day 30 before. I ordered multiple drinks on the plane–one time actually walking to the back, where the flight attendants were congregated, to order one (and a fruit & cheese box, to make it seem less problematic) because, apparently, they weren’t coming down the aisle checking on passengers fast enough for me.

It’s difficult to think about the fact that I was growing EC that whole time, even though when I told my OB-GYN about it (I was honest for once in my life about my drinking: “No, you don’t understand. I drank a lot during the first month. A lot.”), he was very comforting and said there was no harm done so early on in the pregnancy. Also, EC is clearly fine. But still.

In any case, once I arrived in California, some instinct told me to stop drinking, and I didn’t drink again after the wine on the plane. I think it was day 34 when I finally decided to take a test. (I have this information helpfully saved in a Gmail message draft where I was tracking my cycle length, and which hasn’t been edited since November 20, 2014. It informs me that on that day, day 31 of my cycle, I had “spotting,” which I guess in retrospect must have been implantation bleeding. At the time, I thought it was my period finally coming, and when it hadn’t fully arrived within a few days, I finally took one of my BFF’s leftover pregnancy tests.)

When I look at my relationship with alcohol now, compared to, say, 2013, it seems unrecognizable and miraculous to me. I rarely drink (I’ve had alcohol on three occasions this year, and on only one of them did I get anything more than buzzed) and, whereas I used to think things like “Ahhhhh, 5pm. That first sip of wine is going to be soooo good,” I now think, “Ahhhh. You know what’s going to be soooo good? Not drinking tonight or for the foreseeable future. That’s going to feel fucking great.” The idea of “doing” events, occasions, interactions, get-togethers, holidays, etc. sober is not only comfortable and A-OK, it’s preferable to doing those things drunk. I regularly express gratitude to my higher power for bringing me to this place, which seemed unimaginable for so long.

How did I get here? Not exactly sure. Most of it is probably logistical: I had kids, and drinking was never the same again. I had to constantly think about them. I couldn’t just let go and do whatever I wanted. Plus, I wasn’t getting any sleep, which ensured a hangover the next day and general awfulness. And in addition to kids, I was getting older, which made recovery from alcohol take longer and the aforementioned hangovers much more frequent and much less pleasant than they used to be. In a nutshell: drinking, for the most part, stopped being fun. If it had continued being fun, I probably would have continued doing it the same way I had been before.

But now that I’m not doing it as much, I can clearly see all the un-fun parts of it that, back in my problematic drinking days, I glossed over. The horrible, interrupted sleep (even though I told myself drinking made it easier to fall asleep, I never stayed asleep) followed by the anxious, 3am, spinning and looping repeated thoughts about everything that had ever felt wrong in my life–not least of which was my drinking. The dull feeling the next morning, the lack of energy throughout the day, sometimes a headache or worse, all of which would finally abate … just in time to start drinking again the next night. Was it ever really fun? It felt fun while I was doing it, but the rest… not so much.

Does all of this mean I never drank problematically again after having kids? No, most definitely not. There were nights I felt myself getting out of control again, most notably after the second of our two miscarriages. There were days when I noticed myself falling into my old pattern, which was: If I didn’t drink last night, it’s pretty easy to also not drink tonight. But if I drank last night, chances are good I’m going to drink again tonight. I drank on fewer occasions–a lot fewer–but when I did, it was still hard for me to have just one or two: my 20-year high school reunion ended with me sleeping until 2pm the following day after waking up at 6am to be sick in the bathroom. So, yes. The universe has given me many opportunities over the past 6 years to reflect on the fact that, after all those years spent denying it, alcohol and I do in fact have a complicated, and yes, problematic relationship.

Another factor in my new approach to alcohol: the pandemic. When I switched to working nights, drinking really lost its appeal. To give up one or both of my weekend days feeling blah and hungover was so unappealing. D and I did have “firepit date nights” on Fridays, and I drank a bit at those, but gradually petered out on doing even that, leaving D to sometimes drink alone for the first time in our relationship. There came a period last year when I honestly had no idea the last time I’d had alcohol, which was a strange feeling, because I hadn’t exactly meant to give it up, it just sort of happened without my really trying. That’s probably why I’ve kept such specific track of my (3) drinking experiences this year.

Am I an alcoholic? I’m not sure. I’d probably struggle to identify myself that way were I to attend an AA meeting today, considering what I wrote in that last paragraph. But I know it doesn’t really matter whether you’re currently drinking or not, an alcoholic’s an alcoholic regardless of that, and I know I’d certainly be welcomed as long as I had “a desire to stop drinking.” I still see the same signs of compulsivity, the same warnings that I might still drink problematically–even if that’s only on the rare few occasions when I do drink. But I also see signs of hope, and I loved this recent essay by a member of AA who is actually testing the waters of drinking in a moderate, balanced way. She talks in the essay about how wonderful it would be if more people, even those who aren’t sure they’re alcoholics, gave AA a try, because it’s about so much more than drinking. It’s about becoming aware of the issues that underlie the drinking, and dealing with those. That’s what all of 12-step recovery is about, and I can’t recommend it enough. There’s a program for almost any issue you can think of (while I’m not in the so-called “beverage program,” I do a lot of things compulsively, including spending money/accumulating things/not utilizing my time well), and I think absolutely everyone in this world could benefit from checking it out.

I feel weird about publishing this, because I worry that now people will be concerned for me if they’re around me and I am drinking for whatever reason. And if that happens, and you think I need to take a look at my behavior, you’re welcome to call me out on it. But no, I don’t currently plan to give up alcohol entirely. I’ll be with two of my favorite people in a few short weeks, for the first time since January 2020, and I’ll most likely have a lot of fun imbibing with them. I’m sure other occasions will come up where having a drink will be nice. So if you’ve read this far, first of all thank you, and second of all don’t expect to never see me with a drink in my hand again. Right now it’s the clarity and transparency I’m looking for and wanting to share, because vagueness keeps me in my compulsivity, no matter what the activity is.

I’m nothing if not “all up on the trends,” so I bought EC a balance bike fairly early on in his life. I knew “everyone” recommended them rather than the good ol’ training wheels route these days, and the logic behind that made sense (they more easily learn to balance on them, which is arguably the hardest part of riding a bike, rather than teetering back and forth on training wheels). But when he was 2, 3, 4, the balance bike thing was not going super well. Part of the problem was that I simply wasn’t taking him out on it and letting him practice, because I was a little bit nervous about our neighborhood’s lack of sidewalks. Watching him attempt to master it, I felt frustrated on his behalf, because it just didn’t seem fun–it seemed like…..walking around awkwardly with a bike between your legs. He wasn’t intuitively getting it and propelling himself around like “they” promised me he would.

Well, as so many things tend to turn out when it comes to parenting, it was my problem, not his. Turns out you kind of have to practice more than just in your garage to learn certain things. One day (soon after getting him a slightly larger version since he was now 4.5, and that looked very similar to his little friend’s balance bike that he was convinced was better than his since she could ride it successfully, haha), around the time the pandemic was declared, I just said fuck it and took the kids (LB was now using EC’s original balance bike) outside to ride up and down our street. And like…. he mastered it. Immediately. LB, who was 2 at the time, did so soon after, and it wasn’t long before they were doing what appeared to me to be death-defying rides down the steep hill in front of our house. They wanted to ride all the time, and it was joyful to watch.

I was so proud of the balance bike mastery that I got complacent, and failed to even consider how exactly I was going to transition them from balance bikes to pedal bikes. When I finally sort of haphazardly ended up with two Star Wars bikes, both kids hated them (other than the fact that they were Star Wars – that they liked) and refused to spend much time even sitting on them, and honestly I was sort of intimidated by them myself. They were the right size for the kids, but so clunky and awkward.

Finally, a friend (the same one whose kid sailed from a balance bike to a pedal bike seamlessly at age 3, thus inspiring….and inspiring massive jealousy in….my kid) suggested I suck it up and invest in better bikes. Bikes like Woom and Cleary are much sleeker, weigh less, generally aren’t as intimidating… and they have hand brakes, which cheaper kid bikes do not. I had a hard time justifying spending hundreds of dollars on bikes that would soon be outgrown, but after a few disheartening attempts with the clunkers I’d gotten cheap, I gave in. The same friend found a Cleary bike for sale in North Hollywood, we just so happened to be in Big Bear at the time and D agreed to swing by on our way home and pick it up, AND the guy had a smaller one also for sale and agreed to give me a pretty amazing deal on both. (Yes, we checked the serial numbers to make sure they weren’t stolen.)

Enter: phase 2 of my melodrama. I took EC out on THAT bike a couple times, to no avail. Someone posted in my local moms’ group about this exact dilemma, and there were TONS of comments weighing in (including from the mom of one of EC’s former classmates) about how the transition from balance bike to pedal bike had totally failed for them. Most of them attributed this to two issues: (1) waiting too long to introduce a pedal bike and (2) their kid being so unfamiliar with pedals that they ended up needing training wheels anyway while they got the hang of them.

As anyone who knows me can imagine, this inspired thoughts like “EC will be 6 in June, I waited too long, now he’s never going to learn how to ride a pedal bike” and “I should have pushed the tricycle more, maybe then he’d understand pedaling.” The first one is ridiculous because he literally won’t fit on any balance bikes much longer so eventually he was going to have no choice but to ride a pedal bike if he wanted to keep riding, and the second is ridiculous because he actually did love his tricycle. But I’m also nothing if not “a catastrophizing doom predictor.”

And, once again, the problem turned out to be 100% mine. I was so nervous trying to teach him the pedal bike that I was hanging on the whole time, which really just wasn’t allowing him the opportunity to just intuitively “get it” the way he had done with the balance bike. We took the kids to an empty parking lot Easter afternoon and he didn’t even want to take out the pedal bike, but I asked him to please give Daddy a chance since D is generally a better instructor than I am, and he agreed. D’s version of teaching was to basically help EC get on the bike with his feet on the pedals, hold it steady for him, and then tell him, “OK, now you ride it.”

By that I mean he positioned the bike at the top of a slight downward slope and encouraged EC to coast down the hill, just like he’s done a zillion times on his balance bike, only this time his feet would be resting on the pedals. EC was hesitant, but we convinced him to try as long as one of us held the bike as he launched and the other one waited at the bottom of the slope. As he got to the bottom of the slope he just instinctively started pedaling to stay upright, and we pointed out to him that he was doing it! The fear pretty much immediately left him at that point and he said he wanted to do it again. We casually explained the hand brakes and he understood them right away.

We launched him in the parking lot, holding the bike and giving a little push once his feet were on the pedals, then went home, where he was eager to show off his skills on our street. And he almost immediately was able to push off and launch himself with no help from us. By the next morning, he was teaching himself to slow down on the brakes rather than screeching to a halt, and using that skill to turn rather than get off the bike and manually turn it around every time he wanted to go in a different direction. He woke up that morning wanting to ride, which he basically did at every single available moment in between meals and other strictly necessary activities (like making sure his brother got to do stuff he wanted to do too) and this morning he came in to wake me up at 8am (don’t judge, I worked until 1am) already fully dressed and ready to go! There have not been many other times in his life he’s actually tracked down his own clothes (I was sleeping in his room, blocking access to the closet, so he had to find his clean laundry and get clothes from that stack) and gotten himself dressed with zero external motivation.

He now gets on the bike himself, launches himself, rides up our hill, sails down it, slows down and coasts around the curve, rides to the other end of that street and does a wide turn, then comes back and does it all over again. (Time for me and D to get bikes so we can go on family rides and talk about bicycle safety–we’ve already, obviously, done that a bit, and he explained to us how he’s carefully looking and listening when he gets to the end of the second street, where I am not stationed.) My heart soars watching him ride so freely and confidently. (He even took a spill yesterday and got right back on the bike after a little break to recuperate.) There’s just something about learning to ride a bike–now he can go anywhere (that is connected to anywhere else by a land mass)! Of course, now I can also spend my time freaking out about all the things that can go wrong when your 5-year-old starts riding a bike, buuuut I try to do that only internally and not let him see my anxiety.

So, now I’m 100% sold on balance bikes. SO glad we didn’t take the training wheels route–next up is getting LB on his pedal bike, which should be much easier now that EC is riding his, since LB insists on doing everything EC does. And LB is only 3, so I won’t have to go through the doom-predicting phase of worrying I waited too long. Score!

Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday March 22, 23, and 24: Uh, whoops. I’ve gotten really bad about actually updating this every night. But the whole leaving the phone upstairs thing is pretty habitual at this point, and I haven’t done much cheating. But I think I’ve done some very minimal cheating so I guess I’ll go with, uh, Bs for Monday/Tuesday and an A- for today (since I remember more of today and can say with more certainty that I only cheated momentarily while they were playing upstairs and I was in my room).

March 30 update: Whoops again! Guess I failed to update for… almost a week. Honestly I don’t think I’m going to be back much, Lent is over in a few days and this whole thing has gone really well. I have no significant cheating to report over the past week.

Easter update: Lent is over, and I pretty much continue to give myself an A, the most cheating I’ve done lately was actually at a playdate (we did a lengthy quarantine and multiple tests in advance!) when the three moms were all searching for the same play food on the Target app while our kiddos played, lol.

Overall I give myself an A. After years of using different methods at different times to curb my phone usage and months of very specifically focusing on trying various methods in an effort to be more present with my kids, none of which were as effective as I wanted them to be, I wasn’t sure how well I would do with this experiment, but it turns out just leaving my phone physically out of my presence is the answer. When it’s not near me, it becomes increasingly easier to notice the effect it has on me when I am near it. Whenever I would occasionally grab it for a legitimate purpose, I was much more likely to get sucked in and end up cheating for a few minutes than I ever was to actively walk upstairs and get it for no reason and start cheating. I also noticed the effect it had on me physically and emotionally (hint: not good) and a number of other things. Since starting this experiment, it now feels weird to be on the phone around the kids unless I’m actively using it for a necessary task, and I can absolutely tell that not having it around unless I need to use it for a specific purpose is improving all of our lives. I plan to continue living like this for……….ever.

Next step: Curb my phone usage while NOT with my kids, i.e., at night after they go to bed.

OK, so I’m exaggerating. I did not literally wipe my calendar clean the way I did last year when 2020 got canceled, but I did just go through and delete all the future entries for EC’s in-person martial arts classes, because his dojo is moving indoors next month – honestly happy for them! – and we aren’t comfortable going back to inside classes yet. I also finally deleted his regular online speech classes with the two teachers he’d grown to love, which were both recently canceled. For some reason I had been putting off actually removing them from the calendar, I guess in the irrational hope they’d magically become available again?

It was a pretty heartbreaking feeling, and then shortly after that, a sort of “ruefully bemused” feeling as I recalled giving in and erasing all our calendars last year at around this same time. Kind of sadly funny to have gotten to such a comfortable pandemic routine that I’m now sad at having to cancel stuff because life is slowly getting back to normal…

Which I really am happy about, I swear. I swear! I’m just also still very… personally ambivalent about it. Insert shrugging emoji here.