Dancing with My Daughter

Essay: early sobriety, reconnecting with my daughter

A photo of my daughter from before I was sober

If you missed the first two essays in this series and want to catch up:

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Then I was sober without so much as a fragment of good fortune to balance my hopes on, not a penny or a job, not even a phone number to write on an application. Not to mention, I was unknowingly squatting in my apartment. I was sober yet the same irresponsible and broken person as yesterday’s version, still playing tag with shadows in an abyss. As the days passed, my mind became clearer, and the abyss’s roof inched back. I could see the exit. The only way for me to move forward was to retrace my steps. 

I had people to face, apologies to make, creditors to ignore, dealers to dodge, a landlord to placate—and courage. Yeah, I had courage, though I probably didn’t seem courageous while stuttering on the steps of my building when a guy to whom I owed money caught me leaving my apartment. My body seemed to collapse into itself and fold like a lawn chair. I couldn’t understand why he was yelling at me. Did he realize he was twice my size? “Whoa, calm down,” I told him. “I’m sober.” For some reason, I thought my newfound willpower voided all previous agreements, signed or not, and that nobody could hold me responsible for anything I’d done or said prior to my last drink.

Most people don’t care that you’re sober, and those who do care won’t believe you, not at first. And don’t ever expect anybody to withdraw all doubt. People close to you, whenever you look a wink sleepy or aren’t a hundred percent yourself, will always have that voice in their heads that says, “He’s on something. Look at him. Jesus Christ. Would you look at him? I knew he couldn’t do it. Now what am I supposed to do with him?” You’ll see the reproach on their faces and tell yourself, If they think I’m drunk, I might as well get drunk. What’s the difference? 

Life doesn’t suddenly get better just because you decide to stop treating your body like a dumping ground for chemical waste. True, the hell you endure while addiction twiddles with your mind is nothing compared to the aftermath. But as you try to fix your life and regain control of a mind bent on ruining you, all to acquire a lifestyle so pathetic you can’t see the point, the struggle seems futile and introduces thoughts antithetical to motivation. You must reshape what you consider a good life and lower your standards without perceiving them as lowered to prevent yourself from asking, Why go on?

Constantly conjuring reasons to continue living sober is challenging, especially when you feel your life is worse than the hyperbolic tales you spun while hiding from the sun. You must lie to yourself and cling to clichés—it’ll get better, you say, one day at a time. This, too, shall pass. Not only do you have to say these insipid one-liners, but you must convince yourself they’re true. Self-deception is imperative. You lied to yourself to justify using drugs and alcohol, and now you must lie to yourself to stay away from them. You have to believe life gets better, even when it seems impossible. 

So it went. I’d stepped into tomorrow only to discover yesterday. Tomorrow was worse. I could feel things. The world had definition. Wide-awake nightmares posing as memories would surface randomly and deform my perception of self. I mention this often in my work because it is both fascinating and terrifying. To have a mind show you horrific images you can’t validate is torturous, a devilishly deranged trick your former self plays against you, as if you were haunting yourself. Unable to escape these visions killed my morale. What had I done? I couldn’t be that person, could I? Nonsense. I had to concentrate and not let my imagination manipulate my emotions. 

My goal, other than to remain sober, was to see my daughter. Sure, I needed money and other immediate things, but little mattered if I couldn’t see my daughter. I had to learn to be patient, and the only way to learn to be patient is to be patient. All I could do was remain sane enough to stay sober and wait.

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I had never considered abstinence until I heard my daughter’s heartbeat for the first time. I wish I could say that after her birth, when I cradled her in my arms and shushed her screams, her tiny hand grasping my finger, my sanity was restored, and the urge to drink gone. I had hoped to be a new man, thought about it often, and dreamed it would come true. Instead, a few hours after a nurse had weighed her, I went home, a mile away, to walk the dog and shower, and then returned to the hospital half-drunk, just enough to pass out in the stiff wooden chair beside the bed where her mother slept. In the morning, my breath would become evidence.

The year leading to her birth was a doozy and had moved so quickly that nothing felt real. I’d been single for ten years when I met her mother. During the first six months, I helped her move into my apartment, impregnated her, and then moved with her to another state. I hadn’t even adjusted to domesticity and was listening to her plan our lives five, ten, twenty years ahead. “More children,” she’d said. “I want a whole baseball team. You’re okay with that, right? What do you think? Irish twins. We should definitely have Irish twins.” I agreed to whatever she said. I was in shock—that is the best way to explain how I felt back then: bewildered, pale and stunned, uncertain, and utterly shocked. I nodded a lot. I offered to go places and run errands. I’ll take care of it, I’d say, because I’d want a moment alone, to breathe, to think—to drink. 

I eventually had bottles hidden around our townhouse and kept one in my car surrounded by several empties and another stashed between two rocks in the woods where I walked my dog. As the trimesters progressed, even though I knew I had to slow down or quit, I drank more. I’d talk to myself on my way to work each evening in an attempt to convince myself to stop drinking. By the time I reached Saugus, halfway to the restaurant, I’d have seven or eight empty nips of vodka rolling around on the passenger seat. Sometimes I cried. Maybe it was the traffic. So many fears weakened me, fears every new parent faces, and many I fabricated and embellished. Alcohol exacerbated those fears, and the more anxious I became, the more I drank. That was how I attempted to get sober when I first wanted to get sober: I drank more.

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About two weeks into my sobriety, a friend called and asked me if her son’s father could sleep at my house for a night. She had a restraining order on him, the father, not the son. Despite having met the guy only once and knowing he was a drug addict, I said yes. Why not? It was almost December, and if I said no, his best option was to settle under an overpass. Instead, he slept on the hardwood floor in a sleeping bag for the next two months and had a warm place to snort twenty to thirty Ativan each day. No kidding. He would jam so much junk up his nose that pebbles would fall out. The first night, to be courteous, he asked if I wanted some. All set, I said. Besides, Benzos made me fall asleep in strange places, like behind a steering wheel, in a doctor’s office, or while following a hostess to a booth. My new roommate also struggled to keep his head up when under the influence, and whenever he wasn’t unconscious with his face planted in a bowl of Cheerios, he would steal and not remember it: toothpaste, candy bars, extension cords, whatever he could get his hands on. One night, he ate a block of uncooked Ramen like a doughnut and then tried to call China to get a refund on a box of black-market pills he’d bought online. Nobody answered the call. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the TV remote he’d held against his ear didn’t dial out. You never would’ve guessed he was a former law student who’d been at the top of his class. I liked him. He was a nice guy and would go into the bathroom sometimes to crush and snort, even though I found that insulting and told him not to bother. Watching him bury pills in his nostrils and behave as if he were a zombie deterred me from wanting drugs and made me wonder about all the times I’d blacked out. Ashamed and embarrassed—for what, I didn’t know—I decided, from then on, I always wanted to be in control of my body and only forget moments and information the natural way, from a lack of brain power.

Two weeks after my new friend had dropped his duffel bags on the floor and unrolled his sleeping bag, I started working at a tire shop, a large chain throughout the Northeast. I knew very little about cars. Before working there, the last time I’d changed a tire was when I was sixteen, and a few hours later, the lugnuts fell off. At eighty m.p.h., the car’s front end dropped to one side and ground a rotor against the pavement. Sparks shot out from the wheel well. My poor Dodge Shadow. It took some clever maneuvering to halt without crashing it into a guardrail or sideswiping any cars in the next lane. We were stoned, me and two other kids, and screamed as if we were mimicking a scene from a film. The runaway tire bounced ahead of us and landed in a snowy ditch off the interstate, probably a quarter-mile from where we’d stopped. When the cop who arrived minutes later asked what happened, we laughed. 

I started working at the tire shop just before Christmas: not a great time to be a laborer in the tire business if you live in New England. But I didn’t own a car, couldn’t return to bartending, and needed a job. During my interview, once the manager established I had a heartbeat and working limbs, he asked if I could start training immediately. I couldn’t. I needed steel-toed boots and the money to buy them. So I started two days later and worked eighty-five hours the first week, which was funny, considering the company has a policy that new hires in the shop are not allowed to work more than four hours a day for the first week. Why?—because the repetitive motions required to change tires demand positions in which your body should never be. Over and over, you bend and squat, reach and pry, lift and strain, bang your head, and jam your thumb. Oh, and you have to move fast. There are no lunch breaks. And if you’re fortunate enough to have a manager grant you a few minutes to smoke a cigarette, you must grab a hand truck and haul seventy junk tires to the bin across the lot while you smoke. In the shop, some tires, combined with the wheels, weigh more than seventy-five pounds and can only be lifted using your back. You spend a third of your time hunched like a question mark. The company preaches safety and forces you to watch outdated videos, yet lifting with proper technique and using the buddy system would only slow you down, and you have to keep those numbers up. If you’re not cranking out at least ten cars in an eight-hour shift, expect a visit to the principal's office. 

I worked no less than sixty hours each week during that winter. The upside was I had no time to ponder my crumby life and was too tired outside work to do anything but watch television and eat Hot Pockets. Once accustomed to the job, I would do twenty cars in ten hours. We were timed. Four tires were supposed to be finished in forty minutes. I averaged thirty minutes a vehicle because trucks slowed me down. Most people worked in pairs and still needed fifty minutes to finish four tires. I was on a mission. Perhaps I was punishing myself. You have to be insane or newly sober to work that hard for ten dollars an hour. I stayed there for two years, had several raises, quit in 2019, and returned in 2021 for a six-week stint that resulted in a back injury that now limits my physical abilities. That’s another essay in itself.

Then there was my housing problem. This was the second consecutive winter I was without a home, and both evictions happened the week before Christmas, though one wasn’t my fault. Sick of my shenanigans, my mother wouldn’t shelter me full time. I’d been bouncing in and out of her house for fifteen years. Whenever my life would fall apart, I’d live there for several months, save up, and then move out and give adulthood another try. 

So, the wonderful woman that she is, she let me stay at her house a few nights a week, wash some laundry, and sleep in the guest bed. I was grateful. On the other nights, I crashed on a friend’s crusty futon in a one-bedroom apartment so small that when he was having sex with his girlfriend, I felt as though I was lying under their bed.

D. and I had worked together at a bar until mid-summer, when we were fired a week apart for being drunk at work. That fall, he would often call me from the top of a nearby parking garage, drunk and crying, and claim he was about to jump. Sleeping at his house was a terrible idea, but I had nowhere else to stay. 

On several occasions, I awakened to the sound of D. snorting coke and the giggles of his girlfriend, a relationship he would soon ruin because he was an asshole and she out of his league. His behavior, of course, irritated me. I was angry, but not at him. I didn’t expect him to behave differently because I was there. Even if I had asked him to keep the drugs and booze outside the house, he wouldn’t have agreed. Whatever. I was only peeved because he’d disrupted my sleep. No, seriously. I had to work early. So I wasn’t angry at him, just in general, which is the worst kind of anger. It’s easier to be angry when you can blame somebody. Or maybe my anger developed from pretending the drugs didn’t bother me and was then enhanced by my attempts to convince myself that all I wanted was to sleep without interruptions. Not once did he apologize, nor had I expected him to. I was just happy to have a warm place to sleep.

After three months of sleeping at D.’s on and off, I couldn’t spend another second in his company. So, in March 2018, I moved into a rooming house full of addicts and bed bugs, the same rooming house in which my new friend, the Ativan-fueled kleptomaniac, rented a room. To cook food, I used a microwave and a toaster oven. Flies raised families in the communal kitchen and would grow to the size of marbles. Each room came with a mini-fridge. Wi-Fi was included in the rent, though it rarely worked because you can’t have twenty people simultaneously using a basic internet package. Sometimes homeless people would get high in the bathroom across the hall from my room and then pass out on the floor. I often found crack pipes and needles and charred spoons forgotten on the back of the toilet or dropped on the gritty floor. Shower shoes were necessary. Drug deals happened in the building daily. Overdoses and suicide attempts were common. The police came to the house weekly and sometimes knocked on my door because they thought everybody there knew each other and that maybe I might be hiding whoever they were looking for at three a.m. There was always a lot of yelling, domestic disputes, fighting, and fire alarms. One night, somebody tossed a lit cigarette into a trash can in the second-floor bathroom and burned a hole in a wall. The firefighters were unkind. The cops were no different. If you lived in that building, you were trash and not worth niceties. The police assumed everybody living there was on parole. Despite my antipathy for living there, having the space to hide and be alone was satisfying. And being surrounded by addicts and observing their behavior had the opposite effect on me than what most people would likely expect. I was disgusted and wanted nothing to do with that lifestyle. I was determined to do better. I believed I was better. You have to believe.

As you’re aware, my memory of the past is shoddy. There’s so much I have to estimate, like how often I talked to my daughter’s mother. Maybe every two weeks or so, we chatted on the phone. Texts were frequent, I think. I tried to keep her updated on how I was managing sobriety and what I was up to and usually hinted at wanting to see my daughter yet remained patient. 

Regardless of how many leaves you’ve overturned, you can’t make somebody trust you. To rebuild trust after lying to somebody for years is complicated. It doesn’t matter how many of your lies started as truths and only later became lies, nor whether they happened maliciously or incidentally. Either way, the blatant lies will overshadow any obscurities you try to clarify to defend yourself and your intentions. Good intentions are unfulfilled promises never made. Empty.

Six months had passed since my last drink and drug. I had expected to wait several more months before seeing my daughter again. It was probably somewhere around May 2018. I met her mother downtown for a talk that, to my surprise, resulted in plans for me to attend my daughter’s first-grade graduation. Yes, that’s a thing. Maybe it was kindergarten. The memory is vague. I know I was ecstatic, but I can’t recall how I felt when seeing my daughter after ten months apart. I barely remember being at the ceremony. I’m sure I was giddy and near tears. That was the moment I’d been waiting for, and though it’s lost in the fog of my mind, what’s important is that she is here now, in the next room, while I write this.

Following the ceremony, I would see her every Sunday. Her mother would drop her off downtown, close to where I lived. I couldn’t bring her into the dope house I called home. So we’d have breakfast at a bagel shop and play War and Go Fish, then walk about downtown, visit a nearby park, and often stop into a bookstore. For two years, our Sunday routine continued, which was difficult in the colder months because I didn’t have a car and rarely had money. What finally changed our limited time together was my moving into an apartment. 

On July 1, 2020, the day the moratorium on evictions was lifted in N.H., the owner of the rooming house sold the building, and the new owner evicted everybody a week later. Thanks to money saved from unemployment, I had just enough to move into a studio apartment and buy furniture not infested with bed bugs. I bought a futon so my daughter would have a place to sleep should the occasion arise. I had not slept in the same house as her without my mother’s supervision since 2013 when she was a year old—my daughter, not my mother—and I would have to wait a while longer, too.

A year later, during the season’s first snowfall, her mother was returning home from up north, a long drive, and couldn’t be at my apartment to pick up our daughter until much later than expected. I will never forget the moment I palmed the phone’s receiver and whispered to my daughter, “You're staying.” She looked puzzled. I repeated the words. She whispered back, “Here? I’m staying, like sleeping over?” I nodded. My cheeks nearly touched my forehead. 

Since I’d moved into the apartment, she’d asked me countless times why she couldn’t sleep there. When learning remotely for a year, she attended her third-grade classes at my house and returned each evening to her mother’s house. At least once a week, while putting on her shoes, she’d say, “I don’t understand. Why can’t I stay?” I couldn’t give her a solid answer and would talk in circles until we both forgot the question. 

So her staying the night was a milestone neither of us will forget.

“Seriously?” my daughter whispered. “You’re sure?” I nodded again, listening to her mother’s voice crackle through the phone, unable to comprehend whatever she was saying because my excitement had disoriented me. My daughter pumped her fists and jumped repeatedly. She danced in circles for a moment, ran into the next room, said, “Yes, yes, yes,” and then sailed back into the kitchen and twirled, her arms raised in victory. The second I ended the phone call, I jumped around the apartment with her, shouting expressions of disbelief. 

We danced. Yes, we did. In the living room, I held my daughter’s hands and playfully danced with her while snowflakes fell like ashes and drifted by the windows. We swung our arms and moved without coordination. 

Once we calmed down, we watched a movie and ate popcorn, except I didn’t watch the movie. “This is as good as it gets,” I said. She looked at me, the glow of the TV brightening her smile. “I still can’t believe it,” she said.

I believed it. From the moment I decided to quit my old life, I believed this moment would happen. I had to because, without hope, cynicism wins, and the will to try diminishes. 

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