As A Child Of An Alcoholic, It’s Brutal To Watch My Kid Learn To Drink

Being a child of an alcoholic f*cks with your idea of what's "normal" drinking.

I have no real sense of "healthy" drinking except, like many people, I believe my own way is best. I rarely have more than one, and almost never more than two. I only drink socially. A good friend who is sober tells me it's bizarre how disciplined I am, like someone who takes a bite out of a candy bar and then puts it down.

But see, I grew up with a dad who, once he had one beer, could not stop until he stumbled at best and blacked out at worst.

Dad is sober now — he joined AA while I was in college and has decades of sobriety under his belt. Probably to no one's surprise, I did not drink during college and didn't drink in my 20s, either. I didn't drink until I was in my 30s with kids. It's not that motherhood drove me to drink, but motherhood was the first time I felt like I needed one drink to loosen up.

This is all to say that my ideas about drinking are clouded in emotion and judgment. So now that I have a 22-year-old who is not just drinking but who loves drinking, I am kind of a mess about it.

When they were a teen, I talked about how one drink is good and two is plenty. I said it like a mantra and demonstrated it in real life, so I hoped both my kids would either do as I say or as I did, since they were one and the same. They saw my now-sober friend at her worst, and we helped watch her dogs and kids while she was in rehab. I hoped that they internalized that lesson, too.

But here's where I get a little blamey. My husband does not count drinks, and though he is far from an alcoholic, he can get really happy on any given evening — meaning most evenings, honestly.

I am judgy as hell about it, and I know he doesn't come close to understanding that it's triggering for me to watch someone finish a whole bottle of wine and then look for another. Our 22-year-old, who graduated college recently, now lives with us and joins him. Every night.

We've somehow raised his drinking buddy.

My kid's significant other lives with us, too, and he is my match, a one-drink guy who would rather not feel like sh*t in the morning. I stupidly hope that our shining example will be a beacon to the others, but that is just me feeling smug and self-righteous.

The truth is, my eldest and my husband look alike and are temperamentally like twins. My husband has to assure me, over and over again, that it is completely normal for 20-somethings to drink bad booze and plenty of it. When we both read the recent New York Times essay "Drinking With Kids," my husband was like, "Exactly."

Per that essay, I am trying to be patient and just wait out the years when drinking is a delightfully dumb sport. I didn't go through that phase, so it is foreign and scary to me, but that doesn't mean it isn't normal.

Meanwhile, is it wrong that I love that my youngest child, a 19-year-old hypochondriac who won't take Advil unless a doctor says so, is not touching alcohol? If my husband gets his drinking buddy, I want my moderation mate. This parenting thing is brutal, and it makes me crave a salty margarita tonight. But just one.