The Weekend I Stopped Drinking: No Rock Bottom, Just Real Life

The Weekend I Stopped Drinking: No Rock Bottom, Just Real Life

I didn’t stop drinking because I hit some dramatic rock bottom. I stopped because life hit me...hard, and I needed to make space to deal with it all.

It was Thanksgiving weekend. A time that usually means food, family, and some version of controlled chaos. But that year, it unraveled differently.

My mom, who’d been hosting Thanksgiving my entire life, had been secretly declining for months. On the day before the holiday, my dad called and quietly told me the truth: she couldn’t even get out of a chair. Hosting was out of the question. So, I packed up an entire cooked Thanksgiving meal and hauled it across town, trying to hold it all together while everything around me felt like it was falling apart.

At the same time, my oldest son was deep in a toxic relationship. The night before Thanksgiving, his girlfriend kept him up all night in some emotionally manipulative spiral because she wasn’t going to be with him that day. He was exhausted, heartbroken, and drinking to cope.

My youngest son was in his senior year of high school. I was doing my best to be present, to soak up every memory, knowing how quickly he’d be off to college. I didn’t want to miss a second.

And then there was work. A full-time job that didn’t pause just because life got heavy.

That weekend, we called 911 twice for my mom. My oldest son’s situation hit a new low. My youngest was trying to be the glue for all of us, but that’s never supposed to be the job of a 17-year-old.

In the middle of all of this, I had one very small realization: I couldn’t control most of what was happening in my life, but I could control one thing. I could stop drinking.

So I did.

There wasn’t a dramatic goodbye to alcohol. No big announcement. Just a quiet decision to take something off my plate so I could handle what was still on it.

And I’m so glad I did, because that was just the beginning of this complicated, exhausting, and wildly eye-opening phase of midlife. Caring for aging parents. Navigating kids becoming adults. Working. Worrying. And still trying to find yourself in the middle of it all.

Removing alcohol didn’t make life easier. But it made me more capable of handling it.

And that’s been everything.