A little pat on the back

When I was in college I joined a sort of fraternal organization that became a very important and long-lasting influence in my life. It’s a bit different than the typical fraternities on many US college campuses; it’s a smaller group, tight-knit. Many of those guys are among my best friends to this day. I have a lot of great memories from those college days and the years since.

Almost all of those memories involve drinking. Lots of drinking.

Last night there was a big get-together in my city of members of this group, old and young. It had been over a year since I attended one of these. It was great to catch up with everyone, terrific to laugh and clown around with the guys.

And as usual, there was drinking. Lots of drinking.

But I didn’t have a drop, no one seemed to notice or care, and I still had a great time.

For that, I think, I deserve a little pat on the back. <pat pat>

Rituals

I’ve written a fair bit about ritual, tradition, and habit. They played into my drinking, and into my desire to keep drinking even when I knew it was having real negative effects on my life.

At one point a commenter asked why I couldn’t just change the ritual. My answer was (in a nutshell): then it wouldn’t be the ritual, would it? The whole point of rituals is they go on unchanged, and that’s (reflexively) why we like them.

So changing a celebratory ritual with a martini to a ritual with a diet soda just wasn’t going to work for me. I did my best to avoid the rituals that involved drinking altogether, even as I felt sad to see them go by the wayside.

Now I can look back with wonder at how easy it is for me (on most nights — not all!) to go without a drink, often without even thinking about it. And as I look back I realize: I haven’t changed the ritual. But I have developed some new ones that have nothing to do with alcohol, and maybe they are helping me?

Let me tell you about one of them. A couple months ago I went to an early morning program at my son’s school. It was sponsored by an organization called ‘All Pro Dads.’ I’m not endorsing the group; I don’t really know much about them except it was started by Tony Dungy, a famous American professional football coach who is also something of a Christian activist and speaker. Dungy identified a problem: many American fathers are not involved enough in their children’s day-to-day lives. He set out to change that by sponsoring an organization that would encourage fathers to actively seek out positive involvement with their kids.

So my son and I went to his school early one day, and join a packed hall of other fathers and kids. There was a brief guest speaker, and then there were some ‘canned’ opportunities to interact with your child: each father had to tell their child three ways in which they were proud of them, etc. And then each child had to tell their father an area in which they would like more help.

My son is five, and he said: “Daddy, you can help me with my reading.” He can’t yet read and is just starting to learn.

So I took that and ran with it. Every night when I get home from work we grab one of his ‘beginning reader books.’ You know: “Mac has a cat. Mac has a hat. The hat is on the cat.” It only takes 5 minutes or so to go through a few pages, and that is about as long as his attention span lasts. But in the 2 months we’ve been doing this he’s made amazing improvement. He is proud of himself, I’m proud of him, and I’m really happy we have developed this little ritual.

Does it substitute for drinking? Not directly. But having a new, positive ritual that doesn’t involve drinking is probably helping to reduce my tendency to want to engage in my old weekday drinking rituals. And, entirely separate from the drinking issues, it’s wonderful to have even those few extra moments to share with my son with no television or other distractions.

And now it’s got me thinking: I do still struggle more with not drinking on the weekends. Maybe I need to find a few new weekend rituals, too?