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Tracy K. Smith, a former U.S. poet laureate, is the author of numerous books, most recently “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Free-Captives-Plea-American-Soul/dp/059353476X" target=_blank>To Free the Captives: A Plea for the American Soul</a>,” from which this essay is adapted.

When my children were no longer infants but still quite young, the arc of each of my days, as I’d jokingly sometimes say, was: coffee, coffee, coffee, coffee, wine, wine, wine, wine. Which is a way of admitting: In the time I’m remembering, and for reasons I am seeking only now to recall, my living had become an attempt at forgetting.

The arc of my days, as I sometimes allowed myself to see, was to take great joy in waking, feeding and dressing my children, then handing them over to the preschool or the sitter or whomever I could trust to take them.

At which point I’d go to campus and teach. Or sit at my desk overlooking the yard and write. Sometimes I would get back into bed with a book. Then I’d welcome them home late in the day, momentarily filled with the self they would set back instantly on nibbling away.

Remembering this is remembering a time when I so desperately loved myself that I longed to have her back, wept sometimes thinking of where she had gone.

Funny, but what I most pined for, when motherhood was new, were all the ways I’d once sundered myself, all the ways I’d once managed, even without understanding it, to give myself away. To what? To poetry. To men for whom I rendered my body a totem. To love and hurt. To dancing. To error.

But now I was a mother. I swelled, stretched, tore, sagged, shrank, slept less, grazed standing up. I went to bed and woke early, like an old lady. I didn’t want to, but there was so much to do.

Awake early anyway, I put in more time. I paid ransom to recover my original body. Running miles at the gym, I fought myself back to what it was I remembered being. Then I had twins, and it all happened again. My knees made strange creaking sounds, like a historic house.

I accepted entropy. I was no longer 30, no longer 40. It was only upon bumping up against my reflection — it appeared startled, like a ghost, but also tired, dim, puffy, gray — that I realized I’d been holding out hope of being 30 again, 40 again someday.

And then one morning my husband and I were pressured to withdraw our twin sons from a private nursery school because of their classroom behavior — behavior that soon (but not yet, not in the time I’m remembering) would lead us into community with other families <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/04/07/autism-awareness-day-not-enough-steps-for-inclusion-acceptance/" target=_blank>living with autism</a>. Soon (but not yet) this setback would be revealed as a blessing. But in the moment, I felt hurt.

Because my sons were observed for two short days and rejected as problematic, as unteachable. Because the situation had been handled with what felt like brusque disregard. Because the situation had called their worth into question. Because I couldn’t help wondering how much of the director’s dismissal of their potential had to do with race.

At that stage in their acquaintance with the imperfect world, my young sons melted down several times each day. They flared into hysterical need. Their bodies stood up and hurled themselves back down. In the silence after, I’d feel floodlit by judgment.

In situations like these, if a stranger asked if there was anything she could do, what I heard was, What do you think you’re doing, bringing this chaos here? Often, her children stood watching, too, White and mute. Their <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/04/04/hidden-brilliance-autistic-children-koegel-lazebnik/" target=_blank>scrutiny</a> silently hustled us along, demanded we be on our way. Where? Where did they insist we were going?

I am a Black woman married to a White man.

The happy White families cycling past our house on weekend mornings, the ones trailing each other in descending-size order, laughing, a dutiful queue — when they’d cross my path, my whole life wanted to hide. Even if I knew those families, even if I waved, smiling, the sight of them was a reminder that something about my family refused to blend in.

My daughter raced ahead. Her brothers shouted to her to wait up. One boy insisted that his father mitigate some rift. The other cried: high, held notes trembling out like a soprano’s, plump tears leaping from his cheeks. Each a fountain of feeling.

To step out of our house was to play roulette with a thousand urgencies. Chief, I believed, was the need to be seen; next was the need to be heard. I was always made to feel, by our drama, that we were transgressing a proscribed border.

What feeling, even now, does the sight of these orderly White families incite in my husband? Does he notice with what authority they claim the road, and how the road can be seen to oblige? Does he notice the youngest there wobbling behind on the smallest, the most gestural of bikes, and understand nothing will befall him? That beyond a doubt, beyond dispute, everything will make sure he survives?

And if these thoughts occur to my husband, as they occur to me, do they cause his conscience to cloud over, angry at himself for begrudging some deserving child the certainty that he will live out his childhood in safety? The certainty that everything in our neighborhood, our nation, our history has been laid out in such a way to deliver that child to wherever he may seek to go?

Sometimes at night, I ask my White husband to see things for a minute through the eyes of his Black wife. To hold our children in his mind and admit that something, some specter or ghost, has been let loose to circle them, to follow children like ours wherever they might go.

For years I have watched him, born Free, cradle his children’s freedom: different from what has been allotted to him. There is nothing he hasn’t agreed to take from himself and give to them. If the world will let him.

But the pain I feel on the morning of the preschool’s decision activates the reserve of pain amassed over the course of my whole life anytime I am preemptively classified, anytime I am judged as threatening or unworthy of bother because of my race.

Some small part of the concern I ought rightfully to reserve for my sons is displaced by the anger and hurt hovering around my own untended wounds.

That night, after work, I muddle an orange peel with sugar and add ice, bourbon, a splash of soda. A lone sour cherry, lifted from its syrup. The fragrant, bitter warmth restores the boundaries barring any single anger, grief or regret from aligning forces with any other.

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I drank before I became a mother, didn’t I? I had a long life with wine, often starting when the sun was bright, sometimes talking with a friend over a dragged-out lunch, but also often enough at home at my desk, or sitting by the window looking out.

Yes. But I drank more concertedly, with greater fervency — as if not to drink was a form of suffering — only after I became a mother.

I drank because drinking afforded me the tiniest window of time within which I might be justified in resenting my children for needing me.

I drank because drinking was an acceptable form of self-pity.

I drank because loving my children made everything about me larger. And I was told, and dutifully believed, that I should aspire to be small.

I drank. Because the <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/08/02/angela-garbes-post-pandemic-covid-alcohol-drugs-sobriety/" target=_blank>vocabulary of alcohol</a> made all of this seem like what it was not.

I drank. Because all of this, which I would now call alcoholism, was, when I was drinking, made to seem adventurous, sexy, fun.

The alcoholism I hid rejiggered my understanding of what it was that I grieved. It told me that joy was composed chiefly of pleasure. It told me that power was a commendable aim. Even for only a short time, and for power’s sake alone.

I’m reminded of how we know better about any number of things but keep doing them anyway, because they are easy or, in the moment, advantageous. Knowing better but acting as if we don’t is a pact we renew over and again from context to context.

One day we’ll make things better; we’ll suck it up and put in the work. But not until we’ve wrung all we can out of this habitual manner of making things worse.

Before I could name, claim or accept my sons’ autism — to be the mother it insisted I become — I told myself it was something I could run from, that they’d mellow with age, that I need only heed the voices assuring me (often enough, over wine) that my sons were wonderful, brilliant, perfect as they were.

As if it needed to be one or the other. As if learning to mirror at home the support they were receiving in school was a burden I could delay until maybe one day their neurodivergence would simply go away. Because it was easier, I thought, to sit on my stool at my kitchen bar (it was an island, technically, but I knew why I was there) and indulge a farce.

In the first dream about my drinking, I am standing at a microphone addressing an audience. Try as I might, I can’t help slurring my words. People I know in real life sit in the audience. After the presentation is over, something unspoken prevents them from making eye contact with me.

The second dream about my drinking begins on the morning of the day my reputation is instantly and irreversibly ruined. I can’t for the life of me figure out what I have done, and nobody will tell me. The dream is permeated by the clear sense that whatever has befallen me is my own fault.

Still, I kept drinking. I began to suspect there was a question I needed to ask myself: Isn’t it time to give this up?

I lived for a while working up the courage to ask, denying it was a question to which I already knew the answer. Standing alone in the kitchen one night, sipping a glass of wine while my young children bathed themselves, the question drifted again into frame, and I looked away in shame.

Ferdinando Scianna

Walking lately in Harvard Square, I catch sight of a paper notice taped to a historic marker sign, which reads something like this:

The City of Cambridge acknowledges that this historic marker excludes the history of Indigenous people in this place. A new sign is being made to correct this harmful omission.

I first notice it walking back to my car. And something leaps up inside of me, an unknown alacrity. This is correct, it says. But it says more. This acknowledgment — this admission — stirs up a shame that is not mine alone but that claims me. This notice announces an intent to help lift some small portion of that shame away.

The pact of consenting to something that serves only a few, and accepting it as if it serves all, as if it is the only truth — knowing better but acting as if we don’t — we do this every day, without thinking, without acknowledging the cost, or wanting to.

Thirty years ago, I would have walked by this historic marker and noticed, or not, that it sought to instill in me the belief that the Puritan English had built this place, and that proof of this fact was their names on every building and body of water and street. Reading, I would have accepted such a narrative as truth, not thinking about whom it sought to erase, not asking whom it made small.

But it made me small. Even if my name had been Winthrop or Mather or Standish, such a narrative would have held me, too, in a place far from the fact of what I’d done, or failed to do.

What is sobriety if not accountability, facing plainly what has or has not been done?

Can I tell you a story about what happens every night in bars and clubs and at parties where drunken decisions are made? And as I tell it, will you agree to direct your gaze out farther, past the characters my words conjure, past the bar where you imagine they drink, past even the place where you sit now, reading? Farther and farther still, until what you see is no longer a pair of friends on a specific occasion, but the body — the common history — of a nation?

One night, two friends might sit drinking together until things haze over and one friend says a thing or the other friend does a thing or both together make a choice they know in their rightful minds they ought not to. Harm ensues. Someone is scorned or handled or stolen from. And the one friend there beside the other, consenting in silence, is caught somehow, too, in the shame of that harm.

Both go home. Each sleeps it off, then wakes to a vague knowing, acknowledged the next day with a shrug, a choking up the pair covers with hiccups of laughter. It is a pact. It binds them to one another. It is heavy. Together they slump to support it. If one puts it down, the weight of it will fall to the other. So they shoulder it, they soldier on. Over time between them there are many more such nights. Eventually, the whole fabric of their friendship grows knotted with compromise …

Do you see it? Can you make it out? The borders and treaties, the acts and pacts, the decisions, deflections and denials? The growing body of history? The integrity of a nation? And how essential sobriety ought to be to such an enterprise?

Instants

In my particular case, there is an intervention.

It is a Sunday in August. I am sitting at the picnic table in our yard when it occurs to me how nice it would be to be sitting here with a glass of ice melting into a perfectly prepared old-fashioned. How the first sip would promise so much. A reason to close my eyes and open them again slowly, as if I have been tipped back into water and lifted gently up, baptized, unburdened of responsibility. A momentary lightening.

But — something is wrong. The taste is flat, like bonfire ash. An affront. So the drink is tossed. And made again. But again, the second time, the outcome is the same.

I am angry, as if a joke is being played. But by whom? I try, instead, a glass of white wine, which will be cool, clean on the tongue.

I can’t even swallow this time. I lean over the sink and spit, at which point I admit the question — so patient it has been these long years, circling back around gently at times, imploring me to understand what I have long understood without wanting to: Isn’t it time to give this up?

Yes, I answer. Yes, as this habit I have loved — this need to which I’ve cleaved for most of my adult life — is hauled away. I thought I would feel robbed of something, bereaved. But I am relieved. I am eased of what I have been, perhaps since the beginning, afraid to call a burden.

Be it personal or collective, sobriety is accountability. Facing plainly what must, or must not any longer, be done.

When I think back now to why I drank, and what my drinking helped me to ignore or deny, what comes to mind are much more recent exchanges:

The student who wrote, in 2020, to say he was terrified by the ambulances admitting his neighbors to the covid ward. What he meant, I believe, is that to be Black in his city, and this nation, is to be prevented from forgetting that death knows your name. An ambulance, a police van, a square of sidewalk in the light of day, all might reveal themselves to be conveyances of death, if you look like him, like his neighbors, like me.

And the student petitioning that same spring for return to campus, to flee the house and the town where their gender expression put them in danger. What they meant, I believe, is that there are people, some of whom we love and who profess concern for us, whose scrutiny hustles us into hiding, labels us a threat, punishes us and others like us who fail to see the world — to see ourselves — their way.

Most emphatically, my mind returns to the handful of students who mustered the courage to address a gathering of faculty (all those aging faces in the Zoom screen, by turns moved, indifferent, perturbed), who risked retaliation to tell us the ways we were failing. And how we might change. My mind returns to the outrage of some few colleagues who made it their work to double down defensively, to reinforce and wield their amassed authority. Because they were Free. And also, too, because those students, though wise, though courageous, though correct, were merely Freed.

Freedom isn’t a thing to be held or hoarded; its purpose is to be passed forward, given away. Freedom is an impossibility in places where the most one is encouraged to seek and guard jealously is power, permission, authority. Freedom is held captive in places like these.

How quickly everything seems changed, once you realize to what extent everything must change.

One Easter Monday, a 30-year-old pine uproots itself in heavy wind and collapses across our driveway, narrowly missing our house, most of our other trees and our two cars. It falls onto the only place where it is safe to fall — in the opposite direction in which it had long been listing — wallops the patch of driveway where our boys sometimes haul each other in a red wagon. After, we stand watching from the front windows, shocked, retroactively panicked.

Later, watching the crew remove the fallen tree, I remember how much I love my life. How grateful — no, how lucky — I am for the soul-enlarging struggle afforded me by my children.

All the ways my children — who hold me back from losing myself to comfort and the vanity of authority, the very things alcohol once urged me to guard as my life’s chief currency — all the ways they and the other people’s children entrusted briefly to my care continue to free me. All the ways they allow me to fortify my own freedom, bounded though it is, by passing it to them.

The earth-pounding thud of that tree when it fell felt, from the back of the house, like a faraway catastrophe. Like across town, somebody else’s life had been pounded flat.

But it was my life. And what had befallen it was not catastrophe.

Tracy K. Smith

Howard University, BA in Broadcast Journalism

Charla Freeland is an audio producer for The Washington Post. She was previously a producer for WAMU's 1A and SiriusXM’s nonpartisan political news channel, POTUS. 

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Drinking held me captive to my past. Here’s what set me free.

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