When I was a kid, my dad liked to let me pretend I was in charge of things. He’d say, “Who’s bigger, me or you?” And I’d puff out my chest and say I was. Those were the rules: Whoever was biggest got to be in charge.
My dad is one of the most gregarious, happy-go-lucky, energetic people in the world. It seems like I can’t go anywhere in Omaha without him running into an old college friend, a golfing buddy, or a drinking buddy. At sporting events, supermarkets, bars, restaurants, and golf clubs across town, he’s known ubiquitously as “Georgie,” which is what his friends shout when he enters almost any room. He’s a master of hilarious, mixed-up idioms — his mouth works faster than his brain. I can’t remember how many times he told me, while I was growing up, that it was all “bridge under the water.” My father is one of the warmest, most loving men I have ever met. He is also, like me, a lifelong drinker and an alcoholic.
I come from a long, proud line of Nebraska German drinking stock on my father’s side. We’re beer and baseball folks, and we’re proud of that. My dad’s side of the family are the kind of white Midwesterners who bring growlers of their own hand-brewed lagers and ales to every family function. To be a Gehringer is to drink early, often, and with aplomb. I’ll never forget how mad my mother was or how funny I thought it was when a couple of my cousins snuck a purseful of Fireball shooters into my sister’s wedding. They were plastered long before she said her vows.
The kind of drinking I was exposed to as a child was, by and large, celebratory and social. It seemed normal and natural. If my family was having a good time, they were drinking, and if they were drinking, they were having a good time. That’s how I started drinking too, in high school. I drank to have a good time with friends. In college, I drank to have a good time. After college, I drank to have a good time, to celebrate. And before long, I was celebrating every day. For most of the last two years, drinking was the only thing in my life that felt celebratory.
I came out as a trans woman toward the end of October of 2016, right before Donald Trump was elected president. I won’t attempt to contextualize that moment. If you’re reading this, you know what it felt like then, and what it feels like now. Suffice it to say that around that time, I started drinking hard. A lot of people I knew did.
Now five months sober, I’m still learning and re-learning who I am. Until five months ago, I had been drinking heavily every day since a few months before I came out. It’s deeply bizarre to have been out for almost two years and to have almost no memory of what that time was like. I feel like I’ve had to learn what it was like to live as a woman twice. The first time, I forgot.
Quitting drinking has been a process of constant foreclosure. There are spaces, conversations, and entire relationships that I, by virtue of my sobriety, no longer have access to, or no longer feel comfortable engaging in. Part of what has made getting sober and staying sober so difficult for me has been accepting the fact that every part of my life, every relationship that was predicated in any way on alcohol, must now either change or end. And, aside from my relationship with myself, no relationship in my adult life has been more predicated on my drinking than my relationship with my parents.
I came out to my parents blackout drunk on the phone at almost midnight on a random late-October night. The first time I had a candid conversation with my parents about my pronouns was over drinks at a dive bar in New Orleans. Almost every candid conversation I’ve had with my parents about being trans has been over drinks. Over the last two years, almost every candid conversation I’ve had with anyone about anything has been over drinks.
Like many trans people, I often feel like I’m disappointing my parents just by being who I am. To their credit and to my deep and unending gratitude, they’ve been nothing but loving and supportive, if obviously confused. It often feels as though my parents want to love me, but that they don’t always quite know how. The simple fact of the matter is that we live very different lives, and that it’s hard for us to find common ground. My parents are happy, slightly left-of-center mainstream suburban Americans with careers and mortgages, and I’m a weirdo queer and trans leftist artist. I love my parents and they love me, but aside from that, there’s not too much that we all love.
It stings to realize that what I thought was a common interest in alcohol is actually a common illness. The single saddest thing about getting sober for me is that I can’t get drunk with my dad anymore. Despite having no interest in poetry, and having, by his own admission, read fewer than five books in the last five years, my father is relentlessly proud of me and reads everything I write. When my first book came out, he probably sold more copies than I did, talking it up nonstop to everyone he knew, and even sending me pictures of friends who had purchased copies. And I too, am proud of him — so proud that I put a photo of him on the cover of that book, because I couldn’t think of a better way to visually explain who I am and who I want to be.
I’m writing this as I prepare to return to Nebraska to spend Thanksgiving with my immediate family. For the first time in my life as an out trans woman, I’ll be sober at a Gehringer family holiday celebration. I’ll be sober, and I’ll be there, and I’m hoping that’s enough; that caring enough about each other to physically show up in each other’s lives is all the common ground we need. Even if I can’t get drunk with my dad, what I’ve been realizing is that, while it’s painful, our common illness can still be common ground.
As I have continued to wrestle with my alcoholism and my sobriety, a new space has opened in my relationship with my parents. We’re talking more, having conversations now that I actually remember, and that I want to remember. Recently, while talking on the phone with my father, I was able to say, out loud, to him, for the first time in my life, “I’m an alcoholic.” He said the same thing back to me, another first, another step. Just as my father and I share the pain of generation-to-generation alcoholism, we share something far greater. We share solidarity.
The loneliness of sobriety is one of its strangest, most painful paradoxes. When your entire social life revolves around drinking, as mine did, and you decide to stop drinking, your social life evaporates. It’s much harder to drown out the voice in the back of your head that says, “Just one couldn’t hurt,” when there’s no one else around. I am so grateful that now, more than ever before, I have my father to talk to. Though we’re dealing with it in different ways, we’re fighting the same fight, running a lifelong tandem race. Our relationship has always been loving, but it has never before been so intimate. My father has become my friend.
Tomorrow I’ll return home for Thanksgiving. I’ll sit at the table I sat at as a child, though I’m much bigger now, much more in charge of my own life. My parents will fumble with my pronouns and my name. My dad will fumble all his words. His mouth works faster than his brain. If I’m being honest, mine does, too. Regardless of what we do or do not say, what awkward silences remain unfilled, we will meet over the same table we’ve both sat at every year. Probably I’ll be sipping water, or sparkling grape juice if I’m feeling festive. Probably my dad will sip a beer. We’ll have a good time, and we’ll celebrate, in our respective ways. We’re as different as can be, but at that table we are just the same.
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