Learning to Stay in the Story

The other day I caught my daughter watching a video captured on my husband’s phone. She Airdropped the phone to our television mounted on our living room wall. She had been looking for a recent basketball game she played in and got lost in the weeds of nostalgia. She was going back watching old family footage.

I was in the other room folding laundry and I could hear the same part being re-wound and played again. Curious as to why she kept playing the same small segment over and over, I walked into the living room. She didn’t know I was right there, watching her watch it. She had a sideways smile, the kind that slowly creeps up when you see something oddly familiar. A spark of recognition peppered her eyes as she glanced up at me, noticing my attention on her.

“Mom, come here. Sit down and watch this with me. You look sooooooo different.”

As she toggled the clip back to the beginning with her thumb, I squeezed in beside her on the couch to watch.

The video clip was only a few minutes long. It was from 2019. In it, we had music playing. Alexa was spitting out our favorite family tunes on shuffle. Both my kids were there, ages 11 and 5. You could hear my husband and my sister-in-law laughing as my husband filmed the moment. We were hanging out. Laughing and dancing in the living room.

This behavior by my daughter isn’t unusual for her. She likes to scroll through my phone and look for videos of our family, particularly the ones where she’s younger, carefree and utterly adorable. She doesn’t really say why she wants to watch these, but I see something in her eyes when she does.

And I’ve also noticed when I watch some of these videos, my eyes want to turn away. Because memories slide in. Shame starts tapping, insisting on a front row seat in my mind’s catalog of how I chose to spend those days while parenting.

Watching this video on full screen, in the here and now, I hear it in my voice instantly. This is me on a Friday night with a few drinks running through my blood stream. I take my turn cutting up the rug. I insist on dancing with my dog while shuffling on my knees. I tug my son’s arm to come join me. He reluctantly does. I am not sloppy drunk. The adults in the room are in that sweet spot of buzzed just enough.

This short clip showed me just enough to remember. It reminded me of how I chased just enough over and over again.

Just enough to let loose and let the steam of the week out by dancing and laughing.

Just enough to forget the parts of myself I didn’t want to feel.

Just enough to convince myself that this looseness, this glorious laughter was proof I was doing fine.

But watching it now, clear eyed and awake to all of it, I remember the tiny details of those days that got stitched into the fabric of my parenting. The way my smile stretched a little too wide, rearranging my priorities. The way that smile would change with a couple more drinks. The way my daughter, five years old and full of light, might glance up at me checking to see which version of her mother she was going to get that night.

And sitting there beside her on the couch, present-day me felt a familiar tightening in my chest. That quiet, unwelcome whisper of you missed so much. You weren’t fully there.

But then she nudged me with her elbow, eyes still on the screen, head nodding in the direction of her family displayed on the wall.

“Look how happy we were,” she said, almost in a sigh, as if she were remembering a dream she once lived in.

And something in me cracked open. In the crack, the shame suddenly had space to dissipate. In its place came recognition. My eyes could see her eyes now, clearer. Truer. And the truth of that moment is that my daughter wasn’t studying my face for signs of the things I fear she remembers. She wasn’t replaying the clip to analyze the presence of any slurred words or my loud cackling laugh. She was watching it because, to her, it was magic. A tiny, preserved universe where her family danced and the world felt simple and safe. Even if for just a song or two.

She saw joy. Enough joy to want to keep rewinding it.

I saw evidence. Signs pointing to all the ways I didn’t show up as the mom I wanted to be. Enough evidence to want to look away. Delete that part of the story.

The thing is - both are true. And both of those things can sit tightly, snuggled together on a couch looking back at what we had.

Only one of us is still punishing me for it.

Realizing this, I took a breath, let my shoulders drop, and allowed myself to lean into her. Lean back into her joy. I borrowed some of hers. I allowed myself to see what she saw, even if only for a moment.

Just enough joy to remember that healing sometimes looks like sitting on a couch with your daughter, watching an old version of yourself, and choosing to stay. Not delete. Not fast forward. Rewind and remind myself, I was enough. Even then.

With some time and sturdier sober legs, I can look back and admit that it wasn’t all bad. Maybe it’s worth a rewrite. Distance is helping me revise the same story I looped myself through again and again. The one with shame as my lead character.

The truth is, sometimes when I’m alone, I do what my daughter does with the phone. I go back and watch some of these clips of a family from long ago. I walk that tightrope of nostalgia and regret. That particular cocktail is hard to metabolize.

And this is the part that is hard for me to write. If I’m being perfectly honest, I have to look at this part. Alcohol did serve me in ways that I can’t access as easily these days. It did energize me in the evening after a day of hard work on the job. It did excite me enough, even if it was just one or two glasses, to show up tap dancing for my family.

And that’s the part my daughter was pointing a finger at with “Mom, you look sooooo different.” Because what she saw was a looseness in me that has been trying to find its way back to me here in sobriety. Sitting there with her, watching that old version of me dance across the screen, I realized something I hadn’t let myself consider. That looseness wasn’t the alcohol. Not entirely. It was me. A part of me I’d buried under years of self‑critique. A part of me that still exists, waiting patiently for permission to show me some new moves.

My daughter wasn’t mourning who I used to be. She was reminding me of who I still am.

The gut of sobriety isn’t just about not drinking. It’s about telling the truth in real time. It’s about widening the lens enough to hold the whole truth: the joy and the ache, the missteps and the magic, the mother I was and the mother I am still becoming. Maybe “sooooo different” isn’t a loss. Maybe it’s an evolution.

What if that looseness I thought I’d lost is finding its way back to me, not through a substance or in a glass, but through moments like this. Moments where I stay. Moments where I see myself the way she sees me.

Enough. Still enough. Always enough.