A Chefs Sobriety

works in progress

I would taste some of the wines when we where creating the wine dinner menus. I’d swish it around my mouth a little, let the flavor soak my palate and then spit it out.

I mentioned this at an AA meeting one day just to watch people‘s heads explode. I should change my sobriety date they said. But I didn‘t. I wasn‘t drinking, but I was a chef, working in the wine country, and I wasn’t about to change my career because there was alcohol around.

We did the biggest event I had ever worked at St. Francis. It would be a four-course plated dinner, with a different wine for each course for twelve hundred people. The planning and prep took months. The dinner was held in one of the gigantic barrel rooms at the winery. We hired thirty temporary cooks for the evening of the event, rented four double stack convection ovens and had four eighteen foot banquet tables lined up with five cooks on each side plating. The whole thing was pretty impressive and it made me pretty confident that I could executed whatever sized party was thrown at me. I had a life again.

Nothing will ever change how important rehab was to me, and how much it has impacted my life from then until now, but in the years since, sobriety has sometimes been an elusive goal. The reality is that it’s a slippery slope. I do enjoy having some drinks these days. Alcohol use is endemic in the restaurant business and over the years, casual drinking has crept slowly back into my life. Although it‘s never become the overwhelming issue it once was, my relationship to it is obviously complicated.

Would I be better off if I just didn’t drink at all? Probably. It’s not ruining my life or creating problems for me the way it once was, and that may sound like a cop-out, but the difference between then and now is immense. Still, the slippery slope effect happens more easily to me than to someone who‘s never been a problem drinker. When Rob died I was a mess, I drank too much to blunt my grief, but I realized after a month or so that I needed to snap out of it and take better care of myself. Snapping out of it is also something that happens to me more easily, because drink and I are old, edgy acquaintances.

Always, I know that I need to be aware of how I’m doing. Am I feeling burnt out or tired? Am I irritable or frustrated? Am I sad, scared, stuck? I’ve acquired quite a few tools in my box for when things get a bit rough, and exercise, conscious breathing, not burning myself out at work, are all part of my stay-well, don‘t-drink program.

Also, I almost never have a drink when my boys are with me. I don‘t want to model drinking, even casual drinking, in front of them. I love being around them; getting buzzed with my kids there around sounds awful. I‘m already buzzed in the best possible way just from enjoying them, teaching them, learning from them, being Dad.

On the fairly occasional times when I do have a few too many drinks after a particularly long and hard day at work, I don't find any real enjoyment or relief in it. There‘s a saying they have in Alcoholics Anonymous: ”a head full of AA will ruin your drinking forever.“ True facts. I see through excessive drinking pretty much immediately and that hasn‘t changed in all these years.

I’m far from perfect and don’t always use the tools I’ve picked up, but I’m happy, healthy, and most days that feeling of serenity I found after a lot of work in AA is still with me. I consider myself a work in progress.