In a year, the only real dicey interaction came during dinner with a parent of my kids' friend. He offered wine. I declined, lifting the water glass to indicate it was enough. A little later came another offer. Then another. Then he pointedly asked, "But, you do drink, right?" I told him that I had drunk enough.

And that's the truth. Especially during the pandemic, alcohol had become a crutch to give chapters to the days that only seemed to rotate against whether the sun or moon was shining outside. But, even before, drinking had become an extension of a hobby, a way to alleviate my innate shyness, or a way to kill the boredom of sitting at extended family functions.

It's been a year since I stopped drinking, and it's not the alcohol I miss exactly. It's the easy way that alcohol allowed me to break the tensions of life, or even the monotony. Two quick shots or half a bottle of wine would guarantee a different sense of lightness to the sun shining through the kitchen as I start fixing dinner.

However, that lightness would crumble into the darkness as the drinking wouldn't stop with dinner, but through dinner, and after. It would then, in the days after, amplify depression, bringing clouds of ill humor that would be fixed, again, with a few beers. But when I could track the rollercoaster of highs and lows and realized that the lows were more of my doing from drinking than I wanted to admit, that reliance made me uncomfortable and even ashamed. But that shame was waved away from others because we live in a culture that is soaked in insidious allowances to drown out life with the easy fix of alcohol.

It's Wine O'clock. It's Mommy's Little Helper. It's a drink, or five, with The Girls.

I even could wave away the idea of toxicity of alcohol — I'm an adult and can have a vice if I want to — but was stopped cold by reading the idea of how alcohol stole my agency in Holly Whitaker's "Quit Like a Woman." There are so many situations where we, as women, lose our agency and sense of self, including during motherhood. Why should I give it further away to something I drink? Good question.

And, as is a trope of motherhood, was a reliance on alcohol something I wanted to model for my children?

It's strange; alcohol is the only drug you have to explain to people why you're not using it. It's been especially strange since cannabis has become legalized in New Mexico. There have been plenty of complaints about cannabis stores opening near homes and cries of, "But what about the children? How do we explain all these stores to our children?"

To which I counter: No one complains about all the alcohol advertising my children are exposed to in the grocery store or during commercials.

I miss drinking on the porch with my husband, scaring canvassers and solar salespeople with unbottled enthusiasm. I miss the ease of a social lubricant during business mixers with people who think they are more interesting than they are. I don't miss dropping cash without question on a special bottle of liquor or routine six-packs. I don't miss being told by my body that I am no longer in my 20s.

Let's be real, too: I really hoped that quitting drinking would be a near-immediate way to lose weight. That, ladies and gents, is a lie. (Spoiler: It's weightlifting and eating less.)

However, the real journey has been sitting with the negative emotions that arose in waves during the year without an easy way out. Those emotions and waves of discomfort are a part of who I am, and getting to know that part of me, without alcohol as a buoy against that sea inside, makes it worth it to continue to decline those drinks, one day at a time.

Cassie McClure is a writer, millennial, and unapologetic fan of the Oxford comma. She can be contacted at [email protected]. To find out more about Cassie McClure and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Jernej Graj at Unsplash