Trust in Early Sobriety: When Your Word Means Nothing Yet

Rebuilding credibility one kept promise at a time

My daughter stopped believing me somewhere between the third canceled pick-up and the morning I couldn’t remember putting her to bed. I noticed the shift in her eyes before I got sober—the way she’d say “okay, Mom” in that flat voice that meant she’d already made a backup plan.

I got sober carrying a specific kind of debt. The money I owed could be paid back eventually, the apologies could be made, but the trust I’d broken didn’t have a repayment plan. My daughters had learned, through repetition, that my promises expired the moment something more appealing came along. Usually a bottle.

Sofia was six when I got sober. Old enough to remember. Maya was three. Young enough that her memories would be feelings more than facts, but feelings that would shape everything. I wanted to believe that getting sober would fix what I’d broken, that my recovery would immediately restore what my drinking had destroyed. My sponsor told me the truth I didn’t want to hear: trust builds slowly. It breaks fast.

The Weight of Empty Promises

Promises came easy when I was drinking. I’ll be there. I won’t forget. This time will be different. I believed myself—that’s what made it worse. I meant every word in the moment. Then the moment passed. The wine stayed. My daughters learned to expect nothing because nothing was what I reliably gave them.

The weight was heavier because I’m Latina. In my community, family comes first.

Always.

Mothers who drink, who put themselves before their kids—we don’t talk about those mothers except in whispers. I knew what people said at family gatherings when I wasn’t there, the way the conversation would pause when I walked into a room. I was supposed to be the foundation, and instead I was the fault line.

When I got sober, I wanted to announce that everything would be different now. I wanted credit for finally doing what I should have been doing all along. Recovery doesn’t work that way. My daughters didn’t owe me gratitude for being sober. They owed me caution, which they’d earned through experience.

Small Promises, Smaller Failures

My sponsor told me to start small. Smaller than I thought mattered. Show up when I said I would. Pick them up on time. Be present for dinner. Don’t promise what I can’t deliver. Grand gestures could wait—I needed to prove I could manage Tuesday.

Even the small promises felt enormous. I’d promise Sofia I’d help with her homework after dinner. Then I’d spend the meal anxious. What if something came up? What if I forgot? What if I failed her again? The fear of breaking my word almost paralyzed me more than the drinking had.

I failed anyway. I stayed sober—that wasn’t the failure. But I was late. I forgot things. I snapped when I was overwhelmed. Not drinking failures, but failures nonetheless. My daughters noticed each one.

It took me months to understand: perfection wasn’t the goal. Accountability was. When I messed up—and I did, regularly—I had to acknowledge it. “I’m sorry I was late. I should have left earlier. I’ll do better.” No excuses about traffic or meetings or how hard early sobriety was. Just the truth and a commitment to try again.

The Validation They Needed

My therapist helped me understand something I’d been getting wrong. I kept waiting for my daughters to tell me they trusted me again, to give me some sign that I’d earned back what I’d lost. But they were kids processing their own trauma. They didn’t owe me validation.

What they needed was consistency without requiring them to acknowledge it. They needed me to keep showing up whether they thanked me or not. Whether they seemed to notice or not. Whether it felt like it was working or not.

Sofia started testing me around month four. She’d ask me to do something, then watch to see if I’d follow through. Pick her up early from a friend’s house. Remember to buy the specific snack she liked. Show up to a school event I’d mentioned once in passing. Each test was a chance to prove I meant what I said.

I passed some. I failed others. But I kept showing up, and slowly—so slowly I almost didn’t notice—she started asking for things she actually wanted instead of things she was using to measure my reliability.

The Cultural Shame Layer

I attended meetings in a different part of town for the first year because I couldn’t bear the idea of someone from my parent’s church or my extended family seeing me there. The shame of admitting I was an alcoholic felt almost as heavy as the shame of having been one.

Hiding kept me isolated. Isolation threatened my sobriety. I had to separate cultural expectations from my actual recovery. Yes, I’d failed by the standards I was raised with. Yes, I’d become exactly what my community feared. But staying sober required admitting that reality rather than performing wellness I hadn’t earned.

I found a Spanish-speaking women’s meeting eventually. Hearing other Latina mothers talk about the specific shame we carry, the way our families and communities responded to our addiction—that helped.

We understood what it meant to be “that mother,” the one people talked about. We also understood what it took to become someone different.

What Trust Actually Requires

I couldn’t shortcut the time. I couldn’t fake the consistency. Trust required both, built daily, whether I felt like it or not.

I had to trust myself first. That meant learning what I could reliably commit to and what I couldn’t. I had to stop over-promising because I wanted to be the mother I imagined instead of the mother I actually was at that moment. If I wasn’t sure I could make it to something, I said so. If I needed help, I asked for it before I was desperate instead of after I’d already failed.

The rebuilding happened in pieces I couldn’t see accumulating. Maya started asking me for help before asking her dad. They started telling me things they wouldn’t have told me six months earlier.

Both Things Can Be True

I was doing better. I’d also done damage that would take years to repair. My sobriety didn’t erase what came before it—my daughters remembered every broken promise, every time I chose wine over their bedtime.

Recovery doesn’t resolve these tensions. I’ve learned to live in them because I don’t have another choice. To keep showing up even when the trust-building feels impossibly slow. To acknowledge what I did while working toward who I’m becoming. To understand that my daughters’ healing happens on their timeline, not mine.

I’m eight years sober now. My daughters trust me. But it took years of kept promises before that trust felt solid. It took me learning to trust myself first, to know my own limitations and work within them rather than pretending they didn’t exist.

The Practice That Builds Belief

Trust in early sobriety comes from practicing the behaviors that demonstrate trustworthiness before anyone believes you’ve changed. Show up to the meeting even when you don’t want to go. Call your sponsor when you’re struggling instead of handling it alone. Be honest about what you can and cannot do, even when that honesty reveals limitations you wish you didn’t have.

For mothers in recovery, this practice extends to our children. We rebuild trust by being present, predictable, and honest. We acknowledge when we mess up. We don’t ask our kids to comfort us about our recovery or validate our efforts. We do the work because it’s the work, because it’s what they deserve, because it’s the only way forward.

The promises I made in early sobriety felt fragile because I wasn’t sure I could keep them. But I kept them anyway, one at a time, until keeping my word became the pattern instead of breaking it. My daughters learned, slowly, that this version of me was different from the one they’d known before.

I can’t give back the years. I can’t undo the 911 call or the mornings they couldn’t wake me. But I can give them today. Tomorrow. Every day after where my word means something because I’ve proven—through accumulated evidence, not promises—that it does.

Recovery gave me the chance to become trustworthy again. Becoming trustworthy required staying sober long enough to accumulate evidence, to build a track record, to demonstrate through action what words alone could never establish. It required understanding that my daughters’ caution was wisdom they’d earned, and honoring that wisdom by proving it could eventually be updated.

Trust rebuilds slowly. One kept promise, then another. No shortcuts exist. No grand gesture erases years of broken words. Just showing up—consistently, honestly, for however long it takes.

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