Being Present at the Holidays Without Demanding a Fresh Start
The holidays have a way of asking for a cleaner story than life usually provides. Families gather. People take stock. There is a familiar hope that this season can serve as a reset, and that everyone will agree to begin again. I understand that hope. I do not think I am entitled to it.
My name is Wes Burgner. Some people know me as Wess, and older records use Wesley. I am a father in long-term recovery in Atlanta. The holidays do not give me a special claim on anyone's forgiveness, and they do not turn my responsibility into a seasonal project I get to finish before the year ends.
I have called the day I was arrested for driving under the influence with my children in the car the most shameful moment of my life. I still do. My addiction also led to a bank robbery in 2017. I take full responsibility for the harm I caused. Those facts do not become lighter because December is approaching.
There is a version of the holiday story that I want to resist. In that version, a person in recovery arrives as proof that everything has been repaired. The meal becomes a ceremony. The season becomes a verdict. If people are warm, the year is declared a success. If they are cautious, or quiet, or not ready to treat the gathering as a fresh start, the person who caused the harm feels cheated. I do not want to live inside that story, and I do not want my family to have to manage it for me.
The pressure is easy to understand. Holidays concentrate memory. They also concentrate performance. It is tempting to treat presence as a demonstration: look how far I have come, look how stable I am, look how this year is different. A demonstration asks other people to watch and then to certify the change. Presence, if it is honest, does not require an audience or a conclusion.
I can show up. I can be consistent. I can keep my own history from becoming the centerpiece of a gathering that belongs to more than one person. What I cannot do is demand that the people I hurt use the holidays to close the matter. I cannot ask children, or anyone else in my family, to make the season easier by offering me a resolution I have not earned in ordinary time.
I am careful here about what I do not say. I will not describe my children's holidays, invent their feelings, or use a family scene to make this point more vivid. Their lives are not material I get to arrange around my recovery. I can talk about my responsibility as a father. I cannot talk for them.
Over time, I have earned back trust with the people who matter most to me. I am grateful for that. Their love, and their faith in me, gave me a reason to keep going. Gratitude is not a license to treat the holidays as a victory lap. Trust that returned slowly can still be treated carelessly if I expect it to appear on cue because the calendar says it should. I do not get to set that timetable, especially in a season that already asks a lot of families.
This is not an argument against gathering, or against hope. I chose recovery before a judge ordered me to change. I went through intensive inpatient treatment, lived for a year in a structured sober living community, and later did the work required by the Fulton County Accountability Court program. I still participate in a 12-step program. I am a husband, a father, a Georgia State University student graduating in spring 2027, and a soon-to-be law student. In 2021 I founded Swiss Group Solutions in Atlanta, where I serve as Founder and President, and I founded The Artemis Council, an affiliated nonprofit that supports children affected by parental addiction. Those are facts about my life now. They are not proof that the people closest to me owe me a particular kind of December.
The Artemis Council exists because children live with the consequences of a parent's addiction, including in seasons that are supposed to be simple and glad. An adult's recovery story can take up a lot of air. The holidays can make that worse, because the culture around them is already full of messages about togetherness and repair. Children should not have to carry an adult's need for a redemptive ending. They did not cause the harm. They cannot control it. It is not their job to fix it, in December or on any other day.
I wrote a book for fathers in recovery called The Dad in the Doorway. The title is about ordinary presence: being available without making the doorway into a stage. That is the standard I want to bring to the holidays as well. I also wrote The Storm Inside My Dad and From Boy Scout to Bank Robber and Back. One hundred percent of the net profits go to The Artemis Council. The books can be useful to someone else. They do not entitle me to a warmer room.
What I am trying to practice is smaller than a fresh start. It is showing up without turning the occasion into a test. It is leaving other people free to feel what they feel, including ambivalence, distance, or a joy that has nothing to do with my story. Repair, if it happens, happens in ordinary days, not in a single meal that I have quietly asked to mean too much.
I still want to be present with my family during the holidays, for ordinary reasons. I am their father and husband, and I care about being there. I do not need the season to announce that I have been restored. Being in the room is not the same as being owed a new beginning.
If there is a hope I can honestly hold, it is not that this year will erase the last one. It is that I can be steady enough that the people around me do not have to spend the holidays managing my need to be forgiven. I can be responsible for my own history. I can be grateful if I am welcomed. I cannot require the calendar to do the work of repair.
The holidays will come whether I am ready to be humble or not. I would rather arrive with fewer speeches and more room for other people. That is not a dramatic resolution. It is the one I think I can keep.