I Quit Weed for My Kid. Then I Realised It Was Also for Me.

I’d been smoking since I was nineteen. Daily since my mid-twenties. It was just the furniture of my life by the time he was born. I didn’t think much about it. I smoked outside, always. He never saw it. I kept the times predictable and the amounts reasonable, whatever that means. I’d convinced myself it wasn’t his business.

Then one night about a year ago, he woke up and came into the living room while I was there after putting him to bed. He asked me why my eyes looked different. I said I was tired. He looked at me for a moment and then said okay and went back to his room. Four years old.

That was it. No dramatic revelation. Just that look.

I quit two weeks later. Not cold — I took about a week to taper off. Told my partner what I was doing. She didn’t say much, which said a lot.

The first month was mostly just white-knuckling. Sleeping badly, eating too much, generally not a very fun person to live with. I was doing it for him, and that helped when things felt pointless. Having a reason outside yourself is useful when the internal motivation isn’t there.

But somewhere around month two, something else started coming into focus.

I started noticing that I had opinions about things again. Not big things — small ones. A strong preference for one route over another on a walk. An actual reaction to a film, not just a willingness to sit through it. I’d been flattened for longer than I’d understood, and the texture of things was coming back.

There was a Saturday about ten weeks in where I took him to the park. Nothing special. We found a stick he wanted to bring home and I let him, even though I knew it was going to live in the hallway forever. On the way back he held my hand without me asking. I felt it fully. Not through glass.

I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this without sounding like an advertisement for quitting. I’m not saying it will fix your life. I’m saying: I had been half-present for years. I’d built a whole rationalization system around it. Smoking outside, keeping it to evenings, it’s not that serious. And the rationalization was so smooth that I hadn’t noticed how much was missing until some of it came back.

My son still notices everything. What’s different now is that more of what he’s noticing is real.

A few months after I quit, my partner said something that stuck with me. She said she’d grieved the person she thought she was going to have, then gotten used to a quieter version, and was now not sure what to do with the louder one coming back. She said it without judgment. More like an observation.

I didn’t have a good response to that, and I still don’t. But I think it was true.

My son asked me recently why I stopped. He must have heard someone mention it. I said I just decided to. He thought about this and said that made sense, and went back to what he was doing.

Four years old, still notices everything.

I’d like to tell you I quit entirely because of him. It’s cleaner that way. But the truth is that somewhere in the process it became clear that I’d needed to do this for myself for a long time and hadn’t had a reason I could hold onto. He was the reason I could hold onto.

That’s not nothing. That’s actually a lot.

If you are a parent thinking about quitting, reading about what long-term quitting actually looks like might help you know what to expect.