Drunk Mom (11 page)

In the train station food court only one bar is open. It’s a dark, dank sports bar, a baseball game all round me on the screens suspended from the ceiling, and a carpeted floor littered with white flecks, possibly peanut shell remnants.

I order a pint of beer.

B
elieve me, I tried to figure out why. Why, for example, one warm fall evening, I somehow end up in Chinatown at the end of a busy shopping trip, and why I push my tired body and the tired stroller forward, pretending to be here to find a scarf.

In reality, I am here so that I can stumble upon a liquor store. The one close to Kensington Market, one I’ve never been to but that I’ve been aware of, of course. I pretend that this is a total surprise when I do walk by it.

What was that? Was that?

Imagine that! A liquor store.

I walk a bit longer and then turn around. I could get some wine to go with my dinner tonight. The boyfriend is away at some conference—we decided that it makes sense for him to go away now to get a break after my Montreal trip. It’s my turn to be with the baby all by myself.

I don’t mind at all. Tonight I will cook myself a nice meal, treat myself. Maybe I should get a pedicure. Rent a funny movie about blondes getting married to their best friends whom they never saw in romantic light until the high school reunion. Call my best friend in Poland. Make it a night.

I go inside.

I had no idea that the store has a flight of dangerously high stairs. Ridiculous. There’s no ramp. There is a wheelchair lift, a tiny platform that I step onto and then have to shut the little doors behind me before it will move. You can move it with either a manual handle or by pressing a big red button with the words UP/DOWN printed on it. The lift makes a loud noise, and moves slowly, in full view of everyone in the store. It’s actually performance art, this indiscreet and attention-seeking hulk of ancient machinery going up with me standing right in the middle of it.

Once we get out of the lift, I imagine that I can feel people watching us.

I know what this looks like. This is exactly what it looks like, although, naturally, I’m pretending otherwise. But if you need to know the truth: Yes, I am ashamed to be here with a stroller. And I don’t know why I’m here, buying a bottle of wine and also—why not?—a mickey of vodka, telling myself that I’m just buying it for tonight’s special dinner, that I will only have one glass of wine—max two.

No more than three.

But, in the back of my mind, I know already that I won’t just have a glass or three. I will have the entire bottle. Then I’ll drink the mickey. Then I’ll run frantically around the house trying to find anything else that will give me a buzz. On not finding anything, I will have a thought to run out of the apartment, just for a bit, not long at all, and go to the nearest bar and down a quick pint.

The baby will be fine in his crib; it’s not like I’m going to be gone long. Yes, I know that there’s a Murphy’s Law about accidents and babies left alone, which is why I never leave Frankie alone. Even in a state of the most profound drunkenness I am always somehow able to talk myself out of this idea—usually by passing out—and stay at home, avoiding disaster.

But I am scared.

My fear is that one day the perfect combination of insanity and alcohol will cause me to ignore the last-ditch responsible thought and I
will
leave and drink at the bar only to come back to one of these: a house on fire, the baby suffocated by a blanket, the baby face down in his own puke.

And yet, knowing all this, having fast-forwarded the tape all the way through to the end, I have just marched through this Chinatown liquor store and found the wine and the vodka.

The cashier says, How old is the baby?

The baby? I mumble something about having a dinner party and a lot of friends over, never answering her question, never even hearing her question, until I’m back on the wheelchair lift that is slowly, shamefully, grunting its way down. I hear it then, an echo in my head. I answer it in my head.

He’s five and a half months old.

The next day I wake up on the loveseat in the living room with my neck stiff, shoes on. I can’t remember what happened last night.

He is in his crib, asleep, looking peaceful and fat. Bottles of formula spill milk onto the mattress. He’s got enough formula in there to drown in. What a responsible mother I am.

Once I’m downstairs in the kitchen I discover that there was no dinner. No food to make dinner with. There are bottles wrapped in newspapers ready to be taken out and disposed of later.

I make a decision to stay home until the boyfriend gets back. I’m mortified by the fact that I drank without anyone around to take care of the baby in case I drank myself to death, fell on my head or choked on vomit. I’m so mortified, my immediate thought is to drink this shame out of me, but I manage to resist. I can’t risk it anymore. This means a week without alcohol. But the fear of dying and worse, finding my son dead, is suddenly a siren, not just a weak little buzz in the back of my head.

I sleep a lot.

On day three I wake up sweaty—and proud—as if I had run a marathon. I’m not hungover. I breastfeed all the time now, and Frankie’s happy despite the snotty nose and a little bit of a cough. We spend most of our days in bed, both of us gurgling and chatting and laughing, his fat feet kicking madly, sometimes landing on my battered body, but I don’t mind.

We take a bath together. He pees in the tub; this makes me chuckle hard and he looks up at me and joins me, mouth opening in a laugh so powerful that it doesn’t make a lot of sound, except for one loud
hyeee
that comes out of him when he inhales deeply. He smacks one of my collarbones and his mouth turns upside down in surprise. I can tell he has hurt himself, but I distract him from crying, make a high-pitched noise, something between a scream and a coo. He looks at me uncertainly. Then he laughs again through the beginning of his tears. I feel like I’m god.

Drying myself, I look in the bathroom mirror. I’m getting skinny. I’m running out of whatever food I do have, so I may have to leave the
house after all. I try not to think about it. Today will be one more day eating out of cans and I’ll love it—anything to not have to leave.

As I pat my sweet baby-boy dry, I kiss him all over his bean-shaped belly, kiss him on the soles of his fat feet.

I feel I’ve never been happier.

After our bath, we lie down.

I read.

Three days sober, I read like I drink. The right side of the bed—my side—is heaped with books and magazines. I have many different subscriptions and I buy books all the time, but I’m usually too drunk to read. Now, between sleeps, baths and heating up cans, I read. I go through all kinds of inspiring stories in women’s magazines, a few short stories from recent issues of
The New Yorker
, two novels and a non-fiction book about genetic disorders. I am learning so much. I’m hoping that Frankie is sucking in all that knowledge with the breast milk. It feels as though we are both detoxifying from the debilitating past few months.

The next day it’s beautiful outside but I daren’t go out even after I discover that all the cans are definitely gone. I know that I need to eat—for both of us—but I’m so terrified of what will happen outside that I’m actually considering starving to death. I’m not being dramatic—I do think about it. I think about calling my sister, asking her to come down at the end of the week so that she can find Frankie, still alive, ready to be rescued. I imagine him stuck to my dead breast sucking the final drops, surviving. But what if he doesn’t?

I search online for “How long does it take to starve to death?” and am told it “depends on several factors such as your weight and how healthy you are. Most medical doctors state you can live four to six weeks without food. Some obese people have been known to live up to 25 weeks without food, but you can only live three days without water, except for some rare cases where people have lived 8–10 days without water.”

Three days if without water. I could do it. I’ve three days left exactly.

Of course, I’m not entirely serious about starving myself to death and you absolutely have to be serious in order to be successful in such an endeavour. Which means that sooner or later I’ll have to go out.

If I go outside I will go and get booze. There’s no doubt about it.

I don’t have much choice; the thought, it’s already planted in the back of my mind (
planted
—it has roots, this thing, buried deeply in every neural connection in my brain; it’s indistinguishable from all the snapping synapses that make me what they make me). As soon as I think it, I get excited about it. I’m horrified down to the bone and I’m excited about it.

I don’t have a choice because I think about what’s outside these walls concurrently with all these thoughts about feeling good, detoxified, happy, healthy. The walls of my apartment are no match for what’s outside of them, and what’s outside of them is alcohol. And it’s not even alcohol that I’m worried about and that I’m addicted to, exactly. It’s my thoughts that are my addiction, the way they start with “I should get some food” and morph into “How about a bottle of wine?”

And my addictive thoughts are not like other thoughts. They are not stoppable; they are never easily distracted. Which is why my addiction is also a body part. I can’t get rid of it any easier than I can cut off my own arm or poke my eye out.

I pack Frankie’s diaper bag. I take my time getting him ready, dressing him in matching shirt and socks, a hat with teddy-bear ears, mittens the size of tulips. He’s gurgling and smiling. He knows we’re going out, he probably thinks—or whatever it is that he processes in his little brain—that this is about him.

I’ve never been arrested but I always feel guilty whenever a cop or a cop car goes by. Maybe it was the four days in isolation, but when I see the cop car, I’m convinced that somebody tipped them off about what I did the first night: drink a bottle of wine and some vodka while the baby is asleep in his bassinet, completely and pathetically dependent on me and my drunken self. Who’s going to believe that I’ve been sober for the past 3.5 days? I imagine a neighbour, somebody from across the street watching me through binoculars, a telescope, taking notes, taking photos, reporting, reporting.

To serve and protect
it reads on the side of the cop car.

Briefly, I have a thought of flagging it down and asking for a ride. My back is killing me. If the cop says no I’ll point to the serving part of that slogan. Serve me. Protect me. Protect me from me.

I do no such thing. Frankie and I continue on our walk. I smile at the cop behind the wheel and he doesn’t smile back. I didn’t expect him to anyway. I wish I had the guts to ask him to arrest me.

I have some sense left with me because when I get to the liquor store I suddenly remember the light beer that I used to drink in the summer
and so I only get a six-pack of that. In the evening, after putting Frankie to bed, I smoke a pack of cigarettes and I try to sip—not gulp!—and it’s a miracle but I go to sleep almost completely sober with two cans left in the fridge. It is like wrapping an amputation in bandages, but at least I’ve stopped the bleeding.

W
hen my boyfriend gets back I am relieved and scared. I’m scared because I know for sure that something is wrong with me. After my week alone and my painful sober sipping, I am so tired of myself and of my own tricks that I feel a need to confess. But I don’t know how.

I call my sister to ask her to come over. I’m hoping that her presence will help me get out what I need to get out.

My sister comes over to have dinner with us. As soon as I see her I know that I’ll be able to talk. We have a strange relationship where our roles often get reversed—right now, I’m the immature screw-up and she is the wise one even though she is much younger than me.

And so, finally, in a bout of near-sobriety, I tell my sister and my boyfriend that I think I may have a problem with drinking. Again, I mean.