Drunk Mom (17 page)

The option is there.

No. No detox.

A memory pops into my head. It is one of unmade beds, blank walls, and between the walls dozens of dazed women with matted hair and matted skin. This mixed with the smell of unwashed bodies and tears, candy and tobacco. In the past, as part of practising my own recovery, I used to go to these places with the message of sobriety. In the past, I was better than detox. I’m not better than detox now but I am stubborn.

The woman on the phone says someone will call me in the beginning of March to do my official intake.

Fine.

She says, I think that’s all, unless there’s anything else? Good luck with everything at home.

I want to shout that she better be sincere about that because I’m no liar and I really, really need the good luck.

When I’m done talking to the rehab woman, I lift the baby out of his crib, get him changed and shoved into his snowsuit. I go to a liquor store and buy bottles of wine and vodka. For the first time in months I don’t have to hide any of it. My boyfriend is not allowed to move.

In a last, goodwill effort I call up friends and let everyone know to come over and help.

People show up with food and audiobooks and they sit and talk to us, my boyfriend immobilized on the couch. He has to move as little as possible for the next two weeks. There is a gas bubble in his eye that’s supposed to help reattach his retina.

My sister shows up frequently to help with the baby.

I keep the booze outside and get obliterated night after night after a whole day of taking care of the sick boyfriend and the baby.

I’m horrified by my actions.

I am so sorry.

I am pathetically sorry.

If the house is on fire, well, it’ll just have to burn.

On Christmas Eve, we take some photos. Baby’s first Christmas. In the photos, my grin is the biggest and my boyfriend looks terrified. His right eye is covered with a black patch. The eye recovery is going well even though he’ll never regain full sight in this eye.

In the pictures, he looks like a pirate in a suit. He is extremely handsome despite or maybe because of the patch. Despite looking terrified. I am not terrified. I am faking being cheerful. Or maybe I am cheerful. I have no idea. I don’t know what I am anymore.

My sister’s mouth is smiling but not really—it is a tight little smile as if she were trying to eat her lower lip. I can tell from this look that she knows I’m drunk. New Year’s Eve is a sad blur of screams and unfinished dinner. I have no idea how this year ends and the next one begins. I black out.

T
o prepare for rehab, I watch the TV show about addiction,
Intervention
. I watch it night after night, on my computer—while I drink.

I try to figure something out. I’m not sure what, because it’s not the addiction that I try to figure out but the thing that makes people addicts.

I watch lots of episodes. I have seen some before, when I was sober, but now I watch them in a scientific way and I watch them obsessively. I drink and watch. Sometimes I have to rewatch them. That’s how it is lately. I rewatch a lot of things.

Maybe I’m so into the show because I want to see that I’m not as bad as most of the people on it. The strung-out junkies bouncing off walls, the alcoholics drinking freely out of jars and jugs and bottles while family members look on helplessly. I’m nothing like the meth addict selling her body for a couple of bucks in front of the 7-Eleven;
nothing like the girl who eats pills like candy; not even anything like the estranged mother of three who’s in the first stages of cirrhosis of the liver.

I go through Lornas and Joes and Cristys and Aishas. Their faces twist and their eyes scurry around in their sockets like bugs.

The more I watch, the closer I feel. To what I don’t know, but I know that one more show, one more success story or even a failure, and I’ll figure it all out and I will be able to fix myself. I’ll get better. At what, again, I’m not so sure, but not moderation because I certainly don’t understand the concept of not drinking more once I drink. Once I drink, I miss the stop sign long before I’ve gone too far.

Perhaps I watch the show because I need to know if there’s a way to just stop when I want to, but most important, if there’s a way to remain stopped later on in the day.

Eventually I even see my own story. I see the effects of immigration, stressed-out parents, small city, big city, big dreams crushed, and I even see people from my own hometown, people who speak my native language.

I never get too close to figuring out how to stop, or what addiction is all about exactly, even though the show’s producers always seem to hint at it, at the possible reasons for why it’s happened. The counsellors on the show refer to addiction as a disease, which only adds to the confusion.

There’s always a peak in the story when the subject undergoes something traumatic—death, divorce—or when the ongoing abuse escalates and goes over a certain line. This seems to suggest that
there’s something—that there is a certain line, for that matter—and that this something is what makes a person into a full-fledged addict. It’s as if we’re all floating and sometimes gravity brings us down and we touch a soft spot in our lives and when we do, some of us fall right through.

No one is just born an addict, because even the ones with addict parents have siblings who never touch the stuff. And the ones who come from so-called normal families—a minority—seem to be capable of falling into a pile of shit too.

Incidentally, everyone, but everyone, is described as having been a happy baby.

There’s usually a follow-up: close-ups of fattened-up faces, eyes now crystal clear and looking off to the horizon, hair blowing in the wind. Not always.

I don’t care about reasons that much. I don’t buy them. Reasons are arbitrary. My reasons may not be somebody else’s reasons.

I keep watching and hoping for some kind of great reveal. But there’s no way to predict how each story will end—the keenest reformed druggie might suddenly do a 180 and run off with a bag of crack, the crackiest hopeless case will end working up as a counsellor in rehab.

Only one person refuses to go. His episode is one of the last ones I watch. His name is Adam and he’s an alcoholic. I find myself cheering for him when he tells the
Intervention
crew to get lost.

I don’t know why but it feels as if he has escaped.

After seeing dozens of these shows, after learning nothing and everything about addiction and after Adam destroying whatever I have learned in one powerful fuck-off, I know exactly nothing more about it. And then I finally know one thing—that this is
it
about addiction. You can film it and talk and write about it but there’s no way to capture it. It’s a black hole. A black hole sucking us—the addicts—in, sometimes spitting us out, sometimes not, sometimes sucking us back in again.

And again.

W
hen I fall flat on my face it’s not spectacular in any way. I just fall on my face. Not quite flat on it, on the whole face. More like fall-on-cheek. I am drunk when it happens but I’m not too drunk. Not fall-on-your-whole-face drunk.

One minute I’m walking on the street, the next, my cheek is hugging the curb. I’m not even walking fast. Or in a zigzag. I just space out and then I’m on the curb. I could do this sober, no problem. Anybody could do this with all the ice around.

I turn around and go to the nearest dive for a pint. I pile up all the change I fished out of my pockets on the table behind the row of beer taps. The bartender shakes his head. I’m sure he has seen my kind many times. Pretty girl, beat-up, broke, with a soiled jacket, hands raw from never wearing gloves. He doesn’t say it out loud but I can sense it. Or my prickly drunkenness can sense it.

Nothing further from the truth, I want to tell him. I’m a mother of
a lovely baby boy, a writer, a somebody. I live in a real house, not a rental. But then I remember my face. Whatever is going on with it, on it. I don’t want to know yet. I can hardly feel it now, still frozen from January’s deadly snap.

I shut up. I drink. I thaw. My jaw throbs.

I don’t have enough for another beer after that but I end up with one anyhow. Looks like someone took pity. Maybe the bartender. When I try to recall later, the bartender is reduced to head-shaking gestures and the faint green of neon lights from outside.

Those are last things that are clear. Either way, all those thoughts comfort me right now.

I lie in bed and it’s morning.

I’m feeling my usual sheer fright. The usual sheer fright is due to not recalling much more about the evening beyond the fall, the backpack surviving the fall, and a little bit of the bar afterwards.

I touch the inside of my mouth with my tongue. I instinctively know to reach far back into the back of my mouth, to the left. I feel where there’s a dull pain. The pain lives in the last molar. I can move the tooth back and forth with my tongue, make the pain bigger, itchy. The itchiness of it makes me want to keep doing it. I move it with my tongue.

Stop it.

I move it again, imagining I can sense the delicate fibres breaking, detaching themselves from the bone the more I move the tooth.

Stop it.

I want to touch my face. My hand reaches the cheek after sneaking shyly, reluctantly, underneath the sheets.

I hear my boyfriend’s light snoring behind me.

So. I’m in bed. Not on the couch or on the floor in the baby’s room. And the boyfriend is in bed with me. That means that we probably didn’t have a big fight last night and that despite whatever’s happened to my face, I’m still human enough to sleep beside.

I slide out of bed as quietly as I possibly can. My clothes are all over the floor, tights in the hallway.

In the bathroom I look in the mirror. No black eye. Not too bad at all. Swollen on the left side and there’s a big chunk of skin scraped off along the cheekbone, but nothing serious. I can drape my long hair over it and you won’t see a thing.

I get under the shower. My body feels tender all over, but especially on its left side, and I have a hard time bending down when I shave my legs, but I make myself.

Don’t be a baby. My hip hurts the most, and when I look down I notice that the skin there is already changing colours. I touch it and it yelps back in pain. Add it to the broken-tooth pain.

It’s the bruises that tell the whole tale. They’re every drunk’s distinctive mark. The map of misfortunes is painted all over our bodies. Blue and black and yellow, like watercolour flowers, or the fresh ones: blossoming red, shy pink.

That day, the official intake guy from New Hope calls and asks intrusive questions. When is the last time I had a drink? Do I smoke? How long have I been drinking for? Do I have any offensive tattoos, visible to people?

One that is visible and not offensive: my son’s name on my wrist.

What about piercings, anything unusual?

No. Nothing unusual, I say and look up and down my body to double-check.

Do you have frequent and unusual accidents?

No. Yes, I say, feel the soreness inside my mouth as I tell the truth.

You can lie—most people do—but it’s better to save your lying energy for other, bigger stuff.

These are just questions, and if you’re an addict, chances are you know how to answer them. This is the fate of an addict: people ask over and over because you fail over and over. They want to know everything about you to figure you out and why you are the way you are. They demand every intimate number in your life—falls, injuries, days, drinks, years, partners, hospitalizations—and urges—to harm, to fuck, to die and kill—and everything else that is sacred or secret.

There’s no privacy if you’re an addict. If you’re an addict, people have a right to look through your purses, into your mouth and your eyes. They can draw your blood and check your shit, and for that matter, check inside you, inspect every hole to see if you’re lying to them. The only place they don’t have access to is your mind, which is why they ask and ask. Your mind is also the part that everyone—including you—is telling you to stay away from. Because it is your mind that is killing you.

The intake guy says that any medication I need to bring with me must be blister-packed. To make sure nobody—that means me—tampers with it. You wouldn’t believe the things people smuggle in, he laughs.

Like what?

We’ve found all kinds of drugs, he says. Usually they put them in those ceiling boards so we check their bags right away now but people can get quite creative.

Why would you bring drugs to rehab? I want to ask but I know he’ll only think I’m trying to suck up to him. But I really do wonder that. What would be the point?

The intake guy reminds me that I have to be clean and sober for ten days before checking in.

That means from Saturday on, right? I confirm.

He laughs, again, and says that we’re so predictable.

Who’s
we
? I ask.

We. The addicts. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m one of us, been sober for twenty-two years this July.