Drunk Mom (28 page)

Once sober, I have to move out. Despite my breakthrough and finding the moment that lets me get off the crazy train and not have the compulsion to self-annihilate, I still have to deal with my situation. The situation is that I no longer have the comfort of my boyfriend’s support. My sister is in England for the summer. And the mental-health workers, the counsellors, have been abandoned over the months and it would be too inauthentic to rely on them now. Besides, I never really bought it, any of those therapies.

At home no amount of promises or screaming will persuade my boyfriend to let me stay. And part of me prays and hopes that he won’t crumble. I have to act out despair and tears—which come too easily now—but I’m not convinced myself that staying home and being forgiven is what’s best for me right now. So I shout and plead but in spurts rather than making this a continuous campaign. I’m sick of myself.

I’m sick of this, he says.

A few days later I go to the emergency ward with my baby for company. I am there to see someone about my broken toe. As I wait I think about how I used to come to the same emergency years ago to score some Ativan. How they make you take it in the room with them and they only give you two maximum because they’ve been trained to see right through the likes of you.

How I came here not that long ago, while still sober, and watched a cocaine addict sobering up from his latest binge. I saw him suddenly writhing in pain as his numbed nerve endings woke up. He screamed about the huge red-and-yellow pus-filled gash in his leg. He screamed back at his own leg and kept screaming and the emergency workers told him that they wouldn’t deal with him if he was still high. The man kept screaming that this was precisely
the problem—he wasn’t high—and he screamingly demanded a wheelchair but they wouldn’t bring it to him so he made himself fall down on the floor and then crawled through the revolving door into the emergency room, still screaming.

Sitting in the waiting room, I cry the whole time. I keep washing all the madness out. I enjoy it, almost. The nurses and other patients walk by and look at me and at the stroller and smile a sad smile. This is what it is going to be like, I think. People are going to smile. I’m going to be a single mother from now on, crying, dragging my child everywhere with me.

Briefly, I get excited by the concept of single-motherhood, even though it’s supposed to be challenging, but at least, for me, it’s slightly closer to the edge that I wish to live on. I can’t think of cokeheads crawling on the floor with pus and blood dragging behind them in a snotty trail right now. Forget it. But I could be a single mom. This could be interesting, running to pick him up from babysitters, cooking Kraft easy dinners, saying to potential dates: my kid.

Will I have to start stripping to support myself and my child? Will my C-section scar show when I shave off pubic hair to dance?

I don’t take myself so seriously that I completely believe myself worrying about scars and stripping. I am so used to me. But this is the state of an addict’s mind. It’s a fantasyland. I sit in the waiting room, the sleeping baby in my lap, my ass about to be homeless, and I pretend to worry about the swollen cherry of a little toe and how I’m going to fit it into a Lucite heel.

I don’t become a stripper. Since I have a job already I go to my quiet job as I do every day, although now I leave for it from another part of the city.

After I get back from emergency, the same night I pack my bags. Nobody is running after me as I leave and hop into a cab with a bag, first loading the folded stroller, the pack’n’fold crib. I come back to get Frankie. He’s not getting kicked out but I’ve begged my boyfriend to let me take him that first night and he agreed. I’m staying with a friend, Cara, who’s going through a breakup. Frankie and I set up camp in Cara’s apartment above a restaurant that she owns. I unfold Frankie’s pack’n’fold. Cara holds Frankie, who is quiet but sad. He’s unsure of the new place. He looks around with big brown eyes.

Cara lives with a dog, a whip of a whippet that runs around on tiny nails and barks excitedly as I unpack my suitcase. Frankie’s face crumples at this so I leave the unpacking and pick him up and make my voice as soft as possible, softer than the sleep-sheep toy he cuddles every night: It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.

I can unpack later.

I fall asleep with my face against the mesh of the pack’n’fold, breathing in my baby’s breath.

I sleep on a beautiful vintage chaise longue with the window looking out onto a busy street, and across it a butcher shop with neon signs—
Lamb, Pork, Veal, Chicken
—always flashing, all night long, a carnivorous Vegas.

H
e waddles from me to my boyfriend and his face, like his steps, is hesitant. His chubby feet are flapping against wooden floors as he goes back and forth, unsteadily, holding on to the bed frame and the dresser. I’m sitting on the bed in our bedroom and I’m screaming. My boyfriend is standing in the corner of the room and he’s screaming for me to stop screaming.

Frankie moves forward and lands against the bed, fat hand grabbing my thigh. I lift him up without looking at him because I’m too busy being angry. My boyfriend shouts to be careful with the baby. He shouts we have to stop shouting because we’re scaring the baby. I shout to get used to this shouting because that’s what things are going to be like from now on, shouty. On second thought, perhaps things won’t be like this at all because we won’t be around, me and the baby. Maybe he can go back to being a partying middle-aged bachelor, which is what he was when I met him. Maybe he can go
and snort lines of cocaine off of women’s asses and breasts as he always jokes about doing. Maybe he can find another stupid, naive student like me and fuck her and make her a baby and install her in this house to replace me. Us. Replace us. Because we’re replaceable. Because we’re not going to stick around much longer for this kind of bullshit.

Immediately, I imagine myself on the plane going somewhere warmer, nicer. Me and Frankie in a little apartment, then later, Frankie older, bigger, in some sunlit sandbox, maybe even a beach.

My boyfriend yells back that I can just go and fuck myself. I have no right to take him, the baby. Leave the baby alone. He’s not a toy I can just take whenever I please.

Then in a normal voice he says the stuff about calling family lawyers again, which is what made me start screaming in the first place.

It’s now ten days or so since I moved out. My newly found sobriety is coming out in big, angry, shouty chunks.

Frankie stops wobbling around and now sits quietly in my lap despite all the screaming. It occurs to me that maybe he’s so quiet because of it. I have an old memory of running from one set of knees to another, just like him, a bouncy ball of a child’s body between my parents, who tried to kill each other above me. I was older than Frankie is now because I remember telling them to stop it, to please be quiet. They finally stop and turn on me, telling me to shut up, but I don’t. I keep shouting because I’m just buzzed from all this angry energy above me; I am hysterical and can’t stop shouting to
stop it
myself, and then my cheek stings as someone slaps me. I stop it.

Is that what we’re going to end up like?

The warm, heavy body of my son is against my body. There are anger and tears above him. How much I’ve messed up already. All I wanted to do when we were shouting minutes ago was to stop my
son’s little pattering around. Now that he has stopped I feel guilty and helpless because I can’t think of what to do to make him happy.

Fine, lawyers, fine, I say to my boyfriend. Whatever you want.

I know he has contacted his friend Tommy already and I’m starting to feel the first elbowing of social disapproval, like when Tommy’s wife sends a polite but cold email saying she’s too busy when I ask her if she could meet with me. I don’t really want to meet with her but I want the world to believe me when I say that I’m done drinking.

The world has no reason to believe me. I kept lying to it over and over.

Once we are quiet, I get up to leave. I don’t want to fight. Or I want to fight but it is me I want to fight against. It’s the past, the time before drinking, that I want to fight for. I want us to be a family again. I don’t want to say any more hurtful things to my boyfriend. He is the love of my life, I remind myself, but this reminder makes me so ashamed that I can now only feel grief. I’ve broken us, buried us, and I can’t do anything anymore to dig us up again and make it whole.

In the weeks that I’m staying at Cara’s, my boyfriend and I divide custody of Frankie. After I drop Frankie off at the daycare or on the days when his father takes care of him, I ride my bicycle. I ride up the hills and down, for miles, pedalling and breathing loudly as I go up, letting my body sweat it all out as I go down.

My bike is barely holding together, still bent and twisted in places from my accident, but even that makes my excursion somewhat more satisfying, its brokenness a testimony to where we’ve both been. The fact that I’m still riding it meaning we’re better now.

I like feeling my muscles again. Since going to the gym at rehab, I haven’t been this close with my own body’s working. It’s good to feel
it again. I even like the pain in my lungs and the awful city dirt and dust that lands on me in the sweaty evenings and clings to me during hazy mornings. I don’t mind at all.

I ride to and from work, and to and from my meetings. I fill up every free hour with going to and being at meetings.

On my days with Frankie I bring him to meetings. I know I’m becoming one of those moms with a writhing toddler who stands in the back of the room and leaves before the tantrum is in full swing but not soon enough to save everybody from a loud sample of toddler rage. Long time ago before I was a mom and before I relapsed, I used to get annoyed by these women in meetings. I remember having to talk myself out of the desire to shush them. I had to sit there, frozen in annoyance, and I had to keep reminding myself that they had no choice, they had to bring babies with them. And now I will be one of them and I’ll have to put up with tut-tutting bitches like myself.

Three weeks after I last drank, I’m at a meeting and I go up with Frankie on my hip, to pick up a chip that stands for wanting to quit drinking. It’s called a desire chip. I have to march across a room full of people to get it and I know from before that they will all clap madly when I walk back to my spot. This is the part I used to hate, but this time when I walk back and everyone claps, I feel touched and even a little proud of myself. Frankie loves when people clap, so he joins in, clapping his chubby little hands, after we sit down and honour the following thirty-day, two-month, six-month and nine-month chips that honour periods of sobriety.

Outside the windows, the trees are thick with green leaves. Like most meetings, this one is held in a room in a church building. It smells of cheap coffee and it’s a familiar smell; I welcome it.

I don’t leave this meeting early and there are no tantrums. We stay inside for the duration. Cara and her friend Kate take Frankie out near the end, when he fusses, and play with him as I sit inside the room where the actual meeting is held. I listen to a famous film director talk about binge drinking and smoking crack with bikers.

After the speaker is done talking, I go to find Frankie and Cara and Kate. They are in a classroom in the back of the church. Montessori classes are held here during the week, and my friends are playing with Frankie by the shelf filled with wooden toys.

He squeals when he sees me and triumphantly raises one arm to show me a piece of wood he’s holding on to. Cara and Kate turn around and squeal too. They’re squealing over the fact that Frankie is walking; they say he has made a couple of steady steps completely on his own.

Looking at the three of them sitting on the floor with open faces and big smiles, looking at my son with his cloud of golden hair and his face, his ruby-red lips and happy cheeks, and all that green August outside the window, and everything that makes this moment
this
moment—the smell of coffee still lingering in the air—I finally feel that we’re safe and that things will be okay.

When I go home that night to drop off my son, my boyfriend is waiting for me and we talk. He speaks softly; his face doesn’t twitch in annoyance. I wonder if he, too, had noticed how green and promising everything looks outside, if the evening summer light had made him feel something other than despair about us. If it had caused him to snap out of it, even feel some hint of hope.

We don’t shout, don’t say mean things to one another, just talk. Our voices are treading carefully, back and forth on this fragile golden line of cautious connection. We must be gentle with each other. We’ve been
gravely wounded in this war. One more battle and there will be no returning.

I want to move back in, I say as I’ve said, threatened, begged many times over the past three weeks. Except that now I just say it, as strongly and as calmly as I can.

I don’t want you to live here, he says the words that he has shouted and hissed before. Now he sounds resigned.

Just a trial. I will move back out if you want me to.

He says nothing.

Please, I say.

That’s all I say. I don’t talk about my drinking or how admirably sober I am. It hasn’t been that long at all. There’s no sobriety to talk about, really. But: Please.

A long silence. We used to be comfortable being silent with each other before silences became weapons in our war: Him not speaking to me the day after he’d catch me drinking. Me not speaking when I was too drunk to talk. But this silence is okay. I don’t know if he’s comfortable with it right now, but I am. I can sit in it. I’m not alarmed by it.

Okay, he finally says, just trial.

Like a probation.

Okay. A probation. You have till the end of the month.

I can feel my heart flutter a little harder in my chest. I want to put my arms around him. I want to kiss him, feel his hard body against my soft one. My desire is physical but it also feels enhanced, as if there was a spiritual element to it, a need for a communion. But I can’t break through his hate, have no right to expect anything from him yet, have zero proof that he, too, is feeling that hope, light, filtering through the trees outside that’s letting itself inside. So I stand where I am.