Drunk Mom (3 page)

The ones who drink a little harder can even make fun of themselves with typical youthful bravado. I remember sitting with a heavy-drinking friend and joking that once we reached twenty-five, we’d definitely have to go to Alcoholics Anonymous because this was just ridiculous, how drunk we were getting all the time.

She stumbled home, and I opened a third bottle of wine and wrote about that in my journal, or tried to write. Mostly I just scribbled.
Go to AA when you 25 stupid bitch
.

I went to AA when I was twenty-seven. At that point, I had lost another relationship and a job that I’d got freshly out of grad school. My roommates were planning to kick me out. As they say in AA, “AA was the last house on the street.” There were no other options.

I stayed in AA for three and a half years. I stayed sober.

But now I’m not.

I’ve relapsed.

I don’t know why. Or I know why and I don’t have the time to go over it right now. Or there are too many whys to consider. Or who really cares why?

The point is, I really, really need a drink.

When I walk into a liquor store—against my will, not because I want to, I promise, I swear—I know that I own my two feet but I don’t, really; they’re no longer mine. And as soon as I’m inside the store—with its golden colours and lights, like one big liquid carnival—I know that no power in this world can make me leave before I’ve got something.

Yes, there’s a thought buried somewhere deep under a pile of much more urging, loud thoughts, that says I can leave, I don’t have to do this … but this little thought is so weak, it will never overpower everything else that’s going on inside me.

I don’t blame you for hating me for not wanting to stop. For relapsing and not wanting to stop.

It happened because my best friend fell in love.

Or because I felt old.

Or it happened because I was far away from home.

It just happened.

Because I wanted a drink. Because the wanting was stronger than me.

It was at my best friend’s bachelorette. It was vodka and soda. I don’t know how it ended up in my hand. Or rather, I do know: the bartender asked me—as they always do
—Just
soda? and just like that I changed my mind.

No,
vodka
and soda, I said.

I drank it like it was just soda. I looked around. No one paid any attention. No one would anyway. People drink all the time.

I was downstairs. I was the non-drinker sent to get drinks for all the bachelorette women upstairs. The bar was red and velvet and gold. It was fall, my birth month, my birthplace. Warsaw. Another one, please, I said to the bartender then.

What did he know?

Double, actually.

I didn’t get sloppy that night, no blackouts. But at one point that night, in another place, a high-end Malibu Barbie–infested club, I snatched someone’s drink and drained the bottle in one practised gulp. It was the gulp that was familiar. Too familiar.

In less than two hours I annihilated three and a half years of sobriety and caught up to right where I left off.

Two days later, my best friend’s wedding started with a couple of shots of vodka and a bunch of Ativans. Kneeling in church behind her giant puffy dress, I felt laughter coming on, possibly caused by the theatricality of the ceremony, possibly by vodka and Ativan arm-wrestling in
my brain. I managed to swallow my giggles, turn them into a cough. I coughed a lot through that very serious hour in church.

Outside afterwards, I had trouble pinning my best friend’s veil to the back of her head as she received guests and flowers.

The wind was really strong that day.

The wedding ended with my waking up sick in an unfamiliar hotel room.

I woke up with flashbacks of burning my maid-of-honour dress with a cigarette, stuffing my face with cake and fish at the same time, flexing my muscles and laughing manically when pictures were taken, fending off my best friend’s boy-cousins who tried to kiss me, dancing with my best friend’s sister’s husband and telling him that I’d wanted to sleep with him back in the day when he was much thinner. I remember telling him, too, that I had to do a pregnancy test the next day. I was feeling funny lately.

And you’re drinking?

If I’m preggers it’s the last time I’ll party so it’s totally okay, I told him. We danced.

Later, someone carried me through darkness, my body half leaning on his back.

This is all that I recalled the next day when I woke up in the unfamiliar room.

At home, I puked for hours. Then I slept.

In the evening I bought the pregnancy test, found out I was pregnant.

There’s an expression in AA, “to white-knuckle,” which means not drinking but not going to meetings either. It implies a struggle:
clenching your fists so tightly as you’re trying to hang on to your sobriety that your bones shine through your skin.

I don’t believe that AA is the only way to stay sober, by the way. However, it was the only way I had managed to stay sober for a long time before I relapsed. And now I definitely wasn’t going to AA meetings but I was definitely trying to stay sober while pregnant. It was a period of almost-grace. I white-knuckled some of the time, but for most of it, I was in such awe of my pregnancy and I was so scared of hurting the little boy growing inside my belly that I didn’t struggle that often.

It worked with the exception of holidays, when I drank sombrely and greedily, a glass of wine on Christmas Eve, three glasses on New Year’s Eve, every drop like a hiss against a hot surface. My wanting burning bright.

H
ere’s how it is: One day I wake up and it turns out that I am now the head of a country. A whole country—imagine that!

What happens is that I’ve been given a crown one very painful morning and now the entire country depends on me. Not only that, but because of my genetic makeup it is obvious to everyone around me that I’ll naturally know how to rule this country: how to feed it and protect it from disasters and attacks. How to make its people happy. As the genetically designated and designed monarch, it is expected of me that I will know exactly what to do with the little people who depend on me, that my nature will dictate how to help them and feed them and clothe them.

To help me rule it properly, I’ve been given a gift: an endless supply of food that the country’s people live on.

I’m also given a generous pension for ruling this country. Free money that comes every two weeks from the government. The king (there is a king!) insists I am given this money to do my job as the ruler. It is
precisely why I’ve been given this money by the government. Me and not him. He is right.

Not only that—to prove myself as a worthy ruler, I’ve been given a whole year off from my other duties that usually involve sitting in a windowless office and typing on a computer. It’s also strongly suggested I put my un-duties—such as writing novels and taking photographs—on hold. The things that take up time and bring no money and do absolutely nothing for the good of the country.

When I say “it’s suggested” I don’t remember if an actual person suggests this, if everyone perhaps suggests this or if it’s just me going through the bouts of guilt. I do those wasteful things from time to time anyway, but the sense that they take away from the people of my country is overwhelming and creates anxiety. And guilt.

By the way, the first time the country goes through a serious internal conflict, it is over guilt about that money when it starts coming in. I quickly learn that the guilt is part of the responsibility that I’ve been given as the new ruler. It is unavoidable, like taxes.

There will be more guilt. So much guilt. Some of it will be so severe that the country will be undergoing constant economic sanctions. Eventually the country will have to declare bankruptcy. I will try to run the country while bankrupt for a while, which will only produce more sanctions, more guilt.

And there will be more trouble to come along, riots and disobedience so devastating that martial law will have to be imposed over my country—an intervention of military authorities due to an ongoing emergency.

Finally, there will be shame.

It will be the shame that I am failing myself as a monarch—and how ungrateful of me when so many women want to rule countries and
can’t!—and that I am failing my loving king and the king’s mother and my beautiful, supportive sister and my mother and my father and most of all the people of my country. The sweet little people who depend on me so much. Who cannot go to another country because I am theirs and they’re mine and I’ve accepted the crown without any doubt in my heart that this was precisely what I wanted.

But right now we’re in the beginning of my reign. After the crowning, the people are waiting outside my queenly tower and they are hungry, naked and somewhat angry.

The crown is a little tight on my head but I come out on the balcony and show them my breasts bursting with milk and they cheer in admiration and with voracious need, and I feel powerful and loved. I feel that I’m the right ruler of this place—there was no mistake that I’ve been chosen to do this.

Besides, if I’ve any doubt about my ability to handle the responsibility, I am told of millions of monarchs like me who have handled their little queendoms just fine. People in my own family can testify—and readily do—how ruling a country comes naturally for my gender. There’s no magic to it. Sure, there will be mistakes, but it’s expected that my natural instincts will overrule selfishness, helplessness, fear … alcoholism. My strong will to do well as a ruler will be enough to protect me from the darkness that’s engulfing my heart.

The natural instincts will ensure that I will not poison the food source for the people who depend on me. That I will not let it out into the sea (the sink) and give my people artificially manufactured substitute. That I will not endanger my people in any way—even if it’s just because of the egomaniacal prohibition: the fact that they are flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood.

But mostly because of the deep, instant, desperate love I have for my people. After all, I love my country. I would die for my country.

After all, I knew that I would be a ruler of it one day, that the people would depend on me. That it would be expected of me to handle this responsibility. That I would know exactly what to do because we, women, just do. My mother-in-law just knew what to do and my own mother supposedly knew exactly what to do. And even my grandmother knew what to do even though she had been secretly shipped away to a sanatorium for two years, after giving birth to her own country, for something known as “melancholic nature.” They didn’t have the term “postpartum depression” back then. And as one of the women in my family once actually said, they didn’t have the luxury of calling nonsense a psychological disorder.

I don’t know if what I’m going through as a new mother is postpartum depression. It is suggested to me more than once, and I use the term to excuse why I’m failing so much in my new role. But even that comes with guilt. Why can’t I just snap out of it? I’m even taking medication—Prozac—to help me deal with depression, but it doesn’t seem to help because I keep deteriorating anyway and postpartum depression sounds like a luxurious term to me too, a luxurious excuse to cover what I deeply believe to be a moral failing.

When I found out I was pregnant I knew right away that I wanted to have this child. I didn’t tell my boyfriend for a while because the child wasn’t planned, and I felt guilt over that as well. I had the guilt over trapping him—I didn’t plan to trap him, but my body had other plans.

My boyfriend was a fulfilled man, a successful man, a man who was quite vocal about not wanting children, a man who enjoyed going out with his friends and having a fabulous life of semi-bachelordom.

When I finally told him about the pregnancy (middle of the night, my eyes suddenly springing open out of fear, words spilling out: If you don’t want it, I’ll be fine on my own), he was happy and scared. Mostly happy.

I was grateful and overwhelmed that he wanted to have a family with me. Me with my imperfections, my depressions, and even me with my then-dormant addiction hanging over us like an ever-present shadow.

I found his love and joy generous and I told myself to not screw it up.

I wanted to be what he wanted me to be—a good mom, a worthy partner, a perfect ruler for the country that he had accidentally given me.

And every time I’d fail (the baby, him, me, our royal family), I’d feel remorse so great that it weighed me down like a crown made out of lead. The remorse crushed any expectations that he or I would have had about my ability to rule properly.

Metaphors aside, all he wanted and all I wanted for me was to just be normal, to just be a healthy, fulfilled woman who cares for her child. All I had to do was be a mother to a little baby. That is all. Just a mother.

Easing into the expectation.

Easing into motherhood.

I
t is now July, a month after my son was born. I’m having drinks with a new friend who wants to help me out with my artistic project.

Nice guy.

I used to be an alcoholic, I tell him, when I order another round for us, but I’m not now. This is my day off, that’s all. I never get days off now. The baby. It’s a lot of work, as they say.

It is, he agrees.

But I don’t really drink, I say. Not anymore—much. Not much at all. I drink just like anybody else. Not much at all.

He nods, Sure.

Because it’s not
that much
. It’s not that big of a deal, really. Can I even call this a relapse? A drinking problem? Please. Do I sit behind a Dumpster with a paper bag? No. I do not sit with a paper bag behind a Dumpster. Do I fall down, break legs? No, I do not fall down.

I don’t fall asleep on park benches, don’t leave the stroller in stores with Frankie forgotten in it. I don’t shout and throw purses at my boyfriend in a drunken rage. I’m nice. I wash. I wash Frankie. I don’t forget about his formula if I have a little too much. But I almost never do have a little too much.