Drunk Mom (30 page)

It’s okay, I say to the voice behind me.

The drunken man points to himself and announces that this is his country. He says, I’m Native American, pure blood, and this is my people’s land. This is my country.

Silly drunken Indian, I think. You can have your country, I’m glad I’m not from your country.

And today is my birthday, he hollers. It’s September twenty-sixth and it’s my birthday.

Fuck your birthday too.

He tries to high-five a little black kid, You and me. We know what
it’s like—he keeps saying to the kid, who looks scared—we know what it’s like to be with the whiteys.

I wish I could stop listening to this and just ignore it. Everything inside me wants to shout at this man, tell him what a sad loser he is. And I’m angry at myself for having the thoughts I’m having. I’m a racist piece of shit, fine. But this man, seriously. This stupid loser man.

He’s finally walking away from me, pushing through people, still screaming about whiteys and about his people’s land. I wish for him to trip, for the subway to stop abruptly to make it so. Then it occurs to me that the drunken Indian and me—whitey—we just may be from the same country after all, no matter what either of us says. And I don’t hate him so much anymore.

When I get to the meeting, I run into Chris. Chris is with Cara. I remember now that Cara used to be Chris’s sponsor, a kind of mentor that people in AA have to hook up with to guide them through the twelve-step stuff. I haven’t seen Chris in more than a year. I haven’t seen her since our photo shoot. She looks great. I’m surprised she looks great because of what I’ve heard. An almost-overdose, some crazy boyfriend who’d beat her up.

We greet each other nervously, her giant green eyes flashing from underneath heavy bangs. I have a little bit of a cold so I say to both her and Cara that I can’t hug. Fuck that, I don’t care, says Chris, and her thin arms wrap around me. Even though it’s warm she’s wearing the same enormously long winter scarf that her head sinks right into. The scarf is now torn in a few places and dull-looking. Still. I can’t believe she has held on to this scarf through all that she’s been through.

We hug each other as if we were a family. As if we were a family and
haven’t seen each other for decades—as if one of us, or both of us, were at war the whole time. Now we are safe.

I run into another ghost once I go inside the building. It’s Rob, the AA Rob from the harm reduction group, the snake-story Rob. He looks the same, like a middle-aged woman.

He says, It’s nice to see you here, stranger.

I hate that I’ve run into him and I roll my eyes and say, Yeah, I’ve caved in.

He shrugs and I can just hear him saying something, something preachy but well-meaning.

I gotta go. I think I’m in the wrong room, I say.

I’m not in the wrong room but I can’t imagine sitting in the same room as him. I know it would be good for me, healthy for my ego and all that, but I can’t stand his eager, earnest eyes. I walk away.

I see him again afterwards. He is walking toward me. Stupid guy.

I think of turning away but then I stop. I remember something. I want to tell him Frankie is okay. I suddenly want him to know this. I want the world to know this. I will take out an ad in the newspaper to let the world know.

Cara yells they’re leaving now.

I touch Rob on the sleeve, My son, he’s doing well.

If it wasn’t for my kids I wouldn’t be here, he says and nods.

Me too. I’ll see you around, I say. Thank you.

He nods again, Thank
you
.

I
t’s because I’m a first child.

Because my mother had trouble conceiving and the whole family was waiting for me like some kind of a messiah. And when I was born it was even bigger than they thought it would be because I cried and cried and people forgot that this is what happens.

And after I was born, my beloved grandmother went crazy. She had a history of it. The crazy hung in the air, invisible but there, like an afterimage of smoke. It got lost in all the real smoke that came from her room. She would go through two packs of cigarettes a day. Anxiety. Before she was taken away, I imagine her in her room, in a cloud, waiting, with madness in her hair, standing like a proud captain of a sinking ship.

It was also because after she was gone off to the mental ward, I had an accident when I was an infant. The official story is that I fell off the changing table and hit my head and one of my pupils got stuck. It remained bigger than the other. It is this way to this day.

And, as a toddler, I bit other children. Hard, aggressively. I hated them and they hated me. No one played with me. I preferred to play by myself anyway. It was because of that.

Also, because I got sick later. It was something to do with the urinary tract and we didn’t talk about it but I had to spend lots of time in the hospital undergoing painful procedures. I knew that because it happened below my waist, I had to be ashamed of my problem. No one wanted to talk about it. And I was warned enough times that I had to comply with this or the mysterious problem would be revealed to the world. I felt like a freak. Unclean. I still don’t know what was wrong.

Anyway. It’s because of that.

And because when my sister was born she almost died.

And because I read about skinny girls in magazines and decided that I was fat.

It’s also because I idolized Jim Morrison. He was a rock star. And so was I. By nature.

It’s also because I read
We Children from Bahnhof Zoo
—a memoir of a thirteen-year-old heroin addict—when I was thirteen and I thought her story was beautiful and tragic. (The author finally gets clean after her closest friends overdose and die, and after she gets tired of selling her ass to get a fix. I look her up online and read that her life was a series of relapses.
Is
. She is using right now in Amsterdam.)

It’s because I wanted to be a junkie. I wanted to be tragic. With black eyeliner running down my cheeks and fragile wrists and sores and bruises like tiny flowers in every reddish area of my body.

It’s because as a child, my mother made me rewrite the word
butterfly
a hundred times until I got all the letters following a straight line, tilting at the right angles but not too slanted, and with enough curve at the loops.

Because my father said it wasn’t even worth his time when I couldn’t get arithmetic as he sat there with me, explaining my own homework to me for hours.

Because he shouted. And because she shouted. But they also took me to art museums and my father explained what makes a good poem.

It’s because I love my parents too much. Because I saw that they’re human but I didn’t expect them to be. I expected them to be gods.

It’s because we moved to a different country when I was a teenager. I spent countless nights, paralyzed with grief, not sleeping, just replaying an imaginary scene of my grandmother left alone in the apartment that used to be ours and was now filled with the ghosts of us as children, maybe still smelling of our toys. I pictured her unfolding and refolding our kid clothes, wondering about our warm bodies that used to live inside them. I lay there in my new bed, in the new country, screaming in my head, trying to deafen the other sound in my head—of my grandmother shuffling back and forth between the rooms.

It’s because of the cocker spaniel, my first dog, that we left behind with my grandmother, that ran up to the elevator door as we were leaving with our suitcases for good. The sad, stupid dog yelped so loud I can still replay that crazed yelping if I make the memory stick long enough.

I never do make them stick long enough.

I probably drank because I could no longer make them stick or because they stuck and I got stuck.

Because I got raped. Or because I didn’t really care that I did since by that time things stopped sticking.

And also because I finally felt normal when I drank. Whatever normal was. But unlike many people I was always preoccupied with finding it.

Because I fell in love when I went back to visit the old country and because I had to leave my love. Leave again.

Because the education system failed me. I was the girl who fell through the cracks. I had student loans the size of a small continent. The more loans I had, the more I drank.

Also: the more I drank, the more in love I was. There were many relationships. All of them because. And because of all of them. Especially the last one. This one. With my boyfriend. Because of him. Because I found out he had cheated with the determined cougar when I was away in Montreal. Because of that. Because he owned up to it. Because his honesty and his love and care made me feel like I was suffocating.

That too.

Because I can be petty and resentful. I couldn’t understand how a woman could do that to another woman, especially one who just had a baby. I obsessed over this. Because of my obsessiveness. My rage.

So that too.

Because I am selfish, unable to see beyond my own wants. The urgency to soothe my internal conflicts, pain, is stronger than my accountability.

Because I got sober and I missed being drunk. I missed it the way I missed everything: with complete abandon.

And because an old lover contacted me, an old crush, really, who wanted to know if I was
me
still. He wrote he missed it so much, the old me. By then I missed me and he just happened to be there at the right moment, I mean his email was. We used to drink together. I read his old email, and all those feelings came back. I wanted to be that old me.

And because there was my best friend’s bachelorette and because I asked for a soda and the bartender said—as they always do—
Just
soda? and just like that I changed my mind. No,
vodka
and soda.

And also because I got pregnant.

Because my mother couldn’t handle it when I did. She didn’t want me to have a baby because it was wrong to have it with this man, in this country, it was the wrong baby.

Her own mother, my beloved grandma, was dying. It drove my mother crazy with worry and guilt. She desperately wanted to go back to the old country. But the would-be baby seemed to be a confirmation that we were staying here for good.

Sometimes, I would pick up the phone wanting to ask my mother: Was it like this for you when you were pregnant? Did you feel like this? What did you do when? What happens after?

Then I would put the phone down. I couldn’t call. I remembered. I was told not to call. It was because of that.

Because my mother didn’t quite succeed in poisoning me with her own guilt. But I felt poisoned regardless. I felt toxic with rage.

Because I held it together and told myself I will hold it together until I give birth to this child and then I will murder every single perpetrator, starting with myself.

Because of Frankie. Because I couldn’t handle all the love.

This is the archaeological dig of my addiction.

It’s what I think about as we drive along the same grey highways that we did on the way to rehab. This time, however, we’re on the way to a hotel where we will stay for a few days as a family, the three of us, just for fun. Frankie is in the back in his car seat asleep. It’s Christmas.

We talk about my drinking.

I don’t think the
why
is important. I say this as softly as I can.

I know that my boyfriend has every right to ask me about the whys. In his world it has to be sorted, figured out—then you can move on.

Why?

I don’t list my explanations. He knows a lot of these explanations already. He has lived through a lot of them with me. I could list them again but I don’t believe that any of them are truly, fully the reason why.

This is not an episode of
Intervention
. Life isn’t like that. There’s no one event, no line that I crossed that I can pinpoint, that has made me an addict. I was always floating and the gravity was pulling me down and then I touched the soft spot in my life and fell right through. And then it happened again. And again.

I try to be gentle with my boyfriend when he asks these questions—why, why, why—but I can’t lie to him about the whys. I’m scared to answer, scared to disappoint him with my answer.

I don’t know why, I say.

But it’s an interesting thing to think about, he says.

It is.

I know, I could just lie. Just tell him it was one of those things. Give him that relief. Say it was the shameful medical procedures, the email from the crush, the stress during pregnancy. Anything.

It was anything, really.

I
t’s been seven months since I got sober. I meet with Chris for a coffee. We talk. We talk about lying to each other. I tell her about waiting for her in front of the liquor store that day we took photos. She says she got on the bus and rode the full route before getting off and going to the liquor store in the market where she used to live. She doesn’t live there anymore.

She talks about trying heroin for the first time.

Why doesn’t she live in the market anymore?

She shrugs. She is homeless now, couch-surfing, staying with her mother when things get really bad.

Today, she’s got five days. Again.

Up close I see that her face along the jawline is marred by tiny scabs, scars.

I’m just a fuckup, she keeps saying.

No, you’re not.

I am. I don’t play music anymore. I never used those pictures because I never made another album. So. I’m a fuckup.

Chris.

It’s okay. I’m okay with that.

You’ve got five days. You’re not a fuckup.

Five days. Yay me.

Five days? Do you know how hard it was to get twenty-four hours? Impossible. It was impossible. How do you get five twenty-four hours? I don’t know. I don’t know how I got to seven months. In a way, my seven months is less than five days.

Maybe, she says.

In sobriety actual time can be—and often is—irrelevant. It is not linear. It stretches, elongating one breath that can last for eternities, and then suddenly contracts, squeezing eternities into one sober breath. Five days is longer than five years for an addict.