Drunk Mom (6 page)

He’s always been a social person—drinking Scotch with his men friends in private clubs, bar-hopping, flirting with PR girls, speaking at media events, playing poker till dawn. He’s even picked up a new hobby—DJing—and came home once at 5 a.m., explaining that Mildred insisted he drop by for a nightcap afterwards.

I’m cross-eyed from a jaw-grindingly sober, sleepless night when he stumbles home that morning, but I say nothing because I’m already plotting how I’m going to get over this disappointment by drinking.

He tells me about his escapades because I ask. I joke that I’m living vicariously through him. I’m sure he doesn’t tell me everything. Which is okay because I don’t tell him everything. I don’t tell him anything.

Because of my drinking I consciously avoid conflict and confrontation. I no longer ask about his coffees with women who “needed help getting into the magazine industry.”

In the past, this sort of eagerness (to help) often created tensions in our relationship, but now that I’ve secrets of my own, I’ve become generous and permissive, often even encouraging his socializing: What is Liz up to these days? Yes, I really do feel bad about Mildred’s ex-husband being a dick, I think you should call her back.

Instead of focusing on my boyfriend’s intriguing, socially devouring life, I should probably pay closer attention to mine. Life, that is—my simple, socially isolated life.

I need to sort myself out. Before I screw things up with the boyfriend or hurt myself badly enough to go beyond the bruises.

It is almost the end of August and I have had a continuous string of hollow nights and there may be clues everywhere, like puzzle pieces, but I can’t put them together into anything coherent because there are too many blanks in between. The blanks trump whatever narrative I try to come up with.

This is because I’m a blackout drinker,
almost
always have been, and now that the blackouts are here—they are
always
here now—I start to feel a little concerned. As it was in the past, I am amused and worried about the person that takes over when I check out. She looks like me except that her eyes are gone. Replaced by marbles. Her legs are mine but the knees are inside-out. Her fingers dial numbers that I no longer remember; her mouth talks about things I have never even thought about or have tried not to think about. And what if perhaps she doesn’t like children? Who’s going to stop her?

I get scared enough to look up online some programs that deal with problems like mine.

Because I don’t think I’m that bad (for example, you’d never see me hiding with a bottle of vodka in my bed at two in the afternoon, now, would you?), I decide I need a mild kind of solution. Not actual rehab but maybe rehab light. Despite being aware of the distance between wanting and needing getting smaller, I still harbour the idea that I haven’t crossed the line. What kind of line I’m not entirely sure—perhaps the line that will divide the necessity from the absolute desperation.

I can’t go all the way to admitting that my drinking is a big problem. Having gone to AA meetings in the past, I know I’m not capable of that kind of commitment. Right now, I don’t even meet the only requirement of AA membership: a desire to stop drinking.

At this point, I still doublethink myself into agreeing that I only need a little adjustment to get back to feeling normal.

I don’t know if I really need a program that deals with addictions—I wouldn’t go that far—but at the same time, just in case, I know that I could do something to learn to manage better, to perhaps train my body to only want a bit—a can of lemon-tinted beer or two, no more—and to not disappoint me with another blackout.

So I’m looking for a commitment I could adhere to once a week tops, something I could explain—to myself, mostly—as a social thing, a thing I do to get away from the baby. Sort of like an activity that a girlfriend would tell me to partake in, a yoga class or ballroom dancing, to get me away from the baby. Some kind of a
me
-time.

I find something that takes place once a week. It’s called the Guidance Self-Change Program, and it’s to do with “harm reduction” and the negative consequences of drug use. Self-change reads to me like improvement. Improvement is always good. This is exactly like something a person interested in
me
-time could do: improve the person.

The program is offered at the local mental hospital, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. I remember laughing over that name with friends back in journalism school: you can get the addiction or you can get the mental health. I joke to myself now that I already have one—the addiction—but I need the other one. Badly.

I think, too, how much I like the phrase “harm reduction”—it almost sounds as if this thing was supposed to teach us how to drink. Like a course.

Or not drink. I’m not entirely sure I understand, but it’s a short-term deal and that’s all I need anyway, something short-term.

Because I need to learn how to drink properly. Or not drink.

You get into the program after doing a computer test at the hospital, which asks you: Do you crave a drink at a definite time daily? Have you
ever missed a day of work because of your drinking? Do your loved ones remark on the way and/or the amount you drink? Things like that.

I have no idea if the questionnaire is set up so that it can detect you lying. But what would be the point? I answer as truthfully as I can.

After completing the questionnaire I find out that I have a problem. You only need to answer yes once to have a problem. Which is why everyone else taking the questionnaire today finds out the same thing—we all have a problem, no matter how many yeses.

All the people who passed the test—all of us who took it that day—get invited to the information session. Some guy says he said no to everything. The information-session lady says that just taking the questionnaire means you have a problem.

Of course it does.

We’re all eligible for the harm-reduction.

Congratulations—I suppose.

I’m given a pamphlet about the program and a form to fill out.

There are two ways to reduce harm and tackle the program. The first is through eradicating drinking entirely, in other words, abstinence. The second is by drinking only a maximum number of drinks at a given time. So, for example, a maximum of three drinks on one occasion and a total often drinks a week. You can set any goal amount. If you go over that amount, you haven’t met your goal.

In the Comments space on the form I’m tempted to make a lame joke about people setting their amount higher than what they’d normally drink. But I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first to say it. I leave the Comments space blank.

During the program, the group is supposed to meet once a week and do homework in between.

I’m not entirely sure what happens once you graduate, but I hope I will be cured of my problem drinking.

If you don’t meet your goal you are given some other alternatives, I’m told, one of which is meeting with the counsellor one-on-one. You can also go to an inpatient facility, a rehab, if you’re really struggling, but that, you’re assured, is an option for you to explore after everything else fails.

This sounds like a threat to me, getting sent off to an inpatient facility, and I make myself a promise, which I have no way of securing. I tell myself—full of doubt already, somewhere behind all my doublethink—that I will never get that bad.

I think of the inpatient facilities I know from stories of people in AA, or from the television shows about addicts—especially the shows about addicts. My head is full of camera shots of young women with big terrified eyes, rimmed with pink from too much crying. The camera zooming in on their faces as they’re getting whisked away to the place that will hopefully fix them but will most likely fail because forced confinement doesn’t work for those who are in the throes of wanting: wanting to get out and just
wanting
—the wanting with no end.

The promise that I cannot secure but that I make regardless once I sign up for harm reduction is that I will never be the girl with hair whipping in my face as I stare wistfully out of the window of a car taking me to rehab.

B
efore my
me
-time program starts, my boyfriend and I go on holiday by the ocean. We are staying at a cottage rental that we’ve found online. The baby is coming with us, of course.

I sing to the baby as we take off on the plane. I’m a little shaky on the plane. I don’t like flying. Plus, I haven’t had a drink in almost twenty-four hours.

The baby sleeps through the flight.

I bring a couple of mickeys with me. They are hidden at the bottom of the suitcase, behind the lining that you can open with a zipper. Suitcases were designed for liars.

I have to drink straight out of the bottle because our cottage is just one room, kitchen and dining room together, so there’s a chance of getting caught if I were to mix. That’s fine with me. More efficient this way.

If my boyfriend is inside the cottage, I have to sneak quick, brutally large gulps of pure vodka in the bathroom. I brush my teeth afterwards and put on extra deodorant so that the smells will block each other.

When the boyfriend is outside or napping, I drink with my head in the suitcase, right there behind our bed.

During the day we drive out to different beaches with the big wicker basket with the baby inside it. We are on the east coast of the East Coast and it’s different here than anywhere else I’ve been to before where there are beaches. Here, the beaches are wild, huge, with people barely scattered on them. Unlike the more populated and sunny beaches of the west side, here the weather is capricious and cool so the beach culture is minimal, no loud frat guys with coolers full of beers, never any bikini-model girls. There is lots of fog. If you see people, usually it’s just an elderly, spry couple walking hand-in-hand looking like an ad for a retirement home, or a few local families: sluggish children and their tired moms smoking, not swimming or walking. My boyfriend and I joke—in our big-city snobbishness—that they’re just waiting till it’s time to go home and eat their lunch hot dogs.

Sometimes there are local teenage surfers, usually boys, who come out even in sweater-and-raincoat weather and throw themselves right in the middle of the black suicidal waves that are frightening to even look at.

There are some beaches on the east coast where there are no people at all, and a few times we catch ourselves driving by various patches of sand looking for the most populated ones—sometimes we miss having people around. But most of the time we don’t crave company at all, and we are happy setting up our small camp in the pale desert, with the wicker basket on the pure white sand, the ocean open and dark before us and a cold breeze always there under all the sun.

The baby naps and I nap a lot, mostly sleeping off my mini-hangovers. They’re not real hangovers. I may just for once be getting genuinely tired with all the baby care and sneaking around. My boyfriend makes a lot of comments about how we’re finally able to get proper rest far away from the city.

The weather is nice most of the time. It brings out the teenage surfers riding nonchalantly on boogie boards and probably praying for some kind of a storm to wipe all of us out, fat moms, and the few tourists, and for the waves to rise again.

A few times during the holiday I manage to buy some booze when we go grocery shopping. I tell my boyfriend I’ll meet him inside the grocery store but instead I follow him to the liquor store first. He’s a social drinker and likes his beer or wine with dinner.

As I follow him, the baby is rocked to sleep in his Snugli by my catlike moves. I hide behind SUVs in the parking lot. Then I tiptoe through the sliding door into the liquor store entrance.

My boyfriend never looks behind him. The baby never makes a noise. I don’t get caught.

Once my boyfriend leaves the liquor store, I slip inside.

Later, I pretend to run into the boyfriend somewhere in the cereal aisle, the newly purchased, full mickey safely tucked inside the diaper bag.

I dispose of empty mickey bottles in the bathrooms of back-road diners.

I never breastfeed when I drink. I make up some lie about nipples chafing. The baby is fed formula every other night. I drink every other night.

When I don’t drink, I think about it.

I go through the day in a half-daze, thinking about it.

Because I don’t drink as much as I would at home and I generally don’t get too hungover after drinking, only once do I wake up sick enough to vomit into the toilet. When I was in my twenties, this used to be a point of pride. I’d translate from Polish the adage about being tough like a horse.

But that morning I wake up and it turns out I’m a very small pony. My stomach is upset, my skull is a vise to my pickled brain. Everything is squeezing from inside, begging to be expelled.

My boyfriend and the baby are still asleep in the bedroom when this happens. Just in case, I puke over my fist to mask the sound.

That day I sleep extra long on the beach. I forget the sunscreen and the sun is so intense, the redness comes on almost right away. My boyfriend is passed out beside me; the baby is in the wicker basket. We could just lie here on this nice beach and burn to a crisp, all three of us.