Drunk Mom (8 page)

Later, we do an exercise where we write down Trigger Situations and Solutions for how to deal with them.

My triggers: morning, evening, happy, sad, nothing, something.

You know, Lisa the liar blurts out, when I feel my cravings coming on I can just reach for a book. Not that I have cravings anymore but when I had them, I’d just read a short story by Alice Munro or something like that and poof, the craving is gone. But now with the baby I don’t have as much time but I may still, you know, read a couple of lines here and there if I’m feeling a little anxious or something.

There isn’t a writer in this world amazing enough to kill my cravings.

Another of the Robs tells us that he’s about to become a father. His wife sent him here, he says, because she doesn’t want a drunk to be her child’s father. He’s not sure if he’s got a drinking problem. The counsellor asks him to talk about his cravings, how often does he have them.

Once a day? he says.

She says, And for how long?

For as long as I’m awake, I answer her in my head.

He shrugs and says, I don’t know, a couple of minutes.

Clearly satisfied, she writes it down in her notes. I wonder what she does with these notes later—does she translate all the numbers into averages and draw absurdly colourful pie charts at home?

And home, what is her home like? Is it a loud home with children’s art on the walls? Does she get laid? Is there a guy or a girl who kisses her on her serious mouth, someone who likes to grab her from the back as she passes by and who likes to mess up the big bow on her pristine blouse?

During break, we go outside, just like you would if you were taking a course and it was a break and you needed a smoke. From outside, the addictions building looks like something on a university campus—nice yellow brick and glass and benches all around. If you weren’t from around here, you could certainly be fooled into thinking this is a school.
Until you look closer at the smokers and the people sitting on those benches and notice how they suck a little too hard on their cigarettes, or how their hair is matted, their mouths move without speaking, and the rounds of their irises flicker, or the opposite, stay almost completely still.

As soon as we’re outside, I go up to almost-daddy Rob. I want to say
something
about being careful with the almost-baby and about my own relapse and how—I don’t really know what. How hard it is? How strange it is? Either way, I don’t really know why I want to talk to Rob and I don’t really know what exactly my intentions are. It’s not like anything I’ll say will change his life, will sober him up, not like he and his wife will be able to return the baby to the store where they got him. I have no words of wisdom or warning for him but I stand there struggling, trying to come up with the right words, feeling like it’s my responsibility to let him know everything about babies.

Forget sleeping, I say, lamely, and he pretends to laugh.

I relapsed shortly after I had my son, I add.

He looks at me, his face suddenly not friendly at all.

That’s not what I’m trying to say. And it’s not like you will relapse, right? Since you still drink. I mean, you can’t relapse, right? Shit. Because you don’t have a problem. No, I didn’t mean it like that. Sorry.

No, it’s okay, he says, but I can tell that he’s pissed.

I want to do something to make up for my gaffe but I don’t know what.

I wonder if he wants to sleep with me. Sure he wants to sleep with me. I could make an effort and flirt. But that’s not it.

At last, it occurs to me. I offer him baby things.

I have everything, I say. A bouncy chair, a mobile, some awesome sleepers. You can have his tub, too. He doesn’t need a tub, I mean he does but he’s almost too big for it. And the mobile is just hanging there, right? It’s a sheep mobile. I mean, it’s little felt sheep with bells hanging
off the branches. It’s cute but he doesn’t even use most of his stuff, I say, and in my mind strip my son’s room of his things. I’m trying to be tougher than I really am. I am not that tough at all.

I think how it’s true that Frankie possibly doesn’t give a damn about the mobile, really, though how would I know what he thinks—he just lies there.

He just lies there?

No. I don’t really think that. Even in my thinking I’m trying to show myself up. He doesn’t just lie there. And now I have another thought: maybe the mobile is really special. Maybe it’s so special that it’s like god to him. The little felt sheep spinning slowly, the tinkling of bells creating a whole universe in front of my son’s eyes. How would I ever know? I wouldn’t know.

Rob looks at me without saying anything. I can’t figure out the expression on his face.

Please speak, I ask in my head. But nothing.

Which is why I keep listing things: A milk warmer. It’s pretty nifty. But we never use it. You don’t have time to use most of this shit. When you’re drunk ha ha ha. Shit, I mean, you would.
You
would have the time.

Okay.

Okay, I say back. Then I fall silent.

We finish our cigarettes in silence.

Well, I’ll ask the wife if we need anything, he says, stiffly, and, stiffly, walks away.

The group meets for five weeks and I’m the only person who doesn’t meet her goal (maximum eight drinks a week) and doesn’t graduate. I have learned all of the program’s tactics. I did all of the paper homework. On paper I am educated. And I must believe in magic because
I expected to be transformed simply by taking the program. Yet, off paper, I fail every test.

I’m offered the one-on-one meetings with the thin-lipped counsellor, which I attend twice, both times with the baby so that I have the excuse to leave sooner.

T
hough I have taken the course on self-improvement and harm reduction, it seems that my life continues to get more complicated, difficult to manage.

For example, getting rid of the bottles becomes an issue.

Somehow there are always too many of them, and even though I’m quite disciplined about their removal, they keep showing up unexpectedly, as if they had been breeding somewhere.

Instead of the one that I remember, suddenly three, and a plastic screw-top from a mickey, emerge from the depths of my closet. Underneath the shoe rack there is another one. Sometimes the unexpected squashed face of a beer can will reveal itself.

I put the bottles and cans and caps that I find into a plastic bag and I shove that into the diaper bag, cover it with the package of wipes to make sure
no one—the boyfriend—will find it. I can’t get caught with the empties.

Because there are no empties.

I’m not drinking. Despite being a Centre for Addiction and Mental Health alumna now and despite the bottles, there is a part of me that tells myself this: I’m not drinking. And I believe myself most of the time, truly.

Besides garbage cans, I leave the plastic bags in bushes, recycling bins in front of houses, public bathrooms. I’m the reverse of the people you sometimes see in the morning with shopping carts filled with glass, looking in the garbage, the bins. If I were better organized I could probably find my own bottle collector, someone to relieve me of this little chore.

Sometimes, when I’m walking, I turn right into a private driveway as if I were about to visit the people who live here. I stop, crouch beside the stroller as if to tie a shoe or check on the baby. In one well-oiled move, I grab the plastic bag and lay it on the ground like some kind of mutant egg, and then get up, turn around and walk away.

I can’t properly relax until I get rid of the empties. I can sense them, as if they were embedded in me somewhere, their presence pulsating underneath the surface.

I try to never repeat the disposal site, and as time goes on I have to walk for miles before I have a chance to get rid of my empties. Occasionally, miraculously, I forget about them, and when I reach into the diaper bag to get my son’s bottle of milk and my hand brushes against the rustle of the plastic, I panic.

And I also wish my hand to wilt right then and there.

The city installs a new type of garbage can to replace the old bins. They fill up extremely quickly, and by mid-afternoon trash is being shat out of the holes right onto the ground. The bins are often found near bus or streetcar stops, dirtying up everything around them. You always have to squash your garbage to get it inside. Even with meticulously crushed cans or slick, flat shapes of mickeys tightly wrapped in plastic, you can’t just slip them in. I often give up, afraid that someone will notice my struggle. Streetcars keep coming, with people trickling out of them, making me jumpy.

But a few times I don’t walk away. I wait for whatever streetcar to start moving and then I take out the plastic bag, perversely slowly, and start stuffing it into the garbage. Doing this, I look up, stare right back at them, the people behind the glass of the streetcar.

A few times I even take the bottles out of the plastic—inspired by my own shittiness, perhaps I want to shame myself further: Yes, it’s an empty bottle of wine you’re looking at. And yes, I’m throwing it out here, in public, instead of at home. And yes, that’s a baby in the stroller.

The streetcars keep on moving.

And later, once all of the evidence—the bottles—is gone, I will again tell myself that none of this had happened and that there’s nothing wrong with me.

There are other bottles too that I have to get rid of. In my sad world these bottles are inexplicably related to the first kind of bottles. Because of the first type, I end up buying a lot of formula.

Premixed, it comes in cans, or, for more money, you can buy it in twist-top glass bottles. The bottled brand is Good Start, and I don’t know if I should take its name as the biggest irony or the biggest salvation.

I don’t like using Good Start but I use it often. I use it when my milk
turns to poison and when I haven’t been able to save enough of my own supply.

I buy it all the time just in case anyway.

I’m sick. I’m responsible.

I’d always planned to breastfeed exclusively. But that was before I relapsed. When I still had some idea of how this was supposed to look: A baby’s face pressed against the swelling chest. Beatific smile on my face.

Indeed, I loved the idea of being able to be the only food source to my child. And it was never discussed that his feeding would happen any other way. I was given books with titles like
The Womanly Art of Breastfeeding
.

The doctors suggested signing up for breastfeeding classes.

I spent the first three weeks of my son’s life grinding my teeth in pain from cracked, bleeding nipples because I neglected to read the books and I wasn’t paying attention in classes.

Once my son latched on properly, however, it was heavenly. I had experienced pleasure so deep, it felt pre-orgasmic. With every gulp, we were re-establishing our connection outside of the womb, and it was the most intimate, sacred relationship I’ve ever had. A self-proclaimed agnostic, I was convinced I could hear the angels sing when he fed. His mouth was a portal to the universe.

So I went ahead and I destroyed that connection.

When my drinking becomes a regular occurrence, I start looking up charts online to figure out how much time it takes for the alcohol to
leave my body. Not a lot of alcohol from each drink gets into breast milk, but babies are small and the drinks are many.

With my body weight and the amounts I consume, I calculate I need nine to fourteen hours before the alcohol completely clears out of my system. Sometimes more.

I let a lot of the milk into the sink in an exercise referred to as “pump and dump” by mommies online. Mommies who perhaps have had one too many Green Appletinis at a Christmas party. Mommies who, I presumed, would never consider integrating “pump and dump” into their daily schedule.

I buy breast pumps. Yes, plural—I buy three.

I also learn how to milk myself by hand.

I figure out a few magic hours during the day when I can do it and I store the milk in the diaper bag for later. I bring earlier-prepared bottles with me on my walks.

I hide those too. I hide everything.

Furthermore, I set secret alarms on my laptop to let me know when the time is up. Once my milk is safe to be consumed, I feed my son. With Good Start to supplement him, he is probably the most overfed baby in the city.

But if he is too full and refuses to eat, I save the milk for later. I become very good at expressing milk in bathrooms of coffee shops, my nipple pressed against the plastic of the baby bottle, my fingers squeezing in the correct engorged places, the bottle, mercifully, filling up.

Stopping breastfeeding means admitting to the fact that there is a problem and that I am failing as a mother.

It is harder for me to deny to myself that I am a premeditated drinker. That although I don’t intend to drink, if alcoholism was murder I’d be charged on the first degree.

But I continue to engage in doublethink. There’s a problem no there isn’t a problem there is a problem no there isn’t.

In the safe hours of the day, I breastfeed my son confidently and happily. Those are the only times when I feel like a full-on parent. I am the parent I expected myself to be. That everyone expects me to be. This is my only period of grace.