Drunk Mom (9 page)

And do I always succeed in not breastfeeding my son while under the influence?

No.

I cannot with full certainty say that I always manage to wait enough time before I put him up to my breast after my mandatory nine to fourteen hours of rest. Sometimes less time passes.

I try very hard, but trying very hard is just that: trying very hard.

I try very hard.

And there are a few times I am acutely aware of less time passing but I breastfeed him because of my lying—I know that people around me won’t accuse me of drinking the night before if I breastfeed him.

I don’t ask for help because I am scared. Also too proud. Admitting I am in trouble doesn’t mean asking for help—it means asking to be shunned. Am I not the queen of this country? Don’t the people trust me with ruling it responsibly and with love? Don’t they ask me to stop being
destructive? Am I not given a hundred chances? Asking for help means there will be consequences and they will be dire.

My mind, fogged with drink, anxiety and mental illness, tells me the worst. For example, I often envision my boyfriend packing my bags, kicking me out to live on the street. Seeing police cars on the street can mean I am about to go to jail. My sister’s worried mouth means she is secretly plotting to have me locked up in a psych ward.

This is not me.

Me? I am just a mom.

I want so badly to be a good mom.

Please, don’t get mad, look at me, I’m doing it, I’m doing it—I’m being a mom!

And I hope that maybe they are thinking: We’re not mad. We’re not sending her away. She is. A mom. She wouldn’t do
that
to her child, would she?

She would.

She does.

I’m guilty. If not of murder, I’m guilty of manslaughter. As the legal definition has it: “It is not always obvious whether a killing is murder or manslaughter. Many times, the difference is based on what the accused was thinking at the time of the death, which can be extremely difficult to prove in court.”

I’m turning myself in. I’m turning myself in because I’m pathetic and because of another paradox: I am trying to be a responsible drunk mom and I fail at that too.

So the other containers I often get rid of along with the empties are the bottles of formula that I buy on my walks to the local drugstores.

Officially, we have cans of premixed formula at home, but I am so paranoid about alcohol getting into the breast milk (always trying, always failing, always guilty over failing) that I buy extras all the time.
I don’t want my boyfriend to see how many extras I go through. He would ask questions.

My chequing account is often near zero. The formula is pricey. I think of how pricey it is when I buy it. I don’t think about my chequing account being near zero when I’m in the liquor store. I don’t think how pricey vodka is when I buy it. Priorities.

Secret extras of Good Start in the fridge behind vegetables.

Secret singles of Good Start in my son’s diaper drawer.

Empties in plastic bags. On the bottom of the stroller. Breeding in my closet.

I can’t keep away from bottles. I obsess over them. I am the Howard Hughes of bottles.

I am the Howard Hughes of secrets.

O
ne night in September, my sister comes over to help with the baby. She is in her final year at school, so her schedule is hectic, but I appreciate any help I can get. I’m feeling lonely too. Even though I’d never admit it to myself, that’s what it is, loneliness.

He’s asleep, I tell my sister. So no worries, I say, channelling someone, not sure who. Someone who worries not.

I offer her some orange juice; have a glass of it too. I have to keep a close eye on my glass. I mixed my juice with white wine earlier. She would never grab it and try to smell it. Still, I keep a close eye on the glass.

You okay? my sister says and looks at me in that way she looks at me.

Of course I’m okay. I just said no worries, no?

She says nothing.

I’m fine, I say one more time.

I love my sister. She’s so awesome. She should stop writing me letters though about how much my relapse hurts her.

Okay, she says.

Listen, there are no secrets with me. Everything’s out in the open. We can talk about it. I want to talk about it. I want to bring it up. Right now.

She says right now may not be the best time.

Why? Now is as good time as any.

She looks at me in that way she looks at me, again.

She’s younger than me. I practically raised her.

I just don’t understand it, she says. I want to understand.

Understand. What’s there to understand.

She says nothing. Then: I should probably go.

Wait. Wait, I almost scream. I’ve got an idea.

I run around pulling books off shelves looking for all the addiction memoirs and that book about neurological causes of addiction.

I want to read some important passages from this book to her, but can’t find the good stuff about rats and cocaine. The pages seem to be all smeared with bouncy letters. The paragraphs are wavy as if melting off the paper.

Maybe she will have more luck with it.

I lay the book on my sister’s lap and tell her to look for it. Find the stuff about rats and cocaine, I urge her. Check the index in the back for rats and cocaine. Read the whole book. Have it. You can borrow it. No, have it. It’s yours.

She says she has no time to read huge books about addiction. She is in grad school.

Hold that thought, I tell her and run upstairs.

Upstairs, it is quiet. The baby is sleeping.

I check on him to make sure.

I also check in the drawer where I keep the diapers.

Once I check on the baby and behind the diapers, I run back downstairs to talk at my sister some more. I cut her off when she starts talking gibberish again. When am I going to get better? What’s wrong?

Let me finish, let me finish, I keep saying to her, as if “let me finish” was some kind of abracadabra that would give me an infinite right to go on and on and make her shut up.

Somewhere in the back of my drunk’s reptile brain I know that I’m being obnoxious, but I have so much to teach her. As her older and more experienced sister it truly is my duty to teach her about life. She has to learn about addictions. I am probably an addict. Though I’m almost sober now. But I want someone to understand. Is this too much to ask?

I speak in capital letters, feeling my conviction fill me up as if I were a balloon. I mention the rats and the cocaine again because I don’t think she got it the first time. It is imperative that she understands how those things work.

So. The rats and cocaine.

The rats that lived in dire conditions were way more likely than the rats that lived in the so-called Rat Park (Rat Park. I remember the name of the experiment, so I shout it) to self-administer drugs. Drugs didn’t cause addiction. The past did. Circumstances.

I grab the book from her lap.

The text seems more cooperative now. I even find the quote I’ve been looking for and kept missing for some reason. I read it triumphantly to my sister: “Only severely distressed animals, like severely distressed people, will relieve their distress pharmacologically if they can.”

My sister says, Okay, and then, out of the blue: Are you drinking? Are you drunk now?

You’re such an idiot, I tell her.

She really is.

I run upstairs, back into the baby’s room. I fish the mickey out of the diaper drawer—it is almost empty now, crap—and take another swig.

T
here is a vague idea in my head about a woman that I want to emulate. In my delusion, I believe that I’m qualified to practise being her, precisely because I drink.

This woman, she travels first-class and stays at boutique hotels. She is unapproachable, on the verge of being mistaken for a former model, or, if you aren’t entirely convinced about her beauty, the way she carries herself at least suggests she’s important. This woman is very much in control of herself and her confidence is natural, not cocky, but if you find it a bit cocky she certainly doesn’t care what you think.

This is the woman who’s going to Montreal for a fun weekend. It’s fall but it’s still warm out, perfect weather for sophisticated travel. I booked her trip months ago. It was a birthday gift from my boyfriend who is staying home with the baby while the woman travels.

Walking, I make her legs line up one behind the other, making her pelvis bounce just a tad too much. You have to look once you notice her—you have to look one more time to make sure you aren’t missing something. And then you are left feeling that you did, indeed, miss something.

She walks into the lobby of the hotel carrying a small, sexy suitcase packed only with a little black dress, high-quality stockings, lingerie and stilettos. In the lobby, the woman gives the receptionist my boyfriend’s credit card and in exchange receives a card key and complimentary art-museum passes given to all the guests.

The elevator going up plays tranquil music. The walls are wallpapered and mirrored; there is information about yoga classes, the spa and other services. It is unclear whether there is a pool in the hotel.

I look back at the woman’s reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are a little tired and there are bags underneath them. The baby had been waking up throughout the night for the last few nights straight, prior to this trip. Four, five times a night. The breasts feel full of milk.
My
breasts feel full of milk. I milked myself on the train earlier but the milk is now back, expanding inside them, probably starting to leak out and right into my brand-new lace bra.

And like that, I am no longer her, I am me again, a mom with leaky tits.

The hotel room is a heavy-wood wallpapered coffin with an enormous bed. I unpack the little suitcase and check out the tray of heavily priced objects in shiny packages on the desk. Dental dam? Never seen one in a hotel before. Never seen one, period.

I sit on the bed and watch a show about renovating houses while I milk myself.

After I shower and dress, I’m ready to be
her
again.

I take some pictures of her. On the camera’s viewscreen they show just the right amount of blurry gold hair, black dress, fuchsia tights and crossed legs against the dark bed covers. It all seems intriguing, illicit. Blurry enough to miss the dark circles under the eyes.

She walks out of the hotel in search of a bar. Behind the hotel, the streets seem populated with drunk children. All the bars she passes look horrible. Even the more elegant ones are occupied by the sort of male who likes to show off the top of his chest and the sort of longhaired female who is often blond and tanned as if she spent her summers in a warm place where the air smells of coconut.

There is loud music everywhere and people are puking on street corners.

The men catcall and look at the woman even with all the fresh flesh around her. She wants to be left alone, however, so she walks briskly and grows more and more frustrated, trying to find the perfect place to drink.

There is, finally, a horrible but relatively empty dark pub where I find a quiet corner and knock down four pints in a row. I’ve never had this kind of beer, Amsterdam Blonde; beer isn’t exactly what
she
should be drinking but
I
am a beer drinker so I make her disappear. She can come back tomorrow when I have more time to plan what to do with her and her sophisticated tastes. The TV is on in the corner, there are American accents all around me, and nobody is looking at me, except for the bartender—which is all that matters anyway.

I drink the beer fast. I don’t want to stay here for too long—there’s too much to do outside.

But I’m in the wrong part of town to do things. I should be closer to St-Denis. I’m not familiar with the city but surely I can find a place
more interesting than this pub. So I leave, and wander the awful streets around Rue Ste-Catherine, looking inside bars, trying to find one where I can finish off my evening, drink myself sober.

I finish my evening at a Korean restaurant where I have to buy food to go with my beer. I ask for soybeans. The kid serving me seems scornful when I order a third beer. He asks me in broken English if I want anything else to eat besides soybeans.

Why? Is he worried about my health? I hate these stupid soybeans but no, I don’t want anything else. And I hate this beer, as a matter of fact. And this restaurant. Does he think I want to be here? Really? That out of the entire, beautiful city of Montreal, I picked this basement to spend the rest of my night—here, where nobody seems to be speaking English?

No more food, I’m fine, I bark.

He blinks at all of this and bows his head and walks away.

I’m alone at the table. The other four tables are jammed with beautiful Asian kids giggling and flirting among themselves, ignoring me completely. Perhaps they are giggling at me the entire time.

The next morning I wake up sore and angry at the world in my ridiculous huge bed. The sheets are stained with milk.

The second night she is much more prepared. First of all, she bought a nice bottle of wine earlier, which she drinks in the hotel room while watching a TV show about adopted children reuniting with their biological parents. It’s a good show.