Knowing that stuff doesn’t make me happy is one thing; unloading much of the less-obvious excess is another. If I were being honest with myself, I would have to admit that there are several things—possibly tens of thousands of them, which are ridiculously organized and meticulously categorized, but still—in my house that absolutely, unequivocally should be donated or disposed of right this very instant. These include but are not limited to candles that have burned down to the little metal wick plate at the bottom (yes, the jar still smells delicious if I stick my nose down into it, but come on); the shampoo bottle that had one-sixteenth of an ounce of product left in it when I bought and immediately started using a replacement; old toothbrushes (conceivably I could use these to scrub my grout, but I don’t, and even if I did, one would suffice, so why do I have thirty-seven of them?); misfire makeup I’ve had for eons and never liked anyway (that stuff’s only got a shelf life of about six months before it turns into a bacterial bachelor party); the manuals to appliances I no longer own—and even ones I do, because it’s not like I ever need them, but if I did, I’m sure I could find them online; warped, sauce-stained Tupperware with missing lids; ripped underwear and stray, mateless socks; dozens of dry cleaning hangers idling limply under otherwise empty plastic; toys, games, and puzzles that are missing a critical part; and my children’s baby teeth. (My mother saved all of mine in a plastic rain bonnet container and later gave them to me. Why do we do this? I think we can all agree that disengaged body parts are never, ever meant to be saved.*)
But there are other things that aren’t so easily chucked. Letters from old boyfriends, my grade school uniform and high school cheerleading skirt, an art journal I kept in college, plans my dad drew for the bathroom my husband and I never added to the house we sold more than a decade ago, the positive pregnancy tests that were my first connections to my daughters.* I know that I should get rid of these things, because of that fire business and because Anna Quindlen would say it’s the right thing to do, and also, if I keeled over tomorrow, it would be dropping the really shitty task of weeding through it all and deciding what to do with it into someone’s (probably my sister Laurie’s) lap.
But that’s not how I’m wired. I’m an organized, sentimental fool. I like these tokens of the many could-be-forgotten moments in my life. They’re comforting. Besides, announcing “I’m going to simplify this weekend” would be like proclaiming “I’m going to get my shit together by Thursday” if I were Lindsay Lohan. In other words, it’s not going to happen.
Sorry, Laurie. And girls? I hope you’re not as horrified as I was when I give you your teeth back.
CHAPTER 5
I Don’t Have Time for a Crisis (But I’ll Have Another Drink)
I have a friend who likes to regale party guests with tales of his mother’s raging alcoholism throughout his childhood. Apparently, the woman loved her scotch on the rocks and had a habit of asking her loved ones—very young children included—if they “wouldn’t mind topping her off” and then offering up a bone-dry glass. Seems she’d make this request a dozen or more times an evening, generally until she passed out cold and her lifeless, drunken form had to be carted off to bed.
Hahahaha we all cackle collectively when we hear this story—topping her off!—because obviously she was a hard booze-drinking lushbag. The fact that we are all well into our fourth beer or third glass of wine when this story gets paraded out doesn’t seem relevant in the slightest. I mean, it’s not like we’re alcoholics or anything.
I was a heavy drinker in college, because who wanted to go to a frat party or campus bar perfectly sober? Besides, I was pretty sure that was what college was for: to sow your wild oats and get all of that overindulging out of your system while your system was still young enough to bounce back relatively quickly from the repeated abuse. We drank rotgut concoctions of whatever booze was cheap and plentiful at the moment (sometimes through a funnel and once out of a gigantic clean garbage can, I am not proud to admit) with a singular goal: to get drunk, fast. We even had a name for one of the premier benefits of our nightly binge drinking: the “shampoo effect.” You know, because when you were still a tiny bit buzzed from the night before, you could get nice and liquored up that much faster.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
And then I grew up. Well, not really. But I graduated (with honors, somehow) and got a job (miraculously), and I realized that if I maintained my diligent seven-straight-nights-of-partying schedule, I could actually lose the aforementioned job and wind up living back at home with my parents. Which would be a total nightmare for countless reasons, one being that their liquor supply sucked unless you happened to fancy Southern Comfort and diet ginger ale or expired melon liqueur. So the new professional me drank strategically, reserving my nights out for when I knew I could be achingly, pukingly hungover the next day with a minimum of consequences.
At my second job,* I became close friends with an awesome lady named Michelle. I call her a “lady” because she was wise and mature at thirty-five, and I was a rather impulsive, slightly reckless twenty-five. In addition to being a lady, Michelle (who I am fortunate enough to call a dear friend to this day) was stone-cold cool. She was sleek and sophisticated and wore tortoiseshell glasses and rode a fucking motorcycle and smoked cigarettes and wore shoes that didn’t come from Payless and had grown-up dinner parties. With vegetables and everything. None of my other friends were throwing dinner parties, I probably don’t need to add. We ate frozen pizzas if we were home or happy hour appetizers if we were out.* I don’t think I’d had a real, full-size meal that included anything green since I’d left for college until Michelle invited me over for one. Michelle was a young, modern-day Auntie Mame who served exotic cocktails out of matching glasses. Matching glasses! Can you imagine? The only glasses I had at the time may have been ones I accidentally walked out of a bar with.
Before long, Michelle and I were roommates.* She taught me to cook a few things, and overnight I had access to matching glasses whenever I wanted. We’d go out to a party or a bar one or two nights a week, but on the other nights, my new roommate had the strangest habit I had ever seen: She’d come home from work, kick off her shoes, and enjoy a nice, cold beer or glass of chardonnay.
Just one.
“You going out tonight?” I remember asking once early on, vaguely hurt that I hadn’t been invited.
“Nope,” she’d replied breezily.
“Oh,” I said. “Bad day?”
“Nope,” she’d answered, taking a long, satisfying sip.
“Then why are you drinking?” I needed to know.
“I just like the taste,” she’d said.
My still-young mind simply could not wrap itself around the idea of enjoying 130 or more calories of potentially mind-bending goodness simply for the taste. What was the point if you weren’t out to catch a buzz, especially when you could have fifteen more French fries or two and a half cookies instead for the same amount of dietary damage? It was always about the buzz versus the calories (at least until around 1:30 in the morning when then it became screw calories and I’m done drinking anyway, so let’s go find an open drive-through, but this will be covered in excruciating detail in a later chapter, I promise).
It would be another dozen or so years before I understood the lovely, magical, unwinding effect bestowed by a simple predinner cocktail. This epiphany happened to coincide with the exact moment I gave birth to my first child.
Even though she was a remarkably easy baby twenty-two hours out of the day, we called the window from five to seven p.m. the “witching hour.” That’s basically when she would scream inconsolably for no apparent reason, and no amount of rocking, bouncing, soothing, feeding, or pleading could make her stop.
“Getcha a glass of wine?” my husband Joe would shout over the wailing, running a hand through his frazzled hair.
“Dear God, yes, please,” I’d yell back, wiping spit-up off my shoulde
r and staring at the clock.
By the time our daughter finally grew out of that hellish phase, the early evening cocktail habit had been firmly established. Now that we had something to be happy about (the lack of screaming coupled with the fact that I wasn’t pregnant and could actually drink), the “witching hour” became regular old “happy hour.” We agreed that since we both worked from home, we needed—no, we deserved—this gentle segue from the demands of our day jobs to the new madness that was the rest of our lives. Booze was a quitting time whistle, a pat on the back, a ten-minute chair massage, and a dangling carrot all at the same time. I’d look at my watch at 3:15 and automatically start calculating: an hour and forty-five minutes to go! Five o’clock couldn’t come fast enough. And while the first pour rarely came long after that precise and carefully chosen time, it never, ever came before it. Because everyone knows that only alcoholics drink during the day.
Besides, I was a wine girl and alcoholics downed hard liquor. Did you ever see a bum swigging out of a paper-bag-wrapped bottle of Cabernet? Me neither. That’s because wine is classy. It’s social. You don’t have to hide it. Little old ladies drink it at lunch. Fancy restaurants have separate phonebook-size menus dedicated to it. Rich people build entire temperature-controlled subterranean shrines to house it. To speak of it intelligently requires at least a passing knowledge of French language and pronunciation (Bordeaux, Beaujolais, Cabernet, Viognier), and honestly—what’s more refined than that?
(Next time you see a plastered panhandler, try this: “Bonjour, mon ami. Belle journée, n’est-ce pas? Comment vous sentez-vous aujourd’hui?” I’ll give you fifty bucks if he replies in the most romantic of all languages or even doesn’t spit at you.)
Even though I very much like to drink, I don’t like being drunk. That whole room-spinning thing just freaks me out, and most days I’d rather be wrapped in a blanket of thorns and asked to deliver an eleven-pound baby than endure a searing hangover. For these reasons, I reserve my one big blowout night of the year for my annual girls’ trip. This is a long weekend I take every year with four or seven (depending on the year and who’s knocked up/getting married/getting divorced/remodeling her kitchen) of my closest lifetime girlfriends. I have known most of these women—each more successful, professional, and amazing than the next—since the siphoning-grain-alcohol-from-a-trashcan days, and it’s almost inevitable that there will be a bender. We drink totally responsibly,* laugh until our faces hurt, and take lots of pictures of ourselves sprawled out in our inebriated still-got-it glory. We do this because we can and because we can’t do it at home even though we wouldn’t want to anyway. We do it to feel young and carefree again, because on the parts of the trip when we’re not plastered or getting pedicures, we talk about our dying (or dead) parents and our exhausting kids and our recent biopsies and our falling faces and our maddening husbands and their confusing and unfathomable midlife crises. We do it to celebrate the fact that we’ve kept our shit together for the previous mind-blowing 364 days in a row, and we do it because it’s really fucking fun.
For a million reasons—the rarely getting drunk outside of my girls’ weekend part, the not hiding my drinking part, the fact that I am an adult and can do what I want—I rarely gave my alcohol consumption a second thought. Until right around forty. That’s when some tiny farmer snuck into my brain and planted a few robust seeds of doubt. Did I drink too much? Could I stop if I wanted to? Did I have a, you know, problem? Sure, I’d gone sauce free when I was pregnant—but hadn’t I brought a nice bottle of wine to the hospital in my postpartum tote both times to enjoy immediately after delivery? All of my friends drank exactly as much as I did. Did that mean I didn’t have a problem, or was it more that I had intentionally surrounded myself with likeminded imbibers, which obviously would be the sign of a problem? For the record, I wasn’t pounding a few bottles a night; I’m talking two, three glasses of wine over a four-hour period. I barely ever felt a hint of a buzz, so it was a marvel even to me how much I looked forward to wine o’clock.
“Do you think we drink too much?” I’d ask my friends at our semiregular happy hour gatherings.
“Probably,” any one of them would reply, topping off everyone’s empty glasses.
The thoughts persisted. Every once in a while, I’d make a bold declaration but only to myself: I’m not going to drink tomorrow, I’d announce silently. You know, just to prove that I could go a whole day without it. And then five o’clock would roll around—predictably the way it always does, which is exactly when I’m jonesing for a drink—and the excuse tap would start flowing: You know what? It’s not like I have anything to prove. Alcohol isn’t a problem for me. I don’t drink to get drunk, it doesn’t negatively affect my life at home or work, and I’d never drink and drive. Plus I work hard and I’m an awesome mom and I did all of those lousy chores today on top of it all! I earned a drink or two, damn it! I’ll not drink tomorrow, really that’s a much better idea anyway. Besides, I can stop anytime I want to. It just so happens that I don’t feel like stopping right at this exact moment. In fact, what I really want is a glass of wine. Honey, would you mind topping me off?
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I realized that more than one margarita in an hour gives me a headache.
—MELISSA
A gal I know who also likes to enjoy a nightly glass or two of the grape was telling me recently about an episode in her house. She’d run out of wine,* so without thinking anything of it, she opened a brand-new bottle of vodka and fixed herself a cocktail. When she was done with the fixing part, she pushed the vodka bottle into the exact same spot on the kitchen counter that her ubiquitous bottle of wine would otherwise have occupied.
“What the hell is this?” her husband said immediately when he spotted the vodka bottle.
“Oh, we were out of wine, so I opened some vodka,” she explained.
“Well, why is it out on the counter?” he wanted to know. The man was aghast, horrified even.
“Because I might have another one,” she said simply.
He was having none of her silly logic. Instead, and even though he’d never once in more than two decades minded having an opened bottle of wine on the counter, he promptly stashed that liquor bottle away and out of sight—even though they were the only ones at home—and you know why as well as I do: because wine is classy while booze smacks of smelly, desperate old ladies wearing dirty housedresses and talking to themselves while pushing rusty shopping carts.
My friend and I laughed about the whole episode merrily, because it’s not like we were alcoholics. Not long afterward, though, a funny thing happened as I was sitting down to dinner with my family.
“Oh my gosh, Mom!” shouted my then seven-year-old.
“What’s wrong, honey?” I asked.
“Where’s your wine?” she demanded. She actually sounded a little panicked, bless her tiny, innocent little heart.
I’d merely left my glass on the counter by the stove where I’d been cooking. It’s not like I’d forsaken it completely or anything. But the mere fact that my youngest daughter immediately recognized the missing beverage and reacted with unfettered alarm made me feel like maybe it was time to take a little break. The last thing I wanted was her sitting around someday drinking Southern Comfort and diet ginger ale or expired melon liqueur with her friends—because everything always comes full circle, doesn’t it?—and talking about her winoholic mom.
“I’m not going to drink during the week anymore,” I announced to Joe later, when the kids were out of earshot.
“Okay, I’ll do it with you,” he said easily. I thought that the fact that he didn’t ask why or even try to argue the idea might be some sort of sign.
“Oh, wait,” he said suddenly. “What about Thursday?” Thursday is his basketball night, which consists of an hour and a half of sweaty hooping followed by three or five hours of beer pounding. It
’s the highlight of his week, his one chance to unwind without me nagging the living hell out of him (well, honestly), and I wouldn’t dream of taking it away from him, even just the boozing part.
“You can drink on Thursday,” I conceded generously.
“Okay,” he said, relieved. “Oh, wait. But what about Sunday? Does Sunday count as a weekday or weekend? Because we have a lot of barbecues on Sundays.”
“I think it could go either way,” I admitted, watching our nondrinking “weeknights” dwindle. “Do you think you could do Monday through Wednesday?” I said this a tiny bit sarcastically.
“Totally,” he said.
“Okay, I’m doing Monday through Thursday,” I declared.
The first few weeks, I have to tell you, were a bitch. I had a searing, around-the-clock headache, which is odd because that sounds like a symptom of withdrawal or something, and it’s not like I was an alcoholic. The singular hour from five to six was the worst, survived only by consuming tumbler after tumbler of lemonade. (“Your teeth might rot out, but at least your liver will still be functioning,” Joe joked. Hardy-fucking-har.)
“My Welcome-to-Midlife Moment Was . . .”
When I realized I can’t read the martini choices unless the menu is at least four feet from my face.
—KT
A few weeks into my new semidry lifestyle, a friend invited me over for a cocktail. My younger daughter has an evening gymnastics class in this friend’s neighborhood, and we’d often connect to kill the two hours. But it was on a Wednesday.
I've Still Got It...I Just Can't Remember Where I Put It: Awkwardly True Tales from the Far Side of Forty Page 6