by Dana Bowman
Those clinking bottles took me right back to when I used to drive home after stopping to buy wine with both my boys in the backseat. I would sing “Thomas the Train” and joke with them as we headed home, the car and my spirits buoyed by the pact that the wine had made with me. The bottles would roll and clink and say to me, “We will make you feel whole and shiny and brilliant upon opening. We promise.”
We know how that all ended.
It was the clinking that reminded me.
I remembered looking into the rearview mirror and my boys’ brown eyes searching out mine. I remembered promises of Little Einsteins DVDs, ice cream, and endless other loopholes, so we could all survive life together for the next few hours because Mommy was slowly fading away into nothing.
I could have pulled over and thrown the bottles out. Instead, I reached over, tucked the brown paper more tightly around them, swaddled and safe, and continued home.
I didn’t drink the bottles for two more days. It was easy. I could wait. And on Christmas Eve, when I finally did crack open a bottle of red, I made sure it was all very according to plan: one glass for me, one glass for the red sauce.
It would be fitting to tell you that the first sip was horrible. I wish I could tell you that. I can’t even tell you it was wonderful. But I can’t really remember the taste at all. I know I stared at the wine, sitting quietly in the glass, and I wondered at it all. How could a liquid substance be so . . . pushy? Think about it; army generals and mothers have the power to slam us around, bark orders, and make us storm the beaches under their direction. But a liquid? Inanimate and sloshy? Why fear it?
And so, I drank it—because it’s not the boss of me. There was no gorgeous “ahhh” that I wanted. I mean, if I’m going to do this, I deserve to really enjoy it, right? But instead, nothing. No big “Wow, that was awesome” imprint. I remember thinking the wine smelled very bitter. But perhaps that was just my soul, folding its arms and giving up.
Sometimes, God has a really vicious sense of humor. I’m told all the time we forget childbirth so that we’ll do it again. But I remember childbirth. There was a lot of heaving and hoeing and noises and fluids. I yelled at a lot of people. I do remember it all, extremely well, thank you very much.
I also clearly remember that my husband thought it would be funny to buy me footie pajamas. And that Christmas morning, as I opened them, hoping for the adorable sock monkey flannel pajamas I had spotted at Target and mentioned to him twice—once in a text with pictures—I felt somehow the purple-and-brown space monkey tragedy was a perfect fit.
But I don’t remember the taste of that wine. I try to conjure it up, as a sort of forbidden gift, but there is nothing.
Somewhere between the night I started drinking again and New Year’s Eve, I returned to the liquor store, bypassing all the sophisticated chitchat about red sauce and entertaining, and bought myself a large plastic bottle of cheap vodka. This I kept in my old hiding place: my closet. As I shoved it down amongst my boots and clothes, I remember a sharp thwap in my brain that said, “SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT’S HAPPENING HERE?”
Also, I remember on New Year’s Eve day, my little boy, Henry, figured it all out.
Henry was just about four at the time, and the whole figuring-out thing happened in an unglamorous, yet fitting, way: sweet Henry was sitting on the toilet. Henry loved his toilet time, much like his father. He liked to hang out in there, sing a little “Bob the Builder,” and ponder the meaning of life. Henry did not like to rush bodily functions, and I was fine with this because it meant containment. I knew where he was and what he was doing, and unless there was some sort of level-red, hazmat kind of situation going on in the loo, it was a break for us both.
I left Henry to do his business and poured myself a lovely vodka and vodka with a twist of vodka. I made sure to put it in a normal glass, probably something plastic with a superhero on it. Although I missed using barware, I never attempted to use wine goblets or a rocks glass with this whole trip to Insanityville.
As I walked into the bathroom, drink in hand, I was at that slightly off, humming stage of early evening where things were not sloppy. Mom just seemed like she’d hung a vacancy sign above her head.
And then Henry, sitting on the toilet, stared at me and said, “That’s your special drink, isn’t it?”
Afterward, he smiled, but his smile was the uncomfortable, tilted kind that he gives me before we visit the doctor, trying to convince himself he’s not afraid. “Is there gonna be a shot?” Half smile. “I’m okay with it. I just wanna know. So will there?”
There are moments in a parent’s life that we don’t forget. We aren’t allowed. They are filed away, framed perfectly, and they resurface when we pray, or are drifting off to sleep. It was his smile. It broke my heart.
Henry never saw me pour the stuff into glasses. He didn’t see the bottles. To the best of my memory, all of that had been successfully contained while they were watching endless Little Einsteins or playing in the train room. I never poured a drink when the boys were in the kitchen with me. And, four years ago, when I first got sober, Henry was barely a year old. But somehow, he knew.
And he looked afraid.
I drank a lot that night. It was New Year’s Eve, after all.
Some More Pithy Recovery Sayings That Totally Apply Here
1.You’re only as sick as your secrets.
2.If you are coasting, that probably means you are going downhill.
3.Drinking again will send you right back to where you left off: Crazy Town.
CHAPTER SIX
HOW TO
master
THE
ugly cry
Do you know why they recite pithy sayings in recovery meetings? Because they’re true.
And who’s the “they” behind the sayings? A bunch of people who know Crazy Town all too well. They have visited it personally and have the pictures to prove it.
I was one sad space monkey.
On New Year’s Eve, I tried to make a fantastic dinner because we were parents of small children, so dinner at home and a movie was really all we were going for that night. New Year’s Eve always has such pressure to be super exciting. If we start out the new year with a boring meal that has to include chicken nuggets and Veggie Tales, then we might as well start researching minivans.
So, I was busy making all sorts of sexy amuse-bouches—otherwise known as food my children make gagging noises at—and stirring up all sorts of vodka in orange juice for me. I wouldn’t be eating much, since the vodka seemed to provide all the nutrients I needed at the time. I was going off plan on this night because Brian was already home; the prior nights, I finished any sort of drinking before he showed up. But I was getting braver. It seemed the more orange juice concoctions I stirred up that evening the braver I became.
Again, this is when my brain should have given me another resounding thwap and said, “BRAVERY-SHMAVERY. YOU JUST DRANK VODKA OUT OF A VEGGIE TALES GLASS.”
But my alcoholism had shoved a sock in my brain, tied it up, and put it in the closet, which is a weird analogy but that’s really how it felt. There was more room in the closet because the warm bottle of vodka had moved down to the kitchen because I was tired of endlessly climbing stairs for refills. I hid it behind the flour containers. I figured Brian wasn’t going to bake anytime soon, so I was safe.
There wasn’t much more to say about that New Year’s Eve. It had a high-pitched, amped-up hilarity—provided by me—because this was going to be the best New Year’s Eve! Ever! My husband provided a sort of puzzled amiability while my children picked at the adult crappy food, drank Sprite out of plastic champagne glasses, and hopped right onto the kiddie ride that I had created for them. But still, the evening had a frantic feel like the exhausted, sticky end of the night at a carnival’s closing time.
At one point I considered putting some of my special drink in a plastic champagne glass. I missed the actual glasses in which I could put a drink—the slender, delicate stem of
a wine glass balanced so prettily between my fingers, like a conductor’s baton. A heavy, manly crystal rocks glass felt like a heavy weapon, ready to throw at someone at a moment’s notice, if need be. When I used to drink the manly brown stuff that I poured into those rock glasses, their weight tethered me and kept me from wafting away altogether. Then there was the impossible and tippy martini glass. It made me feel like I was on an episode of Mad Men, until I spilled it, which I always did. And how could I forget the champagne flute, which makes any drink into its own decoration?
However, I did not put the special orange drink in a plastic champagne glass. At least I did one intelligent thing that night. Doing so would have resulted in me being more careful with my intake because that glass could have had the chance of being mixed in with the other glasses sitting around; therefore, I might have not gotten as totally blitzed drunk as I did. All this led to the ugly version of Dana showing up in a much shorter amount of time than anticipated.
Of course, the ugly version of Dana was not part of the plan. But show up she did, somewhere in between the main course and our fancy flan-thing for dessert that no one liked because it was rubbery and tasted like sweet eggs—drunken baking wins again.
I started to get that uneasy and fractionalized realization that I was not okay.
There are levels of inebriation in alcoholism. We have the gentle, glowy inebriation that we long for, that we would write love letters to if we could, because it is so elusive for us. There is also the frenetic, super energized inebriation that makes all sorts of household chores super easy. If the cat boxes are in their worst state or your husband gets trapped under a car, this is the most opportune level.
Then there is sleepy inebriation that results in . . . sleeping. You don’t even get to enjoy the inebriation. You’re passed out on the couch with your drool, and hopefully no one takes a picture.
There’s also angry inebriation that is pretty awful and ugly, and no one ever thinks that will happen. No one starts out with a couple of margaritas thinking, “Well, in about an hour and a half I’m going to alienate all my friends on social media and probably reduce my children to tears. Cheers!”
The angry inebriation level is often paired with total humiliation inebriation. Total humiliation inebriation is often difficult to remember. So that’s a plus.
However, the level that I had reached on New Year’s Eve was past all of that.
In one of my trips from the kitchen into the living room, where all the frivolity was, I realized the floor was not in a straight line. And my thinking started sliding off into immobile nuttiness wherein my brain was zipping from thought to thought in a frantic search for some sort of sanity, but my body was not able to keep up. So, I plunked myself down on the couch in the hope that no one would notice.
And no one did.
This makes a lot of sense because rarely is my family paying attention when there is television involved. We were watching something kid-oriented and cute, and all three family members were now slack-jawed and focused. I could have ripped off my shirt and waved it around my head at this point and maybe, just maybe, Brian would have looked up and asked, “Are you hot, honey? Should I turn the heat down?”
I would have thought that making it this far without detection would have made me happy, but I had bypassed logical; that’s if you call relapse and manipulation and clandestine behavior logical. It’s alcoholic logical, I guess.
So, I was past all that. I was about as messed up as one can get while being in a living room, not in some hospital somewhere. I found myself sitting dejectedly on the spinning couch and feeling sorry for myself as Brian took the boys up to bed. I had lucked out with missing the bedtime routine; Brian volunteered, and I certainly didn’t want to give kisses and hugs in my state. But I felt so alone as I sat on my couch. I actually felt sad that no one noticed I was doing something so very wrong. In the teaching world, we learn that the kids who misbehave are usually the ones who are longing for the most attention and love.
I, in my sad space monkey pajamas, had really acted out. And yet, no one had noticed. I had no threats of expulsion. I didn’t even merit a detention slip.
And this made me even more despondent.
So, I started to cry.
It was the kind of crying that has no other description except that it was phlegmy and wet, and my face turned red, and I made noises like a dying baby seal.
At last, my husband noticed. He came down the stairs and did that head-tilty thing he does when he’s trying to process information, which kind of makes him look like a school counselor.
I took a gulp and reached out to hold down the couch, and then I whispered to my husband, “I drank. I’m sorry.”
He answered, brilliantly, “What? You drank what?” And he actually looked around for the cup as though I had ingested some cleaning spray by accident, or because I was really that stupid.
I stared at him, rather stupidly, because vodka produces that look a lot. I was really that stupid.
And I said, slowly, “I’m drunk. I drank. I’ve been drinking.”
I sounded like an inebriated French lesson in verb tenses.
And my poor husband stared at me some more. If I had had better vision at this point, I could have watched his face travel through a variety of expressions, starting at incredulity, moving to anger, and landing at disgust. Brian, who had been so understanding and compassionate when I first got sober, had no ability to conjure up those feelings on this night.
Maybe, just maybe, while I was adding more and more vodka to my orange juice during my relapse, I wanted someone to find me out. Maybe I wanted my husband to discover me, mid-pour, and knock the bottle away, all dramatic and terminal. Maybe I wanted someone to take my drinking from me instead of me having to hand it over by confessing.
Maybe I wanted someone to put a stop to this whole mess sooner. But it doesn’t matter. I probably wouldn’t have listened. Recovery always has to be my choice. Addiction doesn’t like to listen to others. So, I made my misery and then I sat right down in it for a spell, all wretched and alone. All the while, I was shooing away anyone who had the audacity to suggest, “Hey, you look kind of awful. Are you all right?”
So, here was the best news from that night: I finally said, “I’m not all right.” And, once again, I stopped.
My Relapse Gratitude List
1.I am grateful I didn’t get the keys and get in the car while I was drinking.
2.I am grateful I didn’t start that car and start driving, in search of more wine.
3.I am grateful I didn’t have my children in that car.
4.I am grateful I didn’t get pulled over, doing a breathalyzer outside my work, my church, or my kids’ school.
5.I am grateful I didn’t kill someone.
6.I am grateful I didn’t kill myself.
7.I am grateful I looked into the abyss of me.
8.I am grateful I can say, “But I’m still here.”
9.I am grateful for the memory of it, even the horror and the pain. Even the sadness.
10.I am grateful for all of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
HOW TO
deal
WITH RELENTLESS
disappointment
It’s a Wednesday night, three days after the space monkey relapse and reveal. I’m up in my bedroom, frantically pawing through my lingerie drawer, which seems to contain nothing but lingerie. I start to panic. This was where I stashed all my sobriety chips, tangled in with all the satiny, stringy things, but they were nowhere to be found. Don’t ask me why I chose to store these precious things amongst my sexywear. I guess I figured they’d never see the light of day, and so they’d be safe. But now, they were missing.
In my twelve-step program, all anniversaries, from the first twenty-four hours onward, are awarded with a small, round medallion that looks like a poker chip, only fancier. Initially, I did find some irony in this comparison. I was all “I dunno, punk, do I feel lucky?” with staying sobe
r, and the whole thing felt like a risky gamble.
As I continued to search among the lacy undergarments, I did find a thong that had “I You” emblazoned in very uncomfortable rhinestones across the crotch. It was from my long-ago honeymoon, and it was still in the drawer; however, my sobriety chips were not.
I found my chips later that week while I was helping my boys clean out their playroom. We were sorting small plastic toys from other smaller plastic toys, and then I heard it—a familiar jingle of metal. My son, Henry, was sitting in front of a small treasure chest, and inside was a pile of plastic tokens evidently stolen from Jumpin’ Joes, the local fun center/child casino. Also, there were my chips. All of them. I didn’t know where to place most of my malaise: on the stolen coins or the fact that my boys had been rifling through my underpants.
At my next meeting, I decided I would return my chips. I wanted to come clean and start over. It seemed like the best gesture to help with this. It was a healthy thing to do, all honest and redemptive. And, as is often the way with virtuous stuff, I kinda felt sick to my stomach about it. This dread was heavy and real and ran in tandem with the gloom in my heart about starting my sober walk all over. I do realize giving the chips back is not the whole story. Recovery doesn’t have a total reset button; it keeps growing even when we falter. Yet I was having a hard time remembering that. I couldn’t see the recovery forest for the disappointed trees.