Now My Heart Is Full

by Laura June

  They threw me into a holding cell that was full of probably a dozen women, most of whose faces I remember—they’re burned into me. They were there mostly for drugs and prostitution. “Why are you here?” a girl who seemed only half awake asked me from her place laying on the floor.

  Another girl from the corner yelled, “A white girl! You know she’s a DUI.” She was right, I agreed. A white girl with a DUI. What a cliché.

  And I didn’t leave in two or three hours. I stayed long enough for three meals. I stayed long enough that the next morning came. They told us a judge would be there soon, and then she or he failed to appear. There was a Steelers game; judges were mysteriously hard to come by. Eventually, I was able to call and leave a message for my boyfriend, but I didn’t know if he’d get the message, and I didn’t know when I’d be out anyway. I stayed in jail for almost a whole day because of a Steelers game. We could hear the cops on duty screaming as the Steelers won, and another woman, who had clearly been there under similar circumstances before, stood up and said, “Fucking finally, we can get our judge.”

  I was shackled to the other girls, pulled through a series of long hallways that led us from the jail to the courthouse, where in thirty seconds a judge told me I needed to come back in two months to hear my fate. My fate was that nothing happened. I had to pay an $800 fine. My crimes didn’t mean a loss of my license or even community service.

  I’d like to say that this experience led me to stop drinking, but it didn’t. I simply never drank and got behind the wheel of a car again. And I will never, ever forget what was scratched on the wall in a Sharpie marker of that holding cell. It read, simply, “Punck Ass Bicth.”

  * * *

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I want to tell you that I stopped drinking in January of 2007, after my mother died. And I did! I had quit smoking the year before and had weaned myself fully from drinking a few months before she died. This was lucky. I needed clarity in that time, and her death certainly made the matter of drinking clear to me. It was something I could not do.

  But I slid back before the year was out, and drank, for instance, in the weeks leading up to our wedding in October of 2007. I did this mainly because it was easy. I’d never met less of a problem drinker than Josh. I’ve seen him actually drunk just a few times in a decade of knowing him, and though he’s certainly seen me drunk more often, it wasn’t devastatingly obvious to anyone—not even to him—that I should quit. This is a personal decision unless you are so clearly a drunk that your life has become damaging to others.

  And New York City is a drinker’s paradise. It’s not just that there are bars everywhere, but that you never need to drive. There are cabs and sidewalks, which opens the possibilities for drinking more often a lot easier.

  Josh and I were never partiers or even people who went out very much. When I drank, it was usually at home, in the late evening, until bedtime. It’s hard to do damage that way. His moderation kept me safe in many ways.

  I would like to tell you that I quit drinking in January of 2012, when Ellen died from alcoholism at the age of thirty-four, almost exactly five years after my mother.

  In fact, my memories of Ellen’s death and the days after it are foggy because we drank so much. After Emily called me in tears to tell me that she had died, we had a long conversation where the question “How does a thirty-four-year-old woman with a ten-year-old son die from drinking too much?” remained unanswered. I flew back to Pittsburgh a few days later. I took a week off work and traveled, for the first time in many years, alone, back home.

  I had two drinks on the plane, staring out the window the whole time. And when I got there, Emily picked me up, and we went back to her house and sat at her dining room table. She’d bought a house of her own a few years earlier. She was single just then, right out of a long relationship that ended badly. We smoked and drank wine—just two bottles, but then three—and went to bed late, knowing the funeral the next morning would be bad.

  And it was. What to say about a woman I hadn’t seen in four or five years? That I stopped talking to her because she drank too much was both true and untrue. Yeah, the last few times I’d seen her had been upsetting because she drank so much, but again, it wasn’t that simple. I didn’t excise her from my life; she just sort of faded. I’d been in contact with her more recently, as everyone I had ever known began to stream onto Facebook, but mostly we’d been happily, acceptingly distant for years.

  She’d already been cremated. Her parents, whom I hadn’t seen in years, were there. Her mother was fighting cancer and was dead a year later herself. I didn’t have any takeaways other than simple sadness. There was nothing to learn except that this couldn’t happen to me. I couldn’t let it; I wouldn’t let it.

  I want to tell you that I didn’t drink after Zelda was born. But that’s not true, either, because I did. Alcohol wasn’t on my mind for several months after her birth; I was too tired. But slowly, I saw exactly why it was that so many of the new mothers around me talked really excitedly about their after-bedtime drinks. Relaxation. Time to yourself. Why not fill it with a little wine?

  I never really drank around Zelda. I was too nervous; my rules wouldn’t allow for it. But I started to drink sometimes after she went to bed. And then, for the first time in my adult life, it became an almost nightly habit. It crept up on me slowly. It was just a few drinks, two or three, a bottle of wine every couple of days. Nothing bad happened, just a woman relaxing with her wine. The image of the “wine mom” exists for a reason: society condones, even encourages this image and the behavior.

  No one tells you how unfair it all feels. It’s unfair that you can’t enjoy something as simple as a calming glass of wine at the end of the day like pretty much every other person on the planet does, because your history or whatever makes you you is a problem.

  I don’t know if I couldn’t enjoy it because of guilt or because I really had a problem. I don’t know if it matters. What mattered was that I was always scared, despite continuing to head at the end of the day, pushing the stroller into the wine store, to pick up a few bottles for the week before taking my daughter home.

  I was never drunk around Zelda. I never fell down carrying her or dropped her. I never missed a nap or a feeding or even snapped at her because I’d been drinking. I always waited until she went to bed, just like my mother.

  But the reality of my life was this: Josh traveled a lot, and I did not. I was often home alone with my daughter for days at a time, and though I wasn’t getting wasted, I began to have another worry: not that I would end up like my mother—though I still worried about that constantly—but that Zelda would wake up sick or an emergency would occur. Wouldn’t an emergency situation be worse with two or three glasses of wine?

  If I was honest with myself, and I have always tried to be honest in my questions of myself, even if I defer answering them for a while, I knew the answer was yes.

  It wasn’t finally a striking realization or a tragedy that made me stop. It was very simple: I didn’t want to be someone who looked forward more to the part of the night after my daughter went to bed than the part when she was awake. It’s hard to blame mothers for feeling that way, and I don’t have any guilt about sighing with relief when I close her door at night, but I’d found that some days, I was already thinking about my pinot grigio while I was still reading Zelda her bedtime stories. There she was, enjoying the best part of her day, Mama standing beside her crib, and I was, at least sometimes, imagining myself into a Zelda-less future. A future with wine and cigarettes, which I had magically started smoking again at night.

  Why did I have so many rules for myself about drinking? I couldn’t just drink the way others did, that was why. I was always either all in or all out; I lived pulling the wagon behind me all the time, the wagon was always there. Why was there a wagon?

  Did my mother go through this? There had been so few periods of sobriety for he
r that I knew of, and most of them had lasted weeks at a maximum, not months or years the way that I had managed. Did she have an internal struggle like I did, or was she unburdened by such doubts? I’d grown up feeling so disappointed in her, because she’d never even seemed to try. But I now wondered, what did she feel inside? Her struggle was struggled alone. I know it now.

  But when I quit, it didn’t matter what my mother had gone through. I was and am my own person. I didn’t want to spend so much mental energy thinking about it anymore, and so for me, the easiest way seemed to be finally, fully, removing the possibility. Taking the option of drinking off the table was what I had to do. To cut myself off.

  Which I did, in November of 2015. I snapped after Thanksgiving, moving into Christmas. I knew that holidays always resulted in at least one night where I drank a little too much from stress and then woke up unhappy to a full day’s work, and I didn’t want to do that ever again. So I decided not to.

  I wanted to push back against inevitability. I wanted to stop ever worrying that someday I might trouble my daughter the way that I myself had been troubled by my mother. Zelda and I would argue, I knew, over things that mattered little and things that mattered very much.

  But I could, right then, right now, push back against any inevitability of alcohol. I could make sure that never happened. I could see to it that my daughter never lived with the anxiety that I felt, never knowing for sure what version of Mom I would encounter when she picked—or didn’t pick—me up from a school event or in the hallway outside my own bedroom late at night. The thought of her feeling that kind of worry on my behalf ached inside of me and pulled me into this new reality, where I felt alive and awake and solid.

  I haven’t had a hangover or even barely a headache in almost two years. I have rarely thought, “I’d like to have a drink,” though there is some irreplaceable festivity created by a bottle of champagne that nothing, really, can replace—although I have found that IKEA Sparkling Pear Juice comes close. I feel less guilt, and I don’t worry about my own health as much anymore. All I had to do was stop.

  I hope against the future that I have, in this one way, bettered my mother in mothering.

  CHAPTER 18

  ◆ ◆ ◆

  I’ve always expressed myself better in writing than in words spoken out loud. And the first time I remember writing my mother a letter, I was still using crayons. In the boxes of stuff I took from her house after she died, there were a few handmade cards and drawings she’d saved over the years from my brothers and me, things that had survived the fire. And though I looked among her papers and in her drawers for the two letters I had written to her that weighed on my mind so heavily, I found only one of them.

  I made her the card on a piece of blank white paper. Not construction paper, but copy paper. I remember the card very well, because I have it here, in my house. I don’t know why she kept this, among the hundreds, maybe thousands of things I sent or made her in the twenty-nine years that I knew her. But I can guess.

  The card was rudimentary, but not as rudimentary as my actual art skills (I am incredibly bad at drawing or really any visual art, always have been) because I copied the picture from a book. It was of a rabbit, the front half of its body there on the front of the card, the back half on the back side, around the bend from the fold. Inside the card read, “I love you mommy, thanks for everything you do for me.” It was a ruse.

  I left the card on my mother’s dressing table in her room and didn’t say a thing. Later, after she’d read it, I planned to pounce on her with my assessment of her life. Thinking of it right now, I feel nervous wonder at the balls it must have taken to confront her. The card was an apology, but in advance.

  I don’t remember exactly how it went down, though I feel embarrassment on behalf of both of us. I remember that I ended up calling her into my room, telling her I wanted to talk, which was quite common for us: the two women in a house of men, we often took refuge in my little quiet bedroom, closing the door against their noise. I don’t remember what I said, but I can imagine it.

  “Mom, we learned at school about alcoholics, and I think that’s what you are. But it’s treatable, there’s a cure! I think you sometimes need to go to AA to fix it, but it can be better.” It would have been something like this, so textbook and overly simple and still so true. So childlike and perfect. So very painful for me to think of even now.

  My mother did what any cornered mother would do: she smiled and took it quietly. She assumed, incorrectly, that I was a lot dumber than I was. She assured me things would be different moving forward, that I didn’t have to worry.

  Parents think their kids want reassurances—“You don’t have to worry.” Maybe they do, when they’re three or four. But by the time I was eight, nine, ten, I saw quite lucidly what was going on around me: I knew better than my parents. Somehow, in her walk from youth to adulthood, things had gotten all confused. My mother was wrong. She was wrong a lot. Every kid learns this about their parents eventually, that they can make mistakes; it’s part of growing up. But some learn faster and harder than others.

  The card that I will keep for the rest of my life makes something start to burn in my throat when I pull it out and examine it, not because of sadness but because of anger. Anger at myself for how smart but misguided I already was becoming.

  Another characteristic of children of alcoholics, I’ve found, is that they’ll always be better at pointing out and accurately assessing the problems of others than they are of themselves. They’ve usually had a lot of practice.

  The second letter I wrote to my mother was in the beginning of November of 2006. I’d just gotten engaged to Josh and was living happily in Brooklyn. In fact, I was happier than I had ever been in my life, and I think that was the main reason that I decided to write to my mother, rather than call her. I wanted to keep the distance from her that I still needed, to protect and buffer myself against something unpleasant, but I also needed to share my happiness with her. At the time, I thought what I was doing was so adult, so different from the other times I’d confronted her. Now, I see the truth: I might as well have written the letter in crayon.

  I have never really told anyone about the letter before; you are the first to know. It read more or less like this: “I am engaged to be married. I am happier than I have ever been. I want to help you go to rehab. I will do anything for you to make that happen, but if you don’t, I want you to know that I will not invite you to my wedding.” And then, I added, to my eternal horror, the following: “And if you don’t stop, if you can’t stop, and if I ever have children, you will never meet your grandchildren. I love you. Laura.” I said more than this, of course. I pleaded with her; I told her how much I wanted her to be a part of my life. But the material facts are what they are. It was a letter that contained a bold statement of fact and a devastating threat.

  I know why I wrote this letter. I was harsher to her in writing than I had ever been because I hoped, my last hope, to snap her out of it. I threatened her out of fear that she would never recover and out of a desperate need that she should. I threatened her with my happiness because I wanted her to be a part of it, but that happiness had come to me at a great price: I’d had to leave behind painful things, and the most painful loss was her.

  I wanted my mother to hear me, to want to be with me, to love me. I wanted her to be proud of me, not just from afar but in my life with me. I wanted her to meet Josh and his family, to be a part of the suddenly wonderful life that we were having. My father had gotten engaged, too; he was going to get married in the spring, just a few months before Josh and me. I wanted her to have some chunk of the good things we were all slowly beginning to fill our time with.

  I didn’t know what her day-to-day life was like anymore. I don’t know how she felt when she opened the mailbox and saw a letter from me. She was probably excited. I am filled with horror at the thought of her opening it, reading it alone,
exhausted and disappointed.

  I want to tell you that in these moments when I allow myself to think of the letter, I hate myself because I was the aggressor then. Instead of feeling victimized by my mother as I had when I was a kid, I now must contend with the fact that in that last moment, in our last direct communication, she was the helpless one.

  I understand why I wrote this letter. I would want nothing less than this from Zelda if I deserved it; it was on some level a symptom of my unfailing love for her, that I wrote it and said what I said. And yet, I live still with it as my truest regret. It is the worst thing I have ever done, and the fact that it contained nothing but the truth doesn’t change that at all.

  My mother never responded. Less than three months later, she was dead.

  When we cleaned her apartment out after she died, I hoped that I would find that letter, partly out of a deep fear that it still existed, that someone else could read what I had written and judge me for what was, no doubt in my mind, my most regrettable action ever. Not because it wasn’t true—all of it was blunt and true—but because it hadn’t worked so it felt very pointless, with her dead and me still alive to lay awake at night in regret. I didn’t find the letter. I hoped that she destroyed it.

  Only after Zelda was alive, sitting at her desk with a pen one afternoon, so concentrated was she at that time on intently drawing tiny circles over and over, did I think of that letter in a new light. Though I still regretted it, though it stings me now to know that I wrote it, I looked at her and thought to myself, “I hope she loves me enough someday to say such dreadful things to me, if she must.”

  This is the only absolution I have allowed myself for that letter.

  We didn’t, in fact, clean out my mother’s apartment right after she died, but several years later, when her partner died himself, from cancer. Before then, in the space where my mother was gone and he was still living, he stayed in their house and kept all my mother’s things, her clothes, her papers, just as she had left them. Once he was gone and we were there, cleaning the place with Josh and my brothers, her boyfriend’s son and wife, even my father was there, I found her makeup still in the bathroom cabinets.