Easing into the expectation.
Easing into motherhood.
BEDTIME
It is now July, a month after my son was born. I’m having drinks with a new friend who wants to help me out with my artistic project.
Nice guy.
I used to be an alcoholic, I tell him, when I order another round for us, but I’m not now. This is my day off, that’s all. I never get days off now. The baby. It’s a lot of work, as they say.
It is, he agrees.
But I don’t really drink, I say. Not anymore—much. Not much at all. I drink just like anybody else. Not much at all.
He nods, Sure.
Because it’s not that much. It’s not that big of a deal, really. Can I even call this a relapse? A drinking problem? Please. Do I sit behind a Dumpster with a paper bag? No. I do not sit with a paper bag behind a Dumpster. Do I fall down, break legs? No, I do not fall down.
I don’t fall asleep on park benches, don’t leave the stroller in stores with Frankie forgotten in it. I don’t shout and throw purses at my boyfriend in a drunken rage. I’m nice. I wash. I wash Frankie. I don’t forget about his formula if I have a little too much. But I almost never do have a little too much.
But if I have a little too much, I’m responsible. I drink after he goes to sleep. I don’t forget to check on him before I do. I check on my boyfriend asleep. Don’t forget to fold our family’s laundry. I manage. Everything is manageable. And it’s not really a relapse; it’s nothing. It’s just like anybody else.
When Frankie was born I was completely sober. I drank alcohol twice when I was pregnant but it was nothing, nothing that took a hold of me; I was responsible. And anyway, I felt too sick to drink.
Frankie was born to a sober mother.
And after Frankie was born some friends came over. There was champagne. We celebrated. Just like anybody else would.
Then there was another big party, to welcome Frankie to the world. So many nice, friendly people showed up. They brought presents, stiff paper bags filled with bottles too. We took the bottles out of the bags, naturally. As they appreciated the newborn, we read the labels on the bottles while holding them by their necks, tilting them in another kind of appreciation.
They drank. I drank, they drank, we drank, Frankie slept in his bassinet.
And after that, there were still people coming by with presents, a procession of people, Scotch for my boyfriend, wooden ecological toys for Frankie; this was after all the parties. Sometimes it was just one person, one bottle. It was nothing. It was celebrating.
So I’ve been drinking a little since my friend’s wedding, god, no, not that much, technically, practically nothing, a sip here and there in the stream of celebratory sips. And now, not much at all. Every other day, if that, but it’s mostly wine, it’s civilized. I drink it with my meals. I try to learn about wine. You can pair one wine with fish, another with red meat.
I don’t say any of this to my friend. But just in case I say, Yeah, I’ve got it under control.
I know you do, he says like I’m not even there.
I say, Another one?
Sure.
My friend matches me drink for drink. He is at least twice my size.
We talk about babies.
Or I talk.
The C-section scar is still raised and red and crazy-looking. Really something. He doesn’t want to see it. That is fine with me.
Things are starting to spin slightly.
I tell an anecdote about baby’s projectile poop and my friend laughs. There are a few more rounds of drinks, the dinner crowd is starting to arrive. He asks me about the art project. We’ll get to it, I promise.
I talk more about babies but at one point he cuts me off and says he has to pick up his own kid from soccer practice. He asks me if I’m going to be okay going home in this state.
I’m fine.
I get back on my bike. I make one stopover on my way home. This liquor store is close to home and I try not to come here too often. The drunken teenage buskers and behind-the-Dumpster types are shockingly observant. You’d think they would be out of it, but no. Some of them have started saying hello when they see me, so lately I try to avoid this store. But today I risk it and stop by to pick up something extra for later on.
I didn’t have a drink, you’re pissing me off with these accusations, I say to my boyfriend when I get home.
He sniffs me again.
Please.
How was your meeting, he wants to know.
It was fine. We talked about art.
Your project?
What else.
Are you sure you’re going to be okay if I leave?
Of course. I’ll be fine. You’re being really weird.
I’m sorry, he says.
When he gets back, I’m unconscious on the floor. He relates the whole story to me later, through clenched teeth.
The baby is in his wicker basket. The baby is screaming, possibly trying to outdo the bombastic sounds coming out of the speakers. All the lights are on. The boyfriend notices I’ve changed my dress while he’s been out. I notice this too, on waking the next day.
The story continues.
First, he turns off the music.
He talks to me. Tries to talk to me. My ear against the carpet.
He suggests I get up.
I do nothing.
He orders me to get up.
Nothing.
Eventually, he has to give up and lifts my head and slaps me, hard, across the face. He tells me this, his eyes not wavering, not leaving my face as he says it: I had to slap you.
So he slaps me.
Nothing.
He pulls me up to my feet and lets me drop. He drags me to the bathroom and splashes my face with cold water. He shouts.
Nothing.
I am eventually dragged to bed, upstairs, deposited there with my clothes on. The door is closed.
Downstairs, in the wicker basket the baby is soaked in piss and milk and not calming down.
After my boyfriend rocks him for a while, the baby finally falls asleep. His face remains too pink hours later, irritated by all the accumulated snot and tears. He is barely 12 pounds, and his arms and legs remain curled up—they are still formed to fit in a womb. His eyes can’t focus yet; there are still soft spots on his skull.
My boyfriend sits in his office chair with the sleeping baby in his arms, watching him breathe. My boyfriend doesn’t sleep all night. He watches him breathe, all night. He didn’t care if I was okay, he tells me. He was just watching the baby. Breathe.
There is no reason to hate me or to panic, I say when I get up the next morning in my different dress. This isn’t going to happen again. I’m so stressed about the art project. I drank to calm my nerves. It backfired. But I’m not going to do that crazy thing again. Drink so much. I’m not going to drink at all, actually. I shouldn’t anyway.
My boyfriend is silent.
Please.
Okay.
I love you guys, I say, and kiss the baby’s head over and over. The smell of his head is milk, honey and sweet almonds, tears and spit. The combination—it’s intoxicating.
I would never do anything to hurt you.
Okay, my boyfriend says again.
I really do love you. So much. This is the last time, I promise.
Okay.
Believe me?
What choice do I have? my boyfriend says.
BIRTHDAY
In August, on my boyfriend’s birthday we go out to one of those hipstery tapas restaurants. We order something small and potent. It comes to us on a square plate surrounded by thin paisleys of sauce.
It seems half a dozen of these places, these hip restaurants, pop up every week on the newly trendy street. The very cool ones have no names or keep the old convenience-store signs—Family Fruit and Smokes—or other former-business announcements such as We Fix Pants. The less cool ones with no old signs left over go for nonsense monikers, something that those deligh
ting in irony would find particularly chuckle-worthy.
The place we’re at is called something like Doodle Noodle. It’s all orange decor on black walls; waitresses who are barely fourteen totter around balancing tiny trays of tiny food.
The baby is at home with my sister.
By the time my boyfriend and I left for the evening, I had already prepared by taking a long bath while enjoying four and a half big glasses of wine.
I was stressed about going out and not drinking. So I had a couple of drinks. Problem solved.
Before another serving of wet bunny turds, I go into the bathroom at Doodle Noodle and dip into my purse. I always have some vodka on me these days. I cut into the lining of my purse and I keep the mickey there. I can finish a mickey, easy, in three goes by now.
Upstairs, after the mickey, we eat the bunny turds and talk. I don’t know what we talk about. All I’m thinking about is the few fluid ounces of clear liquid sloshing back and forth in my head.
Gotta pee again, I announce, making sure I sound annoyed with myself.
I wear a good-girl dress, below the knees—lots of room to balance well. I balance well. My heels are a good four inches high. The stairway is long and narrow. Lots of orange on the walls. It’s like tightrope walking. I don’t fall down.
The next thing I remember is sitting at the table upstairs again eating something oily and black. Maybe rapini. Maybe not.
In my head, there is relief and panic. Relief for the empty mickey stashed discreetly in the garbage pail downstairs—evidence gone, puff—panic because there is no more.
Pay attention.
He’s asking me something, the boyfriend. There’s more orange behind the shiny-haired waitress who is now at our table and says something that sounds like wah-wah-wah. It makes me giggle for some reason.
I negotiate a glass of wine. My boyfriend doesn’t like me drinking but this is a special occasion. But I don’t drink. Not ever! I explain this to him. I promise to drink slowly.
I drink slowly. I have to make it last. The waitress is asking us something again. I want to tell her to get lost but I remember not to.
More miniature food comes, or doesn’t, perhaps it’s just the bill; it is hard to tell with all this darkness and blur and tiny trays.
Next, I’m smooshing my boyfriend’s face close to mine to take a picture of us with my cellphone. I smile very wide. As it turns out later, his face never makes it into the frame.
We’re outside at this point. I have a great idea.
Thanks to my great idea, next, we’re in a strip club. There are rows of chairs, mirrors, hair extensions, taut skin and fluorescent everything: signs, mesh. Neon. Of course, neon.
A flash of me on the slick couch upstairs waiting. My boyfriend disappearing or coming back—no, no, disappearing—with my look-alike.
Wake up, a voice says.
The fat face of a bouncer in my face.
I’m awake.
Stairs to the bathroom.
In the bathroom, girls, glitter and fake eyelashes. A caterpillar of lashes falls into a sink.
Inside the stall, nothing behind the lining in my purse. How come? Where is it?
Back on the slick couch. My boyfriend says I have to go outside. We’re going outside. We’re going. Now.
Then the night. Nothing.
In the morning, silence, the whiteness of our bed and sun through the windows, too merciless.
I can’t remember much more than these sorts of bleeps.
Listen—
Yes, he says. His voice is too awake.
How long have you been up?
A while.
I apologize for ruining his birthday.
It’s okay. I shouldn’t have let you have that glass of wine.
I think about how he sounds as though he truly believes that’s what did it. But I don’t want to question his honesty, especially since I’m so caught up with lying myself.
I puke a little in the bathroom. I clean up. Come out, give him his birthday presents.
Later on we walk by the lake and take lots of pictures.
I’m wearing white and my hair is up in a loose bun. The baby is so tiny; he fits into the sturdy piece of cloth fastened into a sling that I wear over my right shoulder.
In the pictures I look angelic, kissing the top of the baby’s head, posing with my sunglasses perched coyly on my head. There are a few pictures of my boyfriend too, and he looks older than he normally looks, maybe he even looks his age, despite the youthful outfit he’s wearing and all the summer light that’s so deceptive, making everything seem so carefree and innocent.
SUMMER
Since the baby, I’m out of the house a lot. I walk aimlessly for hours.
Outside, I think about my art project and I think about my baby. I am happy that I had him. The impossibility and possibility of him—it is mind-blowing.
I’m not a crier. Seriously. Although when I first saw Frankie a valve opened inside me and I was flooded with emotion so large that all I could do was cry, to try to flush it out, but the more I cried, the harder I cried and I couldn’t stop.
On the operating table, twenty-three hours into labour, I saw the reflection in the surgeon’s glasses of what was going on with my body. I saw what violation it took to get this child out, but it didn’t matter. All I could think about was this tiny boy and how happy he had made me already.
I didn’t know it at the time but it was too much happiness. Happiness puts you at too much risk—what if you were to lose it? Too much happiness is a paradox. It’s a tragedy, even: getting something you’ve always wanted but being unable to keep it.
This thing, this happiness, it was falling out of me, it was uncontainable, excessive, spilling along with my tears. My guts under the scalpel.
Walking around with the stroller, this is what I think about a lot: Frankie’s birth. As an animal I’ve fulfilled my function. You’d think I’d get bored with thinking about it but I don’t. When I saw him for the first time, it felt as if something detonated in my head, a big bang: hello, this is a new universe.
I was his mother from the first ultrasound. There was the windowless waiting room of orange plastic chairs and old magazines as I waited to be seen by the robotic technician who smeared my stomach with clear goo and laconically recited: there’s the baby, this is the heart, do you want to listen to the heartbeat.
On the grainy screen of the ultrasound, thousands of dots and zigzags came together, tightened, then expanded, almost falling apart at the edges.
She said “the baby.” And it was.
Afterwards in the bathroom, I tried to cry but I couldn’t. The emotion was fetal—there but not fully formed. It hurt and soothed at the same time.
As I walk, I pass other mothers—women like me or not like me at all, their hands tied to the handles of their Bugaboos and Stokkes. Aren’t we a strange bunch, I think: adult women completely unplugged from our regular lives (our grown-up lunches and conference meetings and business trips and bachelorette martini parties and the gym) in order to attend to these helpless, alien creatures?
I suspect many of us aren’t as shell-shocked as I seem to be, but occasionally I catch someone’s eye and it’s like meeting in the trenches: What the hell are we doing here? I have no idea. But I love it.
In my ongoing confusion over motherhood, I go back to replaying the moment when my son was finally out, to remind myself of that overwhelming happiness, to remind myself what I’m doing here. And I feel comforted, reassured even, and I flash back a smile to the next mother who passes, the look of recognition on her face.
I tell myself: It’s going to be okay. I’m a mom. This is my mission. There’s nothing strange going on here.
But even early in the day, there is already another ongoing thought cycle running alongside this one. I pretend it’s not there.
It’s thirsty.
When my boyfriend offers to take care of the baby in the evenings, I go out to ride my bike. I do this a c
ouple of times that August. I ride my bike to the liquor store first. I get a six-pack of light, lime-flavoured beer. The beer cans start to sweat as soon as I get them outside. It’s been impossibly fantastically tropical today. Patio weather.
And the drinks? They’re not really drinks.
It’s not even like drinking, drinking this stuff. It’s summer. It’s because it’s summer. Everyone drinks in the summer.
I pedal as fast as I can to the park by the lake. I find a bench far from the bike trail. The cans look like Sprite cans—the tint of green is close enough; there’s the same illusion of freshness contained in the lemony graphic. It’s perfect. I’m just a bike rider taking a break by the lake, having my pop.
The water is lovely, nice dark blue peppered with clean, white boats. The park is full of runners and rollerbladers, moms with strollers. The sun is still out and I’m wearing a T-shirt even though it’s past nine.
I drink two cans fast.
On the third, I feel my body click and tingle, the warmth spreading from my chest, down my belly, straight into my cunt and then further down to my feet.
It’s a total jolt of joy. Despite the jolt I seem to be made out of caramel. Or toffee. Or whatever makes me feel so sweet and so relaxed that I could melt.
I just love everything. I love everything. I love everybody.
I need to tell someone.
I can’t call my house because I’m supposed to be riding my bike.
I call my father.
I never call my family. I don’t know why. They’re sweet people.
No, they’re not.
They are loving and funny, hateful and completely humourless.
They believe that Jesus Christ is our saviour, but I remember them making fun of religious freaks when I was a little girl and they were atheists. They are intolerant of non-Europeans. But sometimes they are stunned by the small-mindedness of their Polish community here in Canada, people who they say judge too much.
Drunk Mom Page 3