I don’t call them because I’m never sure that I won’t hang up. In that way, I’m a product of my parents. I’m a product of two people who refuse to be defined and whose most powerful weapon is surprise and the predictability of being surprising.
My sister: “You know what mom’s like.”
Me: “Yeah. She freaked out, right?”
My sister: “She was totally calm. We had a really nice chat.”
I don’t talk to my parents because there’s only so much unpredictability that I can handle, having myself to deal with. I cannot rely on my own two feet to walk me out of liquor stores—the disconnect between my mind and the ground I’m stepping on seems too great.
But when I’m buzzed, like right now, I don’t worry about who’s going to answer: which dual mom or dad. It doesn’t really matter at all. I’m generous and feel infinitely tolerant when I’m drunk.
I smoke and drink another two cans as I talk to my father about the baby.
My father listens. Tries to say something but I’m talking now. I know I’m talking too much, Dad, but I just wanted to explain how I’m so full of happiness and everything is working out, isn’t it? And I’m just calling to share my happiness.
He says—
Please, let me finish.
I drink my last can.
I talk more. And talk. Suddenly I share secrets with him, tell him that I never planned to be a mother but now that I am, I can’t think of a more wonderful experience.
I tell him that I actually feel fulfilled for the first time in my life. And that I also feel a little cheated since I always thought myself to be above such basic biological determinants. I guess I always thought I’d be some kind of an academic or an artist and derive my satisfaction from that, I say to my dad. But like you—I boldly refer to a touchy topic: his abandoning his own writing aspirations—I think I can be quite content just being a parent. Perhaps I’ll write later when the kid is older, right? I say, and my dad grunts something on the other end, something that I take as encouragement to talk more because I keep going.
I’ve never said any of this to anyone, I tell him. I tell him I’m that I’m glad we have this kind of relationship, where we can just talk. I say that they’re really confusing sometimes, he is, not just him but Mom too. The whole family. But I love them no matter what. I love him. I love my baby. Because now there’s a new family member! Family is very important. Perhaps it’s the only thing that matters, I mull. Family. It’s great.
He starts to speak—
Oops, what time is it? I say.
I’m done with my can.
Once the last drop makes it out, I hang up.
I get back on my bike. I pedal home. I’m slightly buzzed but not buzzed enough to sing out loud. So I sing in my head, letting the end fragments of songs spill out of me once in a while as I keep going.
At home, my boyfriend says he’s forgiven me for the night before.
What night before.
We kiss.
I hope the lemon smells strong enough to overpower the other, beery smell.
He holds me even closer.
Who cares what night before. I’m not going to ask.
When we make love I hold on to him with all my strength—I’m full of gratitude for his forgiveness. This gratitude is genuine.
I’m full of gratitude because I got away with whatever he has forgiven me for. I love him so much. I’m so happy.
I’m so happy because I remember something. Although it’s not like I really forgot about it. I remember something that is waiting for me after we finish.
He holds my head and says that I don’t seem to be entirely there, what’s distracting me?
No, nothing, I assure him. I pull him even further into myself.
I can’t come but the evening isn’t entirely lost yet.
I tune in to his body reaching further inside mine, try to estimate how far from coming he is. I hold on to his ass. There’s a tension of muscles underneath the palms of my hands. Close. Closer.
I say, Come on, come. Come for me.
The tension gets even stronger.
Come on.
There’s still an almost full mickey hidden in a box in the basement.
HARM REDUCTION
There are lots of evenings when I go out on my bike with my pack of six beers. It’s never just six beers either. The amounts, they increase. They have to as my body gets used to alcohol and it makes more space for it. It makes more space for it because it doesn’t just want more of it—it needs more.
A need implies that this, my drinking, is something that is necessary.
Is it not necessary. Yet it is a need.
What kind of a need is it, then?
It’s not a physical one. At least not yet. My lacking this thing is not going to result in death, not even a serious withdrawal, probably no alcoholic seizure.
This is a need that’s psychological—sustenance necessary to keep troubling thoughts away. The thoughts of guilt and worry.
I can’t imagine dealing with my guilt and worry without the anaesthetic of alcohol—the guilt and worry that haunt me when I’m conscious and aware. Sober.
Maybe another day, I can deal with it. Maybe tomorrow I can deal with it. Maybe after the weekend. Right now I just need a break.
It is ingrained in me now that once I take a drink, I will get the break, will get the relief. Yes, I know—intellectually—that the relief is brief and that the consequences can be awful, but I no longer have any defences. I’m looking for the perfect out from my situation, and even though I know sobriety is the perfect out, it seems like an absurd concept. Can’t get sober till I feel I’m ready to face the guilt and worry; can’t face the guilt and worry when I’m sober.
I have to wonder, too, if in seeking this ultimate break I’m trying to subconsciously annihilate myself—if this is some manifestation of Todestrieb, a death wish. I wonder if my addiction is a strongly expressed death wish, nothing more, nothing less.
I don’t consciously think of dying when I’m drinking. In fact, the desire that I imagine drives my drinking is the desire to live, to live loudly and freely, without any care. I want to jump, want to run, want to want!
But then there’s the parallel, perhaps less conscious desire, which is to numb myself to the world. To deal with the world tomorrow.
Living is difficult. Dying is difficult. Being dead is not difficult. And what else is a blackout if not death?
Because of blackouts there are entire days when I try to avoid my boyfriend out of fear that he’ll ask me about something from the night before.
The truth is, I don’t remember the night before. Most of the time I remember only how I got there; there’s some kind of a beginning—me drinking on the metal staircase outside—and then there’s nothing for a long time, and then I’m in bed, waking up.
Sometimes there are painful, tender places on my body that I feel right away on waking, clues under the disguise of bruises. But I don’t get to know the whole story despite the clues. The best I have are some guesses, like, I must’ve tried to prevent some serious fall judging by the way my shoulder feels.
We make love often, my boyfriend and I, because I want to distract him, to stop him from talking. We usually make love in the morning, but possibly not just in the morning because sometimes he’ll say something or do something—like he’ll tug on my hair—that will also seem to be a clue as to what happened the night before. Maybe something intimate, sweet, or something very, very filthy, but I wouldn’t know.
Despite my avoiding him, my boyfriend is starting to ask questions too. The lovemaking is not enough to distract him. He asks about the tender, bruised places on my body, the way I smell, why I was so out of it—again—the night before when we had some friends over. Why I smoked an entire pack of cigarettes.
I think I know he knows and he probably knows I think I know he knows. But we still haven’t really talked about it—about the fact that my drinking is starting to
get out of control.
I’m not that bad. I need help. There’s nothing wrong.
The doublethink is exhausting enough for me, I’m sure it’s taking its toll on my boyfriend as well. But we never talk about it.
There are times too when I suspect my boyfriend wants to talk about it. But instead he is not talking to me at all, and that scares me too because I need him on my side—he’s all I’ve got on my side.
At the same time, I’m grateful for his silence—it asks no questions and therefore there are no answers to give. So I don’t ask him why he’s quiet. I don’t want him to answer. I don’t think he wants to answer. We both pretend his silences are a new part of his personality.
The new parts of my personality are when I no longer mind that he still goes out a lot.
Since he’s a new parent just like me, his sleep gets dramatically cut down and he doesn’t go out as much as before, but he’s still happily flitting from bar to bar at least a few times a month.
He’s always been a social person—drinking Scotch with his men friends in private clubs, bar-hopping, flirting with PR girls, speaking at media events, playing poker till dawn. He’s even picked up a new hobby—DJing—and came home once at 5 a.m., explaining that Mildred insisted he drop by for a nightcap afterwards.
I’m cross-eyed from a jaw-grindingly sober, sleepless night when he stumbles home that morning, but I say nothing because I’m already plotting how I’m going to get over this disappointment by drinking.
He tells me about his escapades because I ask. I joke that I’m living vicariously through him. I’m sure he doesn’t tell me everything. Which is okay because I don’t tell him everything. I don’t tell him anything.
Because of my drinking I consciously avoid conflict and confrontation. I no longer ask about his coffees with women who “needed help getting into the magazine industry.”
In the past, this sort of eagerness (to help) often created tensions in our relationship, but now that I’ve secrets of my own, I’ve become generous and permissive, often even encouraging his socializing: What is Liz up to these days? Yes, I really do feel bad about Mildred’s ex-husband being a dick, I think you should call her back.
Instead of focusing on my boyfriend’s intriguing, socially devouring life, I should probably pay closer attention to mine. Life, that is—my simple, socially isolated life.
I need to sort myself out. Before I screw things up with the boyfriend or hurt myself badly enough to go beyond the bruises.
It is almost the end of August and I have had a continuous string of hollow nights and there may be clues everywhere, like puzzle pieces, but I can’t put them together into anything coherent because there are too many blanks in between. The blanks trump whatever narrative I try to come up with.
This is because I’m a blackout drinker, almost always have been, and now that the blackouts are here—they are always here now—I start to feel a little concerned. As it was in the past, I am amused and worried about the person that takes over when I check out. She looks like me except that her eyes are gone. Replaced by marbles. Her legs are mine but the knees are inside-out. Her fingers dial numbers that I no longer remember; her mouth talks about things I have never even thought about or have tried not to think about. And what if perhaps she doesn’t like children? Who’s going to stop her?
I get scared enough to look up online some programs that deal with problems like mine.
Because I don’t think I’m that bad (for example, you’d never see me hiding with a bottle of vodka in my bed at two in the afternoon, now, would you?), I decide I need a mild kind of solution. Not actual rehab but maybe rehab light. Despite being aware of the distance between wanting and needing getting smaller, I still harbour the idea that I haven’t crossed the line. What kind of line I’m not entirely sure—perhaps the line that will divide the necessity from the absolute desperation.
I can’t go all the way to admitting that my drinking is a big problem. Having gone to AA meetings in the past, I know I’m not capable of that kind of commitment. Right now, I don’t even meet the only requirement of AA membership: a desire to stop drinking.
At this point, I still doublethink myself into agreeing that I only need a little adjustment to get back to feeling normal.
I don’t know if I really need a program that deals with addictions—I wouldn’t go that far—but at the same time, just in case, I know that I could do something to learn to manage better, to perhaps train my body to only want a bit—a can of lemon-tinted beer or two, no more—and to not disappoint me with another blackout.
So I’m looking for a commitment I could adhere to once a week tops, something I could explain—to myself, mostly—as a social thing, a thing I do to get away from the baby. Sort of like an activity that a girlfriend would tell me to partake in, a yoga class or ballroom dancing, to get me away from the baby. Some kind of a me-time.
I find something that takes place once a week. It’s called the Guidance Self-Change Program, and it’s to do with “harm reduction” and the negative consequences of drug use. Self-change reads to me like improvement. Improvement is always good. This is exactly like something a person interested in me-time could do: improve the person.
The program is offered at the local mental hospital, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. I remember laughing over that name with friends back in journalism school: you can get the addiction or you can get the mental health. I joke to myself now that I already have one—the addiction—but I need the other one. Badly.
I think, too, how much I like the phrase “harm reduction”—it almost sounds as if this thing was supposed to teach us how to drink. Like a course.
Or not drink. I’m not entirely sure I understand, but it’s a short-term deal and that’s all I need anyway, something short-term.
Because I need to learn how to drink properly. Or not drink.
You get into the program after doing a computer test at the hospital, which asks you: Do you crave a drink at a definite time daily? Have you ever missed a day of work because of your drinking? Do your loved ones remark on the way and/or the amount you drink? Things like that.
I have no idea if the questionnaire is set up so that it can detect you lying. But what would be the point? I answer as truthfully as I can.
After completing the questionnaire I find out that I have a problem. You only need to answer yes once to have a problem. Which is why everyone else taking the questionnaire today finds out the same thing—we all have a problem, no matter how many yeses.
All the people who passed the test—all of us who took it that day—get invited to the information session. Some guy says he said no to everything. The information-session lady says that just taking the questionnaire means you have a problem.
Of course it does.
We’re all eligible for the harm-reduction.
Congratulations—I suppose.
I’m given a pamphlet about the program and a form to fill out.
There are two ways to reduce harm and tackle the program. The first is through eradicating drinking entirely, in other words, abstinence. The second is by drinking only a maximum number of drinks at a given time. So, for example, a maximum of three drinks on one occasion and a total often drinks a week. You can set any goal amount. If you go over that amount, you haven’t met your goal.
In the Comments space on the form I’m tempted to make a lame joke about people setting their amount higher than what they’d normally drink. But I’m sure I wouldn’t be the first to say it. I leave the Comments space blank.
During the program, the group is supposed to meet once a week and do homework in between.
I’m not entirely sure what happens once you graduate, but I hope I will be cured of my problem drinking.
If you don’t meet your goal you are given some other alternatives, I’m told, one of which is meeting with the counsellor one-on-one. You can also go to an inpatient facility, a rehab, if you’re really struggling, but that, you�
�re assured, is an option for you to explore after everything else fails.
This sounds like a threat to me, getting sent off to an inpatient facility, and I make myself a promise, which I have no way of securing. I tell myself—full of doubt already, somewhere behind all my doublethink—that I will never get that bad.
I think of the inpatient facilities I know from stories of people in AA, or from the television shows about addicts—especially the shows about addicts. My head is full of camera shots of young women with big terrified eyes, rimmed with pink from too much crying. The camera zooming in on their faces as they’re getting whisked away to the place that will hopefully fix them but will most likely fail because forced confinement doesn’t work for those who are in the throes of wanting: wanting to get out and just wanting—the wanting with no end.
The promise that I cannot secure but that I make regardless once I sign up for harm reduction is that I will never be the girl with hair whipping in my face as I stare wistfully out of the window of a car taking me to rehab.
ON THE BEACH
Before my me-time program starts, my boyfriend and I go on holiday by the ocean. We are staying at a cottage rental that we’ve found online. The baby is coming with us, of course.
I sing to the baby as we take off on the plane. I’m a little shaky on the plane. I don’t like flying. Plus, I haven’t had a drink in almost twenty-four hours.
The baby sleeps through the flight.
I bring a couple of mickeys with me. They are hidden at the bottom of the suitcase, behind the lining that you can open with a zipper. Suitcases were designed for liars.
I have to drink straight out of the bottle because our cottage is just one room, kitchen and dining room together, so there’s a chance of getting caught if I were to mix. That’s fine with me. More efficient this way.
Drunk Mom Page 4