Drunk Mom
Page 8
Clubs. You know.
Strip clubs? I say, because it’s obvious. I can come with you, I don’t care. I love them. I went this summer and had a great time. I got a lap dance and everything. I went for a friend’s birthday. Your ex didn’t deserve you, I say. My voice probably gets higher and I flap my eyelashes.
No, she didn’t. How was the lap dance?
It was great. The stripper was great. Beautiful. She looked like me.
I can get a driver to take us there. We’ll go to my club, the restaurant owner says, and the young man nods knowingly.
Do you do other things? I ask.
They both laugh. Like what?
Mafia things. Never mind.
More wine. I have another cigarette. The restaurant owner tries to kiss me after that and I push him away, playfully. He says, I’m getting you drunk. There is more wine.
And then there’s nothing.
I wake up in my hotel room. My underwear is off but my bra is on. It’s completely soaked through with milk. There is nothing missing from my purse. The restaurant owner’s business card is lying on the floor beside my tights.
I try to imagine the rest of the evening. Dancing? Falling?
Nothing seems to bring back any memories. Did I say offensive things to those men? I recall calling them mafia. I think I have one memory of passing out in the restaurant and them trying to wake me up … but this isn’t a memory; it is just something that I guess.
Did they carry me back to my room? Did they have to ask at the front desk which one was my room? Did we actually go to Rue Ste-Catherine and visit a strip club after all? Did I invite them here, both of them, and did we have a threesome? Did the restaurant owner undress me, roll down those dirty, fuchsia tights slowly and lovingly, take pictures of me, while his nephew watched, impatient and fed up with this drunken slob his uncle was so taken with? Did they both see my C-section scar and realize that I wasn’t the woman they thought I was? That I was indeed who I said I was—a new mom, staying in Montreal for the weekend, visiting art galleries and drinking too much wine. Why am I not wearing any underwear?
I don’t think anything bad happened.
Perhaps all that happened was wobbly, stumbly me getting walked to my hotel room, being let in, put to bed. Maybe I wobbly, stumbly walked myself to the hotel room, let myself in, put myself in bed. I took my own clothes off.
The end.
But the truth is, I don’t know for sure.
My blackouts are the perfect, absolute erasers of reality. There are no maybes, no grey edges. It’s pure temporary death. And not the death that ends with a warm light at the end of the tunnel. Not even flickering. No flashbacks coming back later, either.
People don’t believe in the absoluteness of blackouts. Perhaps because we simply don’t accept that we can be here, on earth, walking and talking and doing things without any of it being recorded somewhere, kept to be released later.
But no light comes on, ever. From my end this is what it looks like: An alcoholic drinks and drinks, she goes into a blackout and then it’s a long nothing and then she is waking up and it’s the middle of the day. The carnage of fuchsia pantyhose, shoes, underwear strewn all around her with no clues as to the sequence of events preceding this.
I’ve heard of extraordinary fits, of alcoholics travelling to different countries in blackouts. I’ve heard of an alcoholic judge who left his own wedding in Ontario and woke up in a bed in Alberta with two strange women. I’ve heard of a man who came to and found he was delivering his daughter.
It is terrifying shit.
I don’t think I was molested.
The end.
I decide to leave. I start packing. I find my panties in the bathtub. I throw them out. In the garbage there’s the dental dam wrapper. Perhaps I unwrapped it last night, looked at it. The end.
I check out nervously, worried that someone is going to make a remark about the night before, tell me that I had damaged something, that maybe I threw up all over the elevator, maybe tried to make out with the waiter from the hotel bar that I thought of sleeping with earlier.
Nobody says anything.
I drag my suitcase out onto the sidewalk. I’m too mortified to walk by the restaurant, so I catch a cab and get to the train station hours before my train leaves. I remember a liquor store nearby—I passed it on my first day here. I drag my suitcase all the way there and buy a mickey of vodka. Even though I’m not drinking it (yet), knowing that I have it immediately calms me down.
In the train station food court only one bar is open. It’s a dark, dank sports bar, a baseball game all round me on the screens suspended from the ceiling, and a carpeted floor littered with white flecks, possibly peanut shell remnants.
I order a pint of beer.
WHY
Believe me, I tried to figure out why. Why, for example, one warm fall evening, I somehow end up in Chinatown at the end of a busy shopping trip, and why I push my tired body and the tired stroller forward, pretending to be here to find a scarf.
In reality, I am here so that I can stumble upon a liquor store. The one close to Kensington Market, one I’ve never been to but that I’ve been aware of, of course. I pretend that this is a total surprise when I do walk by it.
What was that? Was that?
Imagine that! A liquor store.
I walk a bit longer and then turn around. I could get some wine to go with my dinner tonight. The boyfriend is away at some conference—we decided that it makes sense for him to go away now to get a break after my Montreal trip. It’s my turn to be with the baby all by myself.
I don’t mind at all. Tonight I will cook myself a nice meal, treat myself. Maybe I should get a pedicure. Rent a funny movie about blondes getting married to their best friends whom they never saw in romantic light until the high school reunion. Call my best friend in Poland. Make it a night.
I go inside.
I had no idea that the store has a flight of dangerously high stairs. Ridiculous. There’s no ramp. There is a wheelchair lift, a tiny platform that I step onto and then have to shut the little doors behind me before it will move. You can move it with either a manual handle or by pressing a big red button with the words UP/DOWN printed on it. The lift makes a loud noise, and moves slowly, in full view of everyone in the store. It’s actually performance art, this indiscreet and attention-seeking hulk of ancient machinery going up with me standing right in the middle of it.
Once we get out of the lift, I imagine that I can feel people watching us.
I know what this looks like. This is exactly what it looks like, although, naturally, I’m pretending otherwise. But if you need to know the truth: Yes, I am ashamed to be here with a stroller. And I don’t know why I’m here, buying a bottle of wine and also—why not?—a mickey of vodka, telling myself that I’m just buying it for tonight’s special dinner, that I will only have one glass of wine—max two.
No more than three.
But, in the back of my mind, I know already that I won’t just have a glass or three. I will have the entire bottle. Then I’ll drink the mickey. Then I’ll run frantically around the house trying to find anything else that will give me a buzz. On not finding anything, I will have a thought to run out of the apartment, just for a bit, not long at all, and go to the nearest bar and down a quick pint.
The baby will be fine in his crib; it’s not like I’m going to be gone long. Yes, I know that there’s a Murphy’s Law about accidents and babies left alone, which is why I never leave Frankie alone. Even in a state of the most profound drunkenness I am always somehow able to talk myself out of this idea—usually by passing out—and stay at home, avoiding disaster.
But I am scared.
My fear is that one day the perfect combination of insanity and alcohol will cause me to ignore the last-ditch responsible thought and I will leave and drink at the bar only to come back to one of these: a house on fire, the baby suffocated by a blanket, the baby face down in his own puke.
An
d yet, knowing all this, having fast-forwarded the tape all the way through to the end, I have just marched through this Chinatown liquor store and found the wine and the vodka.
The cashier says, How old is the baby?
The baby? I mumble something about having a dinner party and a lot of friends over, never answering her question, never even hearing her question, until I’m back on the wheelchair lift that is slowly, shamefully, grunting its way down. I hear it then, an echo in my head. I answer it in my head.
He’s five and a half months old.
The next day I wake up on the loveseat in the living room with my neck stiff, shoes on. I can’t remember what happened last night.
He is in his crib, asleep, looking peaceful and fat. Bottles of formula spill milk onto the mattress. He’s got enough formula in there to drown in. What a responsible mother I am.
Once I’m downstairs in the kitchen I discover that there was no dinner. No food to make dinner with. There are bottles wrapped in newspapers ready to be taken out and disposed of later.
I make a decision to stay home until the boyfriend gets back. I’m mortified by the fact that I drank without anyone around to take care of the baby in case I drank myself to death, fell on my head or choked on vomit. I’m so mortified, my immediate thought is to drink this shame out of me, but I manage to resist. I can’t risk it anymore. This means a week without alcohol. But the fear of dying and worse, finding my son dead, is suddenly a siren, not just a weak little buzz in the back of my head.
I sleep a lot.
On day three I wake up sweaty—and proud—as if I had run a marathon. I’m not hungover. I breastfeed all the time now, and Frankie’s happy despite the snotty nose and a little bit of a cough. We spend most of our days in bed, both of us gurgling and chatting and laughing, his fat feet kicking madly, sometimes landing on my battered body, but I don’t mind.
We take a bath together. He pees in the tub; this makes me chuckle hard and he looks up at me and joins me, mouth opening in a laugh so powerful that it doesn’t make a lot of sound, except for one loud hyeee that comes out of him when he inhales deeply. He smacks one of my collarbones and his mouth turns upside down in surprise. I can tell he has hurt himself, but I distract him from crying, make a high-pitched noise, something between a scream and a coo. He looks at me uncertainly. Then he laughs again through the beginning of his tears. I feel like I’m god.
Drying myself, I look in the bathroom mirror. I’m getting skinny. I’m running out of whatever food I do have, so I may have to leave the house after all. I try not to think about it. Today will be one more day eating out of cans and I’ll love it—anything to not have to leave.
As I pat my sweet baby-boy dry, I kiss him all over his bean-shaped belly, kiss him on the soles of his fat feet.
I feel I’ve never been happier.
After our bath, we lie down.
I read.
Three days sober, I read like I drink. The right side of the bed—my side—is heaped with books and magazines. I have many different subscriptions and I buy books all the time, but I’m usually too drunk to read. Now, between sleeps, baths and heating up cans, I read. I go through all kinds of inspiring stories in women’s magazines, a few short stories from recent issues of The New Yorker, two novels and a non-fiction book about genetic disorders. I am learning so much. I’m hoping that Frankie is sucking in all that knowledge with the breast milk. It feels as though we are both detoxifying from the debilitating past few months.
The next day it’s beautiful outside but I daren’t go out even after I discover that all the cans are definitely gone. I know that I need to eat—for both of us—but I’m so terrified of what will happen outside that I’m actually considering starving to death. I’m not being dramatic—I do think about it. I think about calling my sister, asking her to come down at the end of the week so that she can find Frankie, still alive, ready to be rescued. I imagine him stuck to my dead breast sucking the final drops, surviving. But what if he doesn’t?
I search online for “How long does it take to starve to death?” and am told it “depends on several factors such as your weight and how healthy you are. Most medical doctors state you can live four to six weeks without food. Some obese people have been known to live up to 25 weeks without food, but you can only live three days without water, except for some rare cases where people have lived 8–10 days without water.”
Three days if without water. I could do it. I’ve three days left exactly.
Of course, I’m not entirely serious about starving myself to death and you absolutely have to be serious in order to be successful in such an endeavour. Which means that sooner or later I’ll have to go out.
If I go outside I will go and get booze. There’s no doubt about it.
I don’t have much choice; the thought, it’s already planted in the back of my mind (planted—it has roots, this thing, buried deeply in every neural connection in my brain; it’s indistinguishable from all the snapping synapses that make me what they make me). As soon as I think it, I get excited about it. I’m horrified down to the bone and I’m excited about it.
I don’t have a choice because I think about what’s outside these walls concurrently with all these thoughts about feeling good, detoxified, happy, healthy. The walls of my apartment are no match for what’s outside of them, and what’s outside of them is alcohol. And it’s not even alcohol that I’m worried about and that I’m addicted to, exactly. It’s my thoughts that are my addiction, the way they start with “I should get some food” and morph into “How about a bottle of wine?”
And my addictive thoughts are not like other thoughts. They are not stoppable; they are never easily distracted. Which is why my addiction is also a body part. I can’t get rid of it any easier than I can cut off my own arm or poke my eye out.
I pack Frankie’s diaper bag. I take my time getting him ready, dressing him in matching shirt and socks, a hat with teddy-bear ears, mittens the size of tulips. He’s gurgling and smiling. He knows we’re going out, he probably thinks—or whatever it is that he processes in his little brain—that this is about him.
I’ve never been arrested but I always feel guilty whenever a cop or a cop car goes by. Maybe it was the four days in isolation, but when I see the cop car, I’m convinced that somebody tipped them off about what I did the first night: drink a bottle of wine and some vodka while the baby is asleep in his bassinet, completely and pathetically dependent on me and my drunken self. Who’s going to believe that I’ve been sober for the past 3.5 days? I imagine a neighbour, somebody from across the street watching me through binoculars, a telescope, taking notes, taking photos, reporting, reporting.
To serve and protect it reads on the side of the cop car.
Briefly, I have a thought of flagging it down and asking for a ride. My back is killing me. If the cop says no I’ll point to the serving part of that slogan. Serve me. Protect me. Protect me from me.
I do no such thing. Frankie and I continue on our walk. I smile at the cop behind the wheel and he doesn’t smile back. I didn’t expect him to anyway. I wish I had the guts to ask him to arrest me.
I have some sense left with me because when I get to the liquor store I suddenly remember the light beer that I used to drink in the summer and so I only get a six-pack of that. In the evening, after putting Frankie to bed, I smoke a pack of cigarettes and I try to sip—not gulp!—and it’s a miracle but I go to sleep almost completely sober with two cans left in the fridge. It is like wrapping an amputation in bandages, but at least I’ve stopped the bleeding.
AT THE DOCTOR’S
When my boyfriend gets back I am relieved and scared. I’m scared because I know for sure that something is wrong with me. After my week alone and my painful sober sipping, I am so tired of myself and of my own tricks that I feel a need to confess. But I don’t know how.
I call my sister to ask her to come over. I’m hoping that her presence will help me get out what I need to get out.
And so, finally, in a bout of near-sobriety, I tell my sister and my boyfriend that I think I may have a problem with drinking. Again, I mean.
It is no news to them, as it turns out. It’s almost as if they were waiting for me to say something because it is immediately decided that I will tell my family doctor about my relapse. I agree with the intervention team that this is a smart idea.
The harm reduction group was nice, my boyfriend says, but it didn’t really work out and you clearly need more.
I know.
So you should tell your doctor. See if she has other suggestions.
I will. Because I’m not going back to AA, I say to them.
I know that. I don’t want you to go back. You were miserable.
My sister says nothing, but later, she gives me a surprisingly strong hug before she leaves, and I almost cry.
At the doctor’s, it feels nice to be able to talk to someone who’s never heard about my alcohol troubles before. There are no people left in my life who haven’t been, at some point, treated to my coming out as a sober alcoholic, years ago, but there are a lot of friends who haven’t been aware of my recent relapse.
When I first got sober, there were lots of people in my life who might’ve wondered if they, too, were alcoholics. My coming out and sobriety were slightly threatening, perhaps—I looked so okay on the outside. The stories of my drinking weren’t any wackier than anybody else’s. But I lost a few friends over my non-drinking.