Drunk Mom

by Jowita Bydlowska

  One minute I’m walking on the street, the next, my cheek is hugging the curb. I’m not even walking fast. Or in a zigzag. I just space out and then I’m on the curb. I could do this sober, no problem. Anybody could do this with all the ice around.

  I turn around and go to the nearest dive for a pint. I pile up all the change I fished out of my pockets on the table behind the row of beer taps. The bartender shakes his head. I’m sure he has seen my kind many times. Pretty girl, beat-up, broke, with a soiled jacket, hands raw from never wearing gloves. He doesn’t say it out loud but I can sense it. Or my prickly drunkenness can sense it.

  Nothing further from the truth, I want to tell him. I’m a mother of a lovely baby boy, a writer, a somebody. I live in a real house, not a rental. But then I remember my face. Whatever is going on with it, on it. I don’t want to know yet. I can hardly feel it now, still frozen from January’s deadly snap.

  I shut up. I drink. I thaw. My jaw throbs.

  I don’t have enough for another beer after that but I end up with one anyhow. Looks like someone took pity. Maybe the bartender. When I try to recall later, the bartender is reduced to head-shaking gestures and the faint green of neon lights from outside.

  Those are last things that are clear. Either way, all those thoughts comfort me right now.

  I lie in bed and it’s morning.

  I’m feeling my usual sheer fright. The usual sheer fright is due to not recalling much more about the evening beyond the fall, the backpack surviving the fall, and a little bit of the bar afterwards.

  I touch the inside of my mouth with my tongue. I instinctively know to reach far back into the back of my mouth, to the left. I feel where there’s a dull pain. The pain lives in the last molar. I can move the tooth back and forth with my tongue, make the pain bigger, itchy. The itchiness of it makes me want to keep doing it. I move it with my tongue.

  Stop it.

  I move it again, imagining I can sense the delicate fibres breaking, detaching themselves from the bone the more I move the tooth.

  Stop it.

  I want to touch my face. My hand reaches the cheek after sneaking shyly, reluctantly, underneath the sheets.

  I hear my boyfriend’s light snoring behind me.

  So. I’m in bed. Not on the couch or on the floor in the baby’s room. And the boyfriend is in bed with me. That means that we probably didn’t have a big fight last night and that despite whatever’s happened to my face, I’m still human enough to sleep beside.

  I slide out of bed as quietly as I possibly can. My clothes are all over the floor, tights in the hallway.

  In the bathroom I look in the mirror. No black eye. Not too bad at all. Swollen on the left side and there’s a big chunk of skin scraped off along the cheekbone, but nothing serious. I can drape my long hair over it and you won’t see a thing.

  I get under the shower. My body feels tender all over, but especially on its left side, and I have a hard time bending down when I shave my legs, but I make myself.

  Don’t be a baby. My hip hurts the most, and when I look down I notice that the skin there is already changing colours. I touch it and it yelps back in pain. Add it to the broken-tooth pain.

  It’s the bruises that tell the whole tale. They’re every drunk’s distinctive mark. The map of misfortunes is painted all over our bodies. Blue and black and yellow, like watercolour flowers, or the fresh ones: blossoming red, shy pink.

  That day, the official intake guy from New Hope calls and asks intrusive questions. When is the last time I had a drink? Do I smoke? How long have I been drinking for? Do I have any offensive tattoos, visible to people?

  One that is visible and not offensive: my son’s name on my wrist.

  What about piercings, anything unusual?

  No. Nothing unusual, I say and look up and down my body to double-check.

  Do you have frequent and unusual accidents?

  No. Yes, I say, feel the soreness inside my mouth as I tell the truth.

  You can lie—most people do—but it’s better to save your lying energy for other, bigger stuff.

  These are just questions, and if you’re an addict, chances are you know how to answer them. This is the fate of an addict: people ask over and over because you fail over and over. They want to know everything about you to figure you out and why you are the way you are. They demand every intimate number in your life—falls, injuries, days, drinks, years, partners, hospitalizations—and urges—to harm, to fuck, to die and kill—and everything else that is sacred or secret.

  There’s no privacy if you’re an addict. If you’re an addict, people have a right to look through your purses, into your mouth and your eyes. They can draw your blood and check your shit, and for that matter, check inside you, inspect every hole to see if you’re lying to them. The only place they don’t have access to is your mind, which is why they ask and ask. Your mind is also the part that everyone—including you—is telling you to stay away from. Because it is your mind that is killing you.

  The intake guy says that any medication I need to bring with me must be blister-packed. To make sure nobody—that means me—tampers with it. You wouldn’t believe the things people smuggle in, he laughs.

  Like what?

  We’ve found all kinds of drugs, he says. Usually they put them in those ceiling boards so we check their bags right away now but people can get quite creative.

  Why would you bring drugs to rehab? I want to ask but I know he’ll only think I’m trying to suck up to him. But I really do wonder that. What would be the point?

  The intake guy reminds me that I have to be clean and sober for ten days before checking in.

  That means from Saturday on, right? I confirm.

  He laughs, again, and says that we’re so predictable.

  Who’s we? I ask.

  We. The addicts. Don’t get your knickers in a twist. I’m one of us, been sober for twenty-two years this July.

  AA? I guess.

  I’m not telling. Do you have any questions?

  Yeah, that was my question.

  He laughs. Oh, and bring a travel mug. Everybody brings a travel mug. People get worried about germs. It’s unnecessary. But bring one anyway.

  As January slides into February there isn’t much left to do before I leave but pack and shop for things like a toothbrush and a prescription refill. I have to tell the pharmacist that I’m going to rehab because he refuses to blister-pack my medication until I give him a reason. Now I can never come back to this pharmacy.

  We’ve arranged for home daycare that I went to check out two weeks before my departure. The daycare is in a private house. Besides Frankie there’s only one other kid, the child of the caretakers. The caretakers are a couple: an obese woman who seems like she’s on the edge of a mental breakdown and her obese husband.

  The husband is probably a pedophile, we find ourselves saying to each other.

  Fake laughter.

  This stupid remark, an attempt at a joke, is said out of anxiety and makes us even more uncomfortable.

  Nothing will happen, my boyfriend says.

  Of course not.

  ON MY WAY

  This is the last time, I tell myself and I actually feel it, I feel that it just might be the last time. I might have a choice, after all. My walk to the store becomes light; it’s lighter than it’s been in months. Such relief.

  I pick out a bottle of wine and a mickey, joke with the cashier, tell her about the party we’re having tonight. Because we’re having a party. This time we’re really having a party. I can’t remember why but everyone my boyfriend knows is invited and for once we lift the alcohol ban in the house. My boyfriend asks me repeatedly if I’m okay with that and I repeatedly say that I’m going to rehab in ten days and then we both feel reassured and then he asks me again.

  I hide my mickey in the baby’s room. I don’t need to be overly careful with it but just in case I bury it in the drawer filled with the baby’s tiny socks.

  The
party starts slowly but then it gets bigger than we’d expected. Lots of friends show up. Strangers show up in fancy outfits, some straight from gallery openings, poetry readings, a woman with a man everyone knows is married. I walk in on them making out by the baby’s room.

  At an earlier point in the evening, I smuggle out the empty mickey and throw it far, far off into the landscape of roofs, from the back balcony.

  Later, I sit outside with Camille on a front-porch bench. She gives me sips of her wine, giggling a little. She knows that officially I’m not drinking, she knows about me going away.

  She tells me some little story about her past, something about an old fling, a mass of knots that is her former love life.

  Camille is at least ten years older than me. She’s so gorgeous I often feel like kissing her. Right now I wish I was drunker so that I would get the courage to kiss her. I imagine her husband walking in on us. Joining. He would join. I want to kiss them both. I want to kiss everybody. But I’m not drunk enough.

  I take Camille’s hand in mine instead of kissing her, then let go when she gives me a squeeze. She goes back to her story about the old fling and, suddenly, I feel so shockingly sober that I can’t stand this anymore.

  I have to go, I say, get up and leave. This is because I realize something: I can’t get any drunker. I’m drinking myself sober.

  But I keep at it, steadily throughout the night.

  I don’t discriminate. I drink whatever others are drinking. Rum and Coke, beer, wine. Vodka.

  I drink from bottoms of glasses and plastic cups. Because, yes, we had to break out the plastic cups.

  I keep one cup filled up with juice by my side at all times, too. My boyfriend stops me periodically and takes tiny sips out of the juice cup and nods approvingly each time.

  He declares the party a success.

  Some of my friends who weren’t at the party ask about me going away.

  I am cavalier about it, say I’m going to at least get some decent sleep. It’s a break from the baby. It’s practically a vacation.

  I’m going to do some research. For my book, I say to other friends. I’m going to write a book about a woman who’s a mom who drinks. Then they send her to rehab.

  That’s cool, that’s cool, say the friends who don’t know me well enough to figure out if I’m serious or if this is just something I’m really doing.

  Rehab? say some of the friends I met in AA. Probably not a bad idea.

  I bristle at this. It’s just for three weeks. It’s not even rehab-rehab.

  Whatever helps. Have you thought of going back to meetings?

  You mean the cult central? Because you know that AA is a cult.

  Right. Whatever works for you.

  Judgy-judgy.

  Like many addicts I’ve learned to compartmentalize my friendships: drink with some, get sober with others, never talk about drinking or being sober with yet others, never talk to those I think will get too alarmed if they find out I am drinking again.

  The compartmentalization is a useful skill for an addict because it allows me to move from group to group without being caught and confronted. Just like in my twenties when I drank a lot—and when I didn’t drink in secret—and used to flit from group to group of people. Just like then, now I socialize with people who won’t overlap and compare stories.

  If I do socialize. I mostly just stay by myself. I’m detoxing. Spend my days white-knuckling: go for endless walks, change endless diapers, cover my son’s beautiful chubby body with endless kisses, feed him mush and formula, watch dozens of movies, read dozens of books to try to distract my insistent brain, to stave off the waiting and wanting.

  One weekend before rehab, my friend Angie shows up and insists on taking me to an AA meeting. This is going to be my first meeting in more than a year.

  I go because she asks nicely and because I am so bored by being good that I actually consider going to a meeting as something fun to do. I know I’m not going there to learn how not to drink. I’m just going to see what those nutjobs in AA are up to now, I tell myself.

  We drive to the meeting in her car. Angie chats and laughs. She doesn’t ask how long I’ve been sober. This is why we’re friends. Her friendship doesn’t depend on the length of my sobriety. She’s just my friend.

  Some people in AA tend to stay away when they know you’re drinking actively; some try to save you too hard. Some don’t even know you’re drinking because you cut them off because of your own shame. Some would never think to reach out because you always appear just fine. Sober. Well put together. Strong.

  I’m good at appearing strong.

  Angie isn’t fooled. But she doesn’t say anything about it. She instinctively knows not to. Maybe she remembers all too well what it was like to be on my side of things.

  We drive to the meeting.

  I am wearing all black. I’m wearing my hair down. I’m a teenage girl being driven by her mom to a boring family function.

  We get there. People shake our hands. The meeting starts.

  I am asked to do a reading and I get up to the front of the room and read “How It Works”—something that I’ve read hundreds of time before. I used to feel this and other AA texts right there, in my gut, in my conviction—if conviction had a place in my body and it happened to be in my gut.

  This time I’m just reading words and sentences, sticking them together into a coherent whole. Concentrate on curbing my eastern European accent poking out of certain, tricky words: balked, earnestness, nil.

  Done reading, I look around the room and notice a cute guy in the second row grinning at me. Victor. A guy I met in the rooms in my former sober, AA life. I grin back at him. Before, I would never do that since I’ve never considered AA rooms to be places to find cute guys, only recovery, but this time, I’m just here to visit.

  Victor stares, unabashedly, as I walk back to my seat.

  I say to Angie, I’m really glad I came to this meeting.

  She squeezes my hand.

  I say, Victor.

  She giggles quietly.

  The speaker chosen to tell his story at the meeting is not here. The chairperson looks around the room and says, Can anyone volunteer to speak?

  Silence.

  Angie volunteers to tell her story. She goes up to the front of the room.

  She tells her story. She tells it beautifully. She talks about feeling raw, walking around skinless, with her nerves exposed. About the comfort of a drug. The drug providing the skin she so desperately needed.

  About staying up for three nights in a row, ODing in the after-hours club.

  About getting sober.

  Everyone claps when her story is done. I try to cry but can’t.

  Before we part, Angie shows me a white box. In it, there’s a little stuffed bear. The bear has wings, a halo and a tag attached to it that says its name is Halo, the bear. Angie says this is her guardian angel bear.

  There’s a card from Angie in the box too. A card that says I’m supposed to return the bear to Angie once I’m done rehab. Angie knows about how I pretend to be strong and she’s respectful of that, so in her card she says she knows it’s cheesy and everything but the guardian angel bear has helped her when she was trying to get sober in the past.

  I want to make a joke about the bear. Something, something, something drunk bear.

  But I know that this means a lot to Angie. I say I’m going to return the box and the bear will stay completely sober.

  She shakes very slightly when she gives me the box and explains about the bear.

  It’s going to be okay, I assure her.

  She looks at me, big brown eyes scanning my face. Gentle, compassionate eyes. She says in an almost-whisper: I know.

  I hope my face shows that I’m not too worried. That I’m relaxed. That this is really sweet. That she has nothing to worry about indeed and neither do I.

  That I’m not really scared.

  I pull her close and we hug.

  The long,
long days leading up to my departure are a blur. I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, it seems, and as usual, shop for stupid stuff that I don’t need to distract myself. I empty my entire chequing account as a result.

  I buy four shirts in the same style, four different colours, same boring shirt.

  Rock ’n’ roll boots with a hundred zippers on them, so many books I’ll need three lifetimes to get through them.

  I go for manicures and chew off my nail polish almost immediately afterwards. I want to get tattoos, big full-back pieces with skulls and birds in them, anything, any random thing to not think about drinking.

  I stay sober for those ten days because I know that this is my last chance and I can’t afford to screw up anymore.

  The daylight turns from dim to muddy, the trees are shivering, painfully wet, bare; there’s dirt and soaked trash everywhere poking out of dirt. March is finally here.

  CHECKING IN

  On the morning of my departure, I take photographs of my boyfriend holding the baby, both of them trying to look happy. My boyfriend has been wearing glasses since Christmas. The glasses make him seem older, more fragile. As I take pictures, he shouts with pretend cheerfulness to the baby to give Mommy a big smile, give Mommy a big smile, and the baby obeys. The smile is a little unsure but it is lovely: little teeth like tiny pearls glistening with spit as he stretches his cherubic pout. My boyfriend’s smile, in contrast, is big and fake and strange-looking against the seriousness of his bespectacled eyes.

  My boyfriend cries a few times that morning and I think it’s for me and I am touched. He says it’s that he’s terrified of being able to handle the next few weeks on his own with the baby. This is why he’s crying.

  The baby stays with my sister while my boyfriend takes me to New Hope. We drive along a very grey highway; on its side, rows of warehouses, parking lots and later on fields of broken, frozen wheat and soil and old snow.