Drunk Mom

by Jowita Bydlowska

  I can’t do this anymore.

  I got hit by a car.

  You got hit by a car? You should see a doctor, then.

  I need help.

  I can’t help you anymore. I don’t want to help you anymore. I don’t want to be with you anymore. I’m going to call the lawyer. If you want I can call one for you too. I’m going to look for a place or you can start looking for a place. I think you should probably start looking for a place right away.

  I’m stunned. Every word falls on me like a brick. It’s a shower of bricks. He says everything that I don’t want to hear, can’t bear to hear. He has a right to say all those things, to mean them.

  It’s over.

  What lawyer? I don’t know any lawyers. He has lawyer friends. His friend Tommy is a lawyer. Tommy’s going to take his side, of course. They’ve been friends for years. Everyone, in fact, is going to take his side.

  I’ve no one. I’m all by myself. The baby will be taken away. I’m a poor, stupid drunk slut, that’s all. I’m nothing and I have nothing.

  I think about all that but then I say something entirely different. I say hurtful, mean things and I make up lies, more lies. The more lies I say, the easier it’ll be to believe them, I hope. I go back to the concussion story. It was a concussion, I insist.

  Concussion, he says and gets up.

  Slowly, painfully, I hop around the house and get myself and Frankie ready to go out. We’ll go to a park, I’ll have a little nap as usual. Frankie can sleep too. Yes, good. We’ll sleep, we’ll clear our heads, things will make more sense once we clear our heads. I’ll be able to convince my boyfriend that what I’m telling him is the truth. Why does he suddenly refuse to play our game where he pretends to believe what I tell him even though we both know I’m lying?

  I strap Frankie in the stroller and hop out of the house.

  It’s a beautiful day. I’m wearing white. I’ve washed my wounds and put dressing on my knee and on the smaller gash on my left leg. It’s not pretty but at least it’s clean. The white squares match the dress. I have a hard time walking but I figure out a way to place my left foot in a way—big-toe pad first—that there’s no pressure on the stupid little toe.

  I’m going to think about things today and then I’m going to go back home and convince my boyfriend of my innocence. I’m so sick of being accused. I can’t take it anymore. This is really unacceptable. What right does he have to constantly monitor me like this? I mean, why is this any of his business? I had a concussion. How is that my fault. I’m going to turn—

  Then there’s silence.

  My own voice in my own head just disappears. And once it disappears, there’s an absolute, vast silence.

  It stops all. It stops me.

  It’s not a moment per se. It’s the invisible, non-existent pause between time’s passing, one minute turning into the next one. It’s so big that it contains everything else—around me and inside me.

  I see me and I am looking back, looking for help.

  And with that glimpse, everything crumbles.

  I’m a liar.

  I’m a liar and I can’t afford to lie anymore.

  I’m an alcoholic, I’m a liar and I’ve lied about everything.

  There was no concussion.

  I drank.

  I drank and rode my bike and fell onto a busy street and broke my shoes. I got up and got back on my bike and then fell down again. Back onto the street. There were cars whooshing by, honking, people on the sidewalk stopping, asking: Is she okay? Are you okay? Is she okay? Are you okay? There was me kicking off my broken shoes. Walking barefoot through the streets with my mangled bike, walking into the darkness, coming out of the darkness, lost.

  But I don’t want to be lost anymore.

  What am I hiding? There are bruises all over my body. Yellow, green, blue, red. I hide them underneath white clothes. I paint my blackened nails over with red. I get sick and flush to hide the sound, wash and scrub to hide the smell. There are bottles hidden all over the city.

  What have I built this tower of secrets for?

  I glance down. Out of the corner of my eye I see that Frankie turns around the way he always does when he senses me looking. It’s our magical connection, mother and son. We feel each other.

  It’s okay, baby, I say, it’s okay. We’re okay.

  I’m only minutes away from home.

  It’s okay, it’s okay, I keep saying to Frankie, to myself, who knows to what.

  I walk back, stumble back. I’m crying but this is good. I’m just washing shit out. There’s so much shit inside me. I could cry for days. Months.

  I’m feeling so incredibly relieved too. Yes, relieved. I don’t have to do this anymore. I don’t have to lie. I don’t have to make up stupid stories about concussions. I don’t have to conceal my tracks—bottles, bruises—pretend I don’t know where they’ve come from. My purse’s double lining will get stitched, there will be no need to hide anything in any lining anymore. Everything will be out in the open with me. I will never get caught because there will be nothing to catch me with or to catch me for. I will live like a normal human being.

  When I get inside the house, my boyfriend doesn’t want to hear it. He’s heard it all before. He’s heard it many times.

  But you don’t understand. This time it’s different.

  That’s what you said last time.

  But it is different. And it doesn’t even matter that he doesn’t believe me. I wouldn’t believe me. Who would?

  I suppose I’m sad that he doesn’t believe me, but I understand. I understand and I’m happy regardless. Frankie is here. As long as there is Frankie, I could be happy. I could lose my boyfriend, lose this house, our life as a family unit … and I would be happy anyway. Because this is over. Although it’s not over for a fact—you can never know for a fact. I just know right now that it’s over.

  THE MOMENT

  So now that I’ve finally caught the moment, stopped time and got out, I don’t know any better how to catch it. Because, no matter what anyone tells you, stopping is impossible if you’re a real addict. If you’re an addict it’s not in your nature to stop. It’s in your nature to do more and more. And more. And more.

  And how do I know that this is the magical moment? Why would this be it, why right now?

  It’s not fear of losing what I have, not my boyfriend’s words and the consequences he has outlined. Because I know that I can still probably go back and throw another lie at him, I can probably even reheat the concussion story and he will eventually capitulate and everything will go back to what it was like until one of us dies or something. Either way, we’ll be miserable until forever.

  I don’t know for sure if this is the magical moment. But I know that right after I get back home to confess to my boyfriend and right after he rejects my confession, I don’t crumble. I feel more solid than I have in months. Years.

  And, limping on my broken toe, I march all the way across town to an AA meeting. Because that is the only thing that kept me stopped before. And this time I mean it. I really want it. I want it. The wanting is as strong as always. But now it’s for the right thing.

  THIS PART OF THE STORY

  If you’ve read other addiction memoirs, you know that this is the part where I talk about how difficult but wonderful things became after I got sober. Things got very difficult indeed after I got sober. The reality is that often I’m not sure if they got anything else. I’m not sure if they really got that wonderful and, really, what this wonderful is supposed to be.

  In fact, it is wonderful that possibly makes me relapse. I’m always chasing it because I don’t experience it—the wonderful—unless I’m truly on the edge. I understand the concept of wonderful, the concept of happiness, but I never feel as close to it as I do when intoxicated.

  I know that here is roughly the part where I’m supposed to write that I found true happiness only after getting sober, but this is not the case.

  I’m certainly feeling
healthier already. But like the uncatchable moment of clarity in the midst of addiction, happiness is a glimpse, a flash going off. As an addict I see it—happiness—differently, or rather, I want to see it differently. I want to see it as a platform, a way of going even further, beyond happy. Fuck happy. I want ecstatic, euphoric. I want godly. Meeting my son for the first time when I gave birth gave me a surge of godly. But it didn’t last long enough.

  And, of course, I wanted more.

  And now I want more again. And now I’m sober. The first time I got sober, it was the same: I wanted it more than anything. Now I want it again, just as hard. Yes, I wanted to be sober the whole time up until now but now it is desperate. The last ditch effort to jump off a speeding train. I don’t have a solution or the answer of why now, why this way. It just is this way. This is no self-help book.

  As for the meetings, I could go to one or I could go to a hundred but without desperately wanting sobriety, it wouldn’t work. I need meetings to stay wanting, to remind myself how badly I want it, to see how there are others like me who want it just as badly. How there are many who want it but for whom the train of compulsion doesn’t seem to stop. They never get that moment, that pause that will be long enough for them to get off. Because that’s all it is—for some the train is too fast, some sleep through the stops, some jump off and jump right back on because they forget immediately that this is a death train. Me? I slept, went too fast, forgot … but then finally, stopped, limping on my broken toe, the lies falling off of me, making me light, making me vulnerable. Making me strong. So strong that for one moment I could halt the whole fucking train.

  Once sober, I have to move out. Despite my breakthrough and finding the moment that lets me get off the crazy train and not have the compulsion to self-annihilate, I still have to deal with my situation. The situation is that I no longer have the comfort of my boyfriend’s support. My sister is in England for the summer. And the mental-health workers, the counsellors, have been abandoned over the months and it would be too inauthentic to rely on them now. Besides, I never really bought it, any of those therapies.

  At home no amount of promises or screaming will persuade my boyfriend to let me stay. And part of me prays and hopes that he won’t crumble. I have to act out despair and tears—which come too easily now—but I’m not convinced myself that staying home and being forgiven is what’s best for me right now. So I shout and plead but in spurts rather than making this a continuous campaign. I’m sick of myself.

  I’m sick of this, he says.

  A few days later I go to the emergency ward with my baby for company. I am there to see someone about my broken toe. As I wait I think about how I used to come to the same emergency years ago to score some Ativan. How they make you take it in the room with them and they only give you two maximum because they’ve been trained to see right through the likes of you.

  How I came here not that long ago, while still sober, and watched a cocaine addict sobering up from his latest binge. I saw him suddenly writhing in pain as his numbed nerve endings woke up. He screamed about the huge red-and-yellow pus-filled gash in his leg. He screamed back at his own leg and kept screaming and the emergency workers told him that they wouldn’t deal with him if he was still high. The man kept screaming that this was precisely the problem—he wasn’t high—and he screamingly demanded a wheelchair but they wouldn’t bring it to him so he made himself fall down on the floor and then crawled through the revolving door into the emergency room, still screaming.

  Sitting in the waiting room, I cry the whole time. I keep washing all the madness out. I enjoy it, almost. The nurses and other patients walk by and look at me and at the stroller and smile a sad smile. This is what it is going to be like, I think. People are going to smile. I’m going to be a single mother from now on, crying, dragging my child everywhere with me.

  Briefly, I get excited by the concept of single-motherhood, even though it’s supposed to be challenging, but at least, for me, it’s slightly closer to the edge that I wish to live on. I can’t think of cokeheads crawling on the floor with pus and blood dragging behind them in a snotty trail right now. Forget it. But I could be a single mom. This could be interesting, running to pick him up from babysitters, cooking Kraft easy dinners, saying to potential dates: my kid.

  Will I have to start stripping to support myself and my child? Will my C-section scar show when I shave off pubic hair to dance?

  I don’t take myself so seriously that I completely believe myself worrying about scars and stripping. I am so used to me. But this is the state of an addict’s mind. It’s a fantasyland. I sit in the waiting room, the sleeping baby in my lap, my ass about to be homeless, and I pretend to worry about the swollen cherry of a little toe and how I’m going to fit it into a Lucite heel.

  I don’t become a stripper. Since I have a job already I go to my quiet job as I do every day, although now I leave for it from another part of the city.

  After I get back from emergency, the same night I pack my bags. Nobody is running after me as I leave and hop into a cab with a bag, first loading the folded stroller, the pack’n’fold crib. I come back to get Frankie. He’s not getting kicked out but I’ve begged my boyfriend to let me take him that first night and he agreed. I’m staying with a friend, Cara, who’s going through a breakup. Frankie and I set up camp in Cara’s apartment above a restaurant that she owns. I unfold Frankie’s pack’n’fold. Cara holds Frankie, who is quiet but sad. He’s unsure of the new place. He looks around with big brown eyes.

  Cara lives with a dog, a whip of a whippet that runs around on tiny nails and barks excitedly as I unpack my suitcase. Frankie’s face crumples at this so I leave the unpacking and pick him up and make my voice as soft as possible, softer than the sleep-sheep toy he cuddles every night: It’s okay, baby, it’s okay.

  I can unpack later.

  I fall asleep with my face against the mesh of the pack’n’fold, breathing in my baby’s breath.

  I sleep on a beautiful vintage chaise longue with the window looking out onto a busy street, and across it a butcher shop with neon signs—Lamb, Pork, Veal, Chicken—always flashing, all night long, a carnivorous Vegas.

  UP THE HILL

  He waddles from me to my boyfriend and his face, like his steps, is hesitant. His chubby feet are flapping against wooden floors as he goes back and forth, unsteadily, holding on to the bed frame and the dresser. I’m sitting on the bed in our bedroom and I’m screaming. My boyfriend is standing in the corner of the room and he’s screaming for me to stop screaming.

  Frankie moves forward and lands against the bed, fat hand grabbing my thigh. I lift him up without looking at him because I’m too busy being angry. My boyfriend shouts to be careful with the baby. He shouts we have to stop shouting because we’re scaring the baby. I shout to get used to this shouting because that’s what things are going to be like from now on, shouty. On second thought, perhaps things won’t be like this at all because we won’t be around, me and the baby. Maybe he can go back to being a partying middle-aged bachelor, which is what he was when I met him. Maybe he can go and snort lines of cocaine off of women’s asses and breasts as he always jokes about doing. Maybe he can find another stupid, naive student like me and fuck her and make her a baby and install her in this house to replace me. Us. Replace us. Because we’re replaceable. Because we’re not going to stick around much longer for this kind of bullshit.

  Immediately, I imagine myself on the plane going somewhere warmer, nicer. Me and Frankie in a little apartment, then later, Frankie older, bigger, in some sunlit sandbox, maybe even a beach.

  My boyfriend yells back that I can just go and fuck myself. I have no right to take him, the baby. Leave the baby alone. He’s not a toy I can just take whenever I please.

  Then in a normal voice he says the stuff about calling family lawyers again, which is what made me start screaming in the first place.

  It’s now ten days or so since I moved out. My newly found sobriety is coming
out in big, angry, shouty chunks.

  Frankie stops wobbling around and now sits quietly in my lap despite all the screaming. It occurs to me that maybe he’s so quiet because of it. I have an old memory of running from one set of knees to another, just like him, a bouncy ball of a child’s body between my parents, who tried to kill each other above me. I was older than Frankie is now because I remember telling them to stop it, to please be quiet. They finally stop and turn on me, telling me to shut up, but I don’t. I keep shouting because I’m just buzzed from all this angry energy above me; I am hysterical and can’t stop shouting to stop it myself, and then my cheek stings as someone slaps me. I stop it.

  Is that what we’re going to end up like?

  The warm, heavy body of my son is against my body. There are anger and tears above him. How much I’ve messed up already. All I wanted to do when we were shouting minutes ago was to stop my son’s little pattering around. Now that he has stopped I feel guilty and helpless because I can’t think of what to do to make him happy.

  Fine, lawyers, fine, I say to my boyfriend. Whatever you want.

  I know he has contacted his friend Tommy already and I’m starting to feel the first elbowing of social disapproval, like when Tommy’s wife sends a polite but cold email saying she’s too busy when I ask her if she could meet with me. I don’t really want to meet with her but I want the world to believe me when I say that I’m done drinking.

  The world has no reason to believe me. I kept lying to it over and over.

  Once we are quiet, I get up to leave. I don’t want to fight. Or I want to fight but it is me I want to fight against. It’s the past, the time before drinking, that I want to fight for. I want us to be a family again. I don’t want to say any more hurtful things to my boyfriend. He is the love of my life, I remind myself, but this reminder makes me so ashamed that I can now only feel grief. I’ve broken us, buried us, and I can’t do anything anymore to dig us up again and make it whole.