The honest truth is a lot of my drinking was super fun. Everything about it. It was often appropriate. It was happy hour after work. Preparing to pop a bottle of champagne for a holiday weekend. Sitting at a craft brewery with a flight in front of me, reading the descriptions, smelling the beer. Drinking wine while making dinner.
But that was only half the story.
The story for me continued, when I left the bar and stopped at the store for more. The story continued, when I was anxiously watching the clock, worried about what time the store closes. The story continued, when I was a single mom and I figured out how to Instacart wine to my house late in the evening.
At the craft brewery, I would drink my flight then order a pint. And then another. And another one after that. And, if I’m honest, the most important part of the description was the percentage alcohol and it just so happened the beer I liked the most had the highest alcohol percentage.
The second half of the story depended on where I lived.
For the most part, as I said, it was appropriate. Or at least, I was able to argue it was appropriate, to balance my hangover with Well, I got everything done that I was supposed to get done.
In Tucson, I was young and in college. It was a different time. The world was a different place. I worked at Blockbuster Video. We were open until 1am. People called on the phone to ask if a specific DVD was on the shelf. I talked to my boyfriend on the landline phone and put him on hold when people needed to check out.
I drank at house parties or with friends. I was 19. We played beer pong on a closet door balanced across a table. We had lingerie parties. We were all in college and worried about our bodies and sometimes thought about our grades. Everyone else would go to sleep and I would sit on the patio, smoking a cigarette, drinking my vodka, stirring the ice cubes with my finger.
When I was in grad school in the Northwest, everything was within walking distance. I went to the little mart before I went to the bar to ensure I’d have beer to drink when I got home. My then-boyfriend’s roommate had a carboy of home-brew wine that lasted us forever (and tasted fucking awful, but that didn’t stop me). In Spokane, I could get to the Super One without even going on a main road, so after I drank whatever I bought immediately after work, I could drive back and get more of that 15% Wrecking Ball stout that I liked so well.
To be clear, I had never liked stout in my life (the only time I ever drank Guinness was in an Irish Car Bomb), but I loved the way a 15% beer hit me.
And in my 30s, in North Carolina where I eventually got sober, in my last drinking days, I could find a way to force my mom into driving me home if I drank at her house with my kids there.
After my first husband and I separated, I would take my boys to my parents’ house and drink. My dad would make me a vodka with olives. My old standby, vodka soaked olives. My mom would say, please stop drinking, you need to drive. But, I would inevitably end up getting my dad to pour me more, or I would just pour myself more, and I would weasel my way into having my mom drive us home. I don’t want to drive the kids, I would say. It didn’t feel like weaseling at the time.
Sometimes I could convince her to stop at the gas station to buy cigarettes and I’d get myself a tall boy, too. She was irritated, sure, but I got my way. I tended to do whatever it was that allowed me to drink as I wanted to drink, although I never would have put it so plainly back then.
She didn’t like that, but she loved me and I loved her, and I would just shrug when she let us out of the car at my house, a grown woman with a mortgage and children, stumbling into my house holding a tall boy and a pack of cigarettes to put my boys into their Thomas the Tank Engine toddler beds.
I had 124 days sober when I flew to California to visit my dying grandmother.
“I don’t drink,” I said to my aunt, who picked me up at the airport.
“Neither do I,” she said.
It was perfect.
But, when we got to their house, the first thing I saw when we walked in was the tremendous, Costco sized vodka bottles. My dad had been staying there, and he had stocked a bar.
My heart leapt. They were so shiny.
I was happy to be with my Dad. I was happy to be with my grandmother. The sun was shining. I didn’t have my kids.
“You know, Dad,” I said, based on the advice of my sponsor. “I do really miss our drinking relationship.”
Her idea had been to tell my dad that I missed drinking with him, but that I just couldn’t drink anymore. “I just can’t drink,” I said.
“I miss it, too,” my dad said. He knew I had been trying to quit drinking. “I’ll pour you one drink. Let loose,” he said. “You’re on vacation. You don’t have your kids.”
He was right. That was all true. But he missed the point.
Or rather, I allowed him to miss the point.
Those vodka soaked olives. The ice clinking in the glass. The sound of the ice cracking when the vodka hit it. The condensation running down the side.
Grandmother was happy to see me. I was happy to see her. My grandfather had died two weeks earlier. She was determined to perfect his obituary, and so we worked.
While she had never been a big drinker, she wanted to drink champagne while we played bridge.
Just a swallow, she said. And that was really all she drank. The glass sat in front of her, the bubbly bubbling.
My grandmother was so fragile. She sat in a wheelchair at the table with a printed draft of the obituary. She was so sharp and so determined to make this obituary exactly what she wanted it to be.
“He didn’t have a lovely wife,” she said, critiquing what I had written. “He had a wife.”
I never cared much for adjectives myself, I thought. I had learned that in grad school.
97 years old. Maybe 80 pounds left. She had oxygen at that point. She regretted not taking it off for a selfie. She was so exacting.
She wanted Beverly’s from See’s candies, which she would cut into quarters. My dad and I went to get the candies, and we stopped at a golf course he liked. That morning I had said to myself Okay, last night was a fluke. I won’t drink again today.
But, at the golf course, we ordered bloody Mary’s. My vacation was only a few days. What was another day?
That night, my aunt made a recipe that required her to use red wine. The velvet texture of the wine. Pouring it into a wine glass. The way it moved in the glass. The aftertaste, the warmth in my belly.
I texted my best friend. What if I only drank when I’m out of state, I said.
Yeah, she wrote. As long as you don’t start driving to Virginia just to get a drink.
That would be absurd, I thought. But then I also thought, Virginia isn’t that far away. She makes an excellent point.
I returned to North Carolina, flying back, as I had historically flown, with a terrific hangover. I came back to my AA meeting, told them what I had done. They welcomed me home.
My grandmother died 15 days later.
I had returned and recommitted to my sobriety.
But unfortunately what I had really learned on that California trip was this: I could get away with it.
There was a crack in the seal. Perhaps I could continue drinking. I was elated.
I had three more relapses after this one before I finally let go of the fantasy that I could ever drink.
I’ll just hit the highlights:
Another 130 days sober. Or it may have been exactly 124 again. A business trip to Charlotte. Blacking out. Chain smoking cigarettes. Having no idea how I got home or who I got home with.
86 consecutive days sober. I went to dinner with a friend in Cary, a twelve minute dr India from my house (which I counted as a different city, which was almost like a different state). He wouldn’t let me bring alcohol in his house, something about a court situation with his ex-wife. We fought and fought and fought. I bought wine at the store and he made me keep it in my van. The next day, when I got home, I drank it with my ex-husband, who had been watching the kids at my house, and then went and got more. Another three day binge.
26 consecutive days sober. I was tired of attending my AA meeting. I was frustrated with everyone in the rooms.
Maybe these people couldn’t figure it out, I thought. But I’ve got this. I can change what I am with my mind.
Maybe I can just stop saying I’m an alcoholic and the truth will cease to be, I said to my friends. Maybe I am reinforcing this to the universe, this “I am an alcoholic” business, and if I stopped saying it, it would stop.
But this was the brain and body I have been given. Just because I stopped speaking the truth, it did not stop the truth.
The last time I drank, I don’t even know that anything happened that day to “trigger” me. It was December. I was stressed about the holidays. My defenses were down. Who knows what happened. Maybe my shoelace broke. And that seemed reason enough to take a drink.
I blacked out. Nothing bad happened, on a sliding scale of bad. No permanent damage was incurred, at least none that I could hold in my hand. But what scared me was the what-if’s.
I would profess I loved my sons more than anything in the world. And that was true. I would never do anything to endanger them. But after I started drinking, my definition of what constituted “endangering” was slippery.
Well, so what, I thought, if I get black-out drunk for 3 days once a quarter. That’s what I said to myself. Once a quarter.
But as those time frames between relapses had shortened, that was what I had to realize. Even if I thought I could commit to once a quarter, I couldn’t. Once a quarter would become once a month. Once a month would become only on the weekends. And pretty soon I would have a reason to drink on a Monday (I mean, the first day of the week!), and a Tuesday (while making tacos for Taco Tuesday, like a totally normal human), and a Wednesday (hump day!), and then probably a Thursday, too, because the week was almost over and who didn’t love Thirsty Thursday? And shit, by then, it was Friday and the weekend was time to drink, like everyone else.
The simplest way to put it is this: I could no longer trust myself if I thought drinking was an option. And that had been just fine for me, I thought.
There is no greater gift than reading a story to my kids and remembering every word. Remembering that I turned out their lights. Having them come into my room in the middle of the night and knowing I am fully there for them. Knowing if I had to take them to the hospital, I would be fully present for them.
People say you can’t get sober for someone else. I didn’t get sober for my sons, not really. I got sober so I could show up as the mom I was wanted to be. So I could be who I really am. So I could find what was beneath all that shit, what I was distorting with all those drinks.
Trusting myself. What a gift.
In general, if giving up alcohol elicits this kind of a response where fear grips you and you think things like, Why couldn’t I just have something easy like cancer, or lose a limb, I have some really bad news for you about your relationship with alcohol.
To be clear, I am not demonizing alcohol in general, or even drinking in excess on occasion. If you can drink without fucking hating yourself, then my hat is off to you, truly. I just myself couldn’t do it — and for that reason, I had to let go of my moderation — or even my quarterly blackout — fantasy.
The fact that I never had a DUI with my children in the car is not because I did something right, it’s because I just got lucky. The fact that I didn’t get murdered by some strange man is not because I did something right, it’s because I just got lucky. They say you can get off the elevator at any time, you don’t have to ride it all the way to the bottom.
You can have a “high bottom.”
The story that I heard that haunts me the most is this: a woman had gotten sober, for the most part, but decided one night to have a bender. She drank what she might have ordinarily drank (some bottles of wine), and at the end of the night, she walked up her stairs to go to bed, but turned to look at something, slipped and twisted on her ankle, and fell to the bottom of the stairs. Her husband found her dead in the morning, crumpled at the bottom of the stairs with a broken neck.
What divine force spared me the fate of my children finding me at the bottom of the stairs, dead with a broken neck? What divine force allowed me to just tumble down the stairs all those times like a ragdoll, waking up with a hurt tailbone and some bruise legs, a bruised ego?
I don’t think I’ll ever know. But for that, to whatever force in the universe makes the sun rise and set, the thing that made me realize I should not drink, I say please in the morning and thank you at night.