The bills added up. Once, my father had the phone cut off, and there we were, having to explain to our friends that ours was a phoneless household. There was no end to the embarrassment.
Years later, when we had all left home and wanted to visit them, my father would rarely warn us if she was on a bender. We’d just arrive, and be back in living hell. Later he learned to give us a tip-off. “Your mother is not feeling very well today,” he would say. It was a feeble bit of code: I used to be angry that he didn’t name it for what it was. But it seemed he could not.
Nothing changed, not for decades. She missed coming to the hospital when my son was born. She missed most important occasions. There were so many sad birthdays, depressing Christmases.
And then it ended. Sometime in her seventies, my mother followed the discipline of a weight-loss regimen and changed her drinking habits in the process. Over time my real mother reappeared, a tinier, softer version of her younger self, a woman who could manage to have two drinks of wine and put the cork in it, heading off to bed at ten in a way she hadn’t in decades. It was deeply confounding, albeit welcome. There she is, at my son’s graduation, beaming into the camera. Could this not have happened a few decades earlier? Saved us years of sorrow, fury, and pain?
“I don’t touch hard liquor,” she now declares. “I only drink wine.”
And but for the rarest occasion, she’s right: her drink of choice is white wine and Diet Coke. A downer and an upper, I always think. It’s a curious mix, but who am I to argue?
Never underestimate real life. Things you think will never happen will occur, and more. Bad, and good. I know this, in my bones.
My gifted father, my precious sober parent, followed my mother on the same terrible path into alcoholism. His journey was very different—discreet, private, late—but it was alcoholic all the same. It took him down, and it broke everyone’s heart. Most of all, it shook my mother. “He needs help,” she would say. “I, of all people, know just how awful this can be.”
But my father was a quiet man who grew more so with age: he wasn’t going to reach out for help. When I told him I had started going to an abstinence-based support group, he took a long draw on his cigarette and said simply: “I went once. You know, I should have gone back.”
A river runs through our family, through our bloodlines. It curdles our reason, muddles our thinking, seduces us by numbing all pain.
Sons and daughters, nieces and nephews: they all need to be vigilant. Tom McGuane once called alcoholism the black lung disease of writers. But I can’t blame my profession.
Over the years, my mother watched me develop into a heavy drinker and she was concerned. One night, near the end of my bingeing days, I passed out in the bathroom at the cottage. I was sitting, fully clothed, on the toilet, pants up. She banged on the door.
“Did you know you were asleep in there?” she asked, incredulously, the next morning. “I never want you to go through the same hell I went through.” I was taken aback. This was my straight-talking mother. I promised to slow down. Within a week I was sitting in a church basement. In truth, this is the one blessing her drinking gave me: it terrified me into quitting faster than I might have otherwise. Luckily, I quit when I was in the middle stage of the disease: there are many embarrassments I incurred, but many tragedies I avoided.
Over time, my mother and I began to see more of each other. When my father died, I insisted she get a passport and let me take her to California. “You’re a great traveler, Mum,” I said, watching her peer over the edge of a gondola as we headed up the rock face of a mountain. “You sound surprised,” she said, smiling. “Why wouldn’t I be? We were so lucky, you know, having that trip to Africa.” Fifty years later, and it’s still the highlight of her life.
The next morning, standing by the kitchen sink, she turned to me and said: “I will never be able to thank you enough for bringing me here.”
“I love your company, Mum,” I said, softly.
And I realized: it’s totally true. I love my mother’s company. I still love the way she puts on her lipstick at night and combs her hair. I love the way she looks like a teenager when we take out the Scrabble board. Most of all, I love her appreciation of my son’s journey as an artist. She has an open mind, a generous heart, and an endless appetite for adventure.
She looked serious. “You know, I am heartsick when I think what my drinking did to all of you.”
It happened like that, just out of the blue: the apology I had waited for, for so many heartbroken years. All I could think to do was hold her tiny frame close for a long, long time. She smelled good: of Guerlain’s l’Heure Bleue, just like she always used to in the early days, when I was little. She was silent, and so was I.
I realized that I had forgiven her, as my son has forgiven me.
But our reconciliation only deepened my growing obsession: What was this thing that had taken us both down, albeit to such different levels and for vastly different lengths of time? What was this trapdoor that we both disappeared into? Down the bunny hole we both fell, into a seductive altered reality.
Why do some disappear for a few years, and others lose themselves for decades, or forever?
A river may run through my family, but it’s also coursing through a significant and growing portion of femalehood. Ever so slowly, my search for answers, once so deeply personal, began to turn profoundly professional.
Sitting on a hard metal chair every Thursday night at my recovery group, I am surrounded by women of every age and every walk of life: young mothers with strollers rubbing shoulders with grandmothers; high school students with teachers, professors, musicians, dancers, actresses, life coaches, investment experts. Over by the coffee urn, tattooed beauties dating rock stars confide in well-groomed mothers of three. Rows and rows of women, banding together to find a solution to a problem both cunning and baffling.
Each Thursday, my home group welcomes newcomers. More often than not, they’re female. More often than not, they’re young: impossibly fresh-faced, if somewhat confused. Six months in, they’re bringing their friends. A year in, they’re starting to mentor fresh new arrivals. It goes on and on, the sisterhood of the newly sober.
“What’s happening?” I always think to myself, nursing my tea in the second row of a capacity crowd, waiting for the meeting to start. “How on earth did we all get here?”
You’ve Come the Wrong Way, Baby
CLOSING THE GENDER GAP ON RISKY DRINKING
One mojito, two mojitos, three mojitos … FLOOR!
—POPULAR BIRTHDAY CARD
Alcohol is ubiquitous in our society. It’s hugely linked to our notions of celebration, sophistication, and well-being. It’s how we relax, reward, escape—exhale.
Know your wines? You’re affluent. Know your vodkas? You’re hip. Know your coolers, your shots? You’re young and female.
Alcohol abuse is rising in much of the developed world—and in many countries, female drinkers are driving that growth. This is global: the richer the country, the fewer abstainers and the smaller the gap between male and female consumption. The new reality: binge drinking is increasing among young adults—and women are largely responsible for this trend. What has not been fully documented, understood, or explored is that while women have gained equality in so many arenas, we have also begun to close the gender gap when it comes to alcohol abuse.
Women’s buying power has been growing for decades, and our decision-making authority has grown