Drink_The Intimate Relationship Between Women and Alcohol

by Ann Dowsett Johnston

  For years she was on the phone, drinking and dialing. Sober, she rarely picked up. Drinking? No call was too difficult, including to the police. More than once I had a date interrupted by a cop. “Your mother needs to find you,” they’d say. “There’s a family emergency.” And I’d roll my eyes. If there was one quality I hated most, it was her disinhibition.

  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?”

  3.

  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 as well. The alcohol industry, well aware of this reality, is now battling for our downtime—and our brand loyalty. Wines with names like Girls’ Night Out, MommyJuice, Mo
mmy’s Time Out, Cupcake, and yes, Happy Bitch; berry-flavored vodkas, Skinnygirl Vodka, mango coolers, Mike’s Hard Lemonade: all are aimed at us.

  When it comes to alcohol, we live in a culture of denial. With alcoholics representing just a tiny fraction of the population, it’s the widespread normalization of heavier consumption that translates to serious trouble. In the Western world, the majority of us drink. And the top 20 percent of the heaviest drinkers consume roughly three-quarters of all alcohol sold. Episodic binge drinking by a large population of nondependent drinkers has a huge impact on society.

  Most of us understand the major role that excessive alcohol use plays in family disruption, violence, and injury. Death? When compared to illicit drugs, there are many more deaths due to alcohol. According to Robert Brewer, leader of the alcohol program at the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, excessive drinking is the third leading preventable cause of death in the United States, after smoking and a combination of bad diet and inactivity. By conservative estimates, it’s responsible for roughly 80,000 deaths each year: of those, 23,000 are female. Of the 23,000, more than half are related to binge drinking. For women, binge drinking is defined as four or more drinks on one occasion in the past month; for men, it’s five.

  According to a recent CDC Vital Signs report, female binge drinking is a serious, underrecognized problem: almost 14 million American girls and women binge drink an average of three times each month, typically consuming six drinks per bingeing episode. Meanwhile, one in five high school girls binge drinks. Among those who consume alcohol, the prevalence of those who binge drink rises from roughly 45 percent of those in their first year of high school to 62 percent of those in their senior year.

  Women most likely to binge drink: those between the ages of 18 and 34 (in other words, those in their prime childbearing years), and those with higher household incomes. Binge drinking not only increases the risk of unintended pregnancies: if pregnant women binge, their babies are at risk of sudden infant death syndrome and fetal alcohol spectrum disorders. Meanwhile, for all women, binge drinking increases the risk of breast cancer, heart disease, and sexually transmitted diseases, among other health and social problems. “People who binge drink tend to do so frequently,” says Brewer. “Most people who drink too much aren’t addicted to alcohol. Most of these people are not dependent. What’s the big picture? This is a major public health problem.”

  The United States is not alone in naming alcohol abuse a major health challenge. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has declared binge drinking a national “scandal.” Deaths from liver disease have risen 20 percent in a decade. Last year, Britain’s chief medical officer, Dame Sally Davies, pronounced: “Our alcohol consumption is out of kilter with most of the civilized world.” In a recent report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, British girls were cited as the biggest teenage drinkers in the Western world: half of fifteen-year-olds said they had been drunk twice in the past year, as compared with 44 percent of British boys the same age.

  Says Sir Ian Gilmore, past president of the Royal College of Physicians: “In the thirty years I have been a liver specialist, the striking difference is this: liver cirrhosis was a disease of elderly men—I have seen a girl as young as seventeen and women in their twenties with end-stage liver disease. Alcohol dependence is setting in when youngsters are still in their teens. This mirrors what we saw with tobacco, when women caught up with men on lung cancer.”

  If leaders in Britain are concerned, so too is much of the world. In 2010, the World Health Organization passed its landmark Global Alcohol Strategy, with 193 signatories. In the developed world, where noncommunicable diseases pose the greatest health threat, alcohol abuse is moving much higher on the health-risk agenda, and will continue to do so.

  Is alcohol the new tobacco? In many ways, it is: a multibillion-dollar international industry dealing with market-friendly governments, enjoying a virtually unrestricted market for advertising, despite growing evidence that the substance has significant health risks.

  In fact, recent research has revealed that alcoholism is a more serious risk for early mortality than smoking—and more than twice as deadly for women than men. German researchers found that compared with the general population, alcohol-dependent women were 4.6 times as likely to cut their lives short. The rate for men: 1.9 times higher than the general population. On average, both women and men died roughly twenty years earlier than those who were not dependent on alcohol.

  “It is just like Virginia Slims,” says David Jernigan, director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Alcohol is a carcinogen, and it’s particularly risky for women. Breast cancer is the poster child for that position. But the alcohol industry is selling young women on the notion that only really, really good things happen when there’s alcohol. And to have really, really good things happen, you have to drink.”

  I came of age in the seventies, a heady time for women in North America. Smack-dab in the middle of second-wave feminism, my baby-boom peers and I headed off to university in our miniskirts and tie-dyed T-shirts, assured by Gloria Steinem and a host of others that the world was ours for the taking. We could, in Steinem’s words, “grow up to be the men we wanted to marry.”

  Not for us the confining roles of our fifties mothers, harnessed to aprons, and what seemed like cookie-cutter lives. Not for us the quiet desperation, the Valium, the acquiescence.

  And for me? Not the path of my mother. Sitting in my dorm room at Queen’s University, unpacking my things—a brand-new copy of Joni Mitchell’s Blue, a not-so-new edition of A Room of One’s Own—I was unequivocal on one point: my life was going to look different. Very different. (Of course, it already did: I had rose-colored aviator glasses custom-made for this new chapter. I kid you not.)

  If there was one trap I was determined I would never fall into, it was alcoholism. Risky drinking? Maybe. It was frosh week. There were keg parties and buckets of what we called Purple Jesus in my immediate future. I was five minutes from meeting my first serious boyfriend. Most conveniently, the legal drinking age had just been changed to eighteen, my age exactly.

  But alcoholism? Never. Three times my family circled the residence, eager to get one last glimpse of me before they headed home. Not once did I look out the window. Not because I didn’t love them, but because I did. Too much: I was deeply entwined in the family drama. I was ready to set out alone.

  I was in good company: my whole generation wanted to start fresh. This was the school year of 1971–72. Politically, we were well steeped in the My Lai Massacre, just a heartbeat from Watergate. Ramparts was still alive and well on the newsstands, and the first issue of a new women’s magazine was having its debut: it was called Ms.

  Nothing, we were certain, would ever be the same. And frankly, nothing was—especially if you were female. Ours was the generation that would have it all: careers, families, freedom of expression, equal rights. Fulfillment on every level.

  Did we have it all? With courage, endless creativity, and gusto, we certainly tried. Without a blueprint, many of us established excellent careers while raising children and nurturing marriages, juggling deadlines, child care, and housework. We experimented with full-time, part-time, flextime, and freelance work, nannies, day care, and shared babysitters, home offices, and virtual offices.

  In many cases, our marriages were strained, and failed. Mine certainly did.

  Could we have it all? Could we be the mothers we wanted to be and rise to the top? Many of us said yes—albeit sequentially. Or with enough help. Others said no, ditch the cape. The jury was out.

  Today, more than thirty-five years after I graduated, women outstrip their male counterparts in postsecondary participation. “We Did It!” crowed a cover of the Economist, featuring Rosie the Riveter. “Women’s economic empowerment is a
rguably the biggest social change of our times,” trumpeted the article. An enormous revolution, with enormous ramifications. As the magazine warned, dealing with the social consequences of this victory will be one of the great challenges of the next fifty years.

  More than forty years after Steinem helped launch a revolution, the debate rages on: can women have it all? These days, there are two powerful women at the microphone, offering a rich diversity of advice: Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook and author of Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead; and Anne-Marie Slaughter, the first female director of policy planning in the U.S. State Department, a Princeton professor, and author of a persuasive Atlantic magazine cover story, “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.”

  In 2011, Forbes magazine called Sandberg the fifth most powerful woman in the world. For today’s young working woman, Sandberg may indeed be the most powerful, period. Long before Lean In appeared in bookstores this year, millions had checked out her 2010 TED Talk, in which she offered women prescriptive advice on how to reach the C-suite. While calling today’s women lucky, Sandberg cites the sorry news that women are not making it to the top of any profession anywhere in the world. Numbers say it all. Of the Fortune 500 companies, only twenty-one are led by women. Of 195 independent countries in the world, all but seventeen are led by men. Meanwhile, in the United States, two-thirds of married male senior managers have children, while only a third of their female counterparts can make the same claim.