Four years later, I’m more seasoned in handling these moments. But certain occasions are still tough. New Year’s Eve, always. Each December 31, a group of us dress to the nines, gather in a home, and feast on oysters and lobsters. Each year I turn down the champagne that greets us on arrival—seductively blond, bubbly, and beautiful, the perfect accessory to a black-tie evening.
A small handful of us are sober: two men and myself. The men take “smoking breaks” on the back porch in their tuxes. I don’t. I drink mineral water at midnight. To this day I am a little wistful as the countdown begins. Always the designated driver, the presenter of the post-midnight cheese course. When the couples kiss, holding their bubbly aside, a little part of me still crumples up like it did in high school, when no one asked me to dance.
What role has alcohol played in my romances? A large one. I know I had too much to drink the night I met Jake. Would I have had the courage to invite him home without being a little tipsy? Doubtful. No question, a little wine helped smooth the way for that first encounter. Ditto the one with Will. And, God knows, I am not alone.
I decide to ask a woman who dates a lot what she thinks of the relationship between alcohol and romance. Alexandra is an actress and a jazz singer, exquisitely sculpted from her high-set cheekbones to her polished toes. Men stare at her, women envy her, and she would have it no other way. This is her business, and she works hard at it. She is a single woman, keen on men and dating.
The daughter of a mechanic and a hairdresser, Alexandra is deeply aware of growing up on the wrong side of the tracks. Her first memory of alcohol is from a sleepover at a wealthy girl’s home: she saw their wine cellar, and never forgot it. She found alcohol in her twenties, starting with gin and tonic in between sets as a singer. “Suddenly I felt like one of those rich girls,” she says. “It was like a childhood dream realized. The flip-flops were gone and I was wearing high heels. It made me feel wonderful.”
Soon she was engaged, and her fiancé introduced her to fine wine. “The whole romance was alcohol-fueled,” she says. Before long, however, they began to fight. Alexandra determined it was the red wine. “Suddenly, you go gremlin on me,” her fiancé would say. For a short while she gave up wine. But soon the rule was broken: the two traveled with his family to a wedding in France, and she drank on the overseas flight. “It was France, for goodness’ sakes,” she says. “And I had never been to Europe.” There she mixed spirits, champagne, and white wine. Soon she was “puking my guts out. I used to put a bucket by my bed.” On one memorable evening, she bad-mouthed her fiancé to his entire family, itemizing his faults. “Alcohol lobotomizes you. I don’t really remember everything I said, but I knew it was over after that. There’s only so much you can do before you cross a line.”
With that she moved out, and joined AA. “I was single, and sober, and it was great. I was in a TV series, made a lot of money, and I was doing really well. I forgot all the hell of drinking. I felt cleansed: the past was over.”
Alexandra fell in love with a wealthy, older, married man. “I remember the first drink—he supported it,” she says. “I thought: ‘What’s the worst that can happen?’” He bought expensive clothes for her, and took her to London. “It was the time of my life, truly magic. He made me feel like a princess. There were nights when I got completely drunk, but so did he. I was just so happy to be there. I thought I had arrived.”
Looking back, Alexandra sees that she was “sort of a high-class prostitute, a professional call girl.” Each time her man visited, he would bring a case of wine. “I would drink two more bottles alone, after he left. I would resent that I was always alone on Christmas, on weekends, on my birthday.
“The beast was back. I stopped going to auditions. The worst happened at one of the most beautiful restaurants in town: I don’t remember eating. I vaguely remember him yelling at me for my behavior before he dropped me off. I then went into a very dark period where I was drinking three bottles a night—buying one and then getting in my car, drunk, to buy the next two.
“And so I got sober—it was either that or kill myself. I ended up doing the long, slow journey back. I miss alcohol when I see social drinkers—a couple drinking cold glasses of wine on a patio. I miss when it was good. But I don’t miss the end. There was never enough. From the time they pulled the cork until they poured the first glass, I would get so angry at waiters: ‘Hurry, will you?’”
Today Alexandra asks herself: “Would I be willing to risk my whole life on a social beverage? And the answer is no. But you know what they say about alcoholics? The alcoholic reaches the end of her days and St. Peter says: ‘Heaven or hell.’ Only the alcoholic says: ‘Can I see what hell looks like first?’”
For me, the incident that ruined my romance with drinking involved not Jake, but my son, Nicholas. It was the spring of 2005, and I had a root canal—one that went badly. I was put on heavy antibiotics and told not to drink for three weeks. Near the end of that period, I received a Mother’s Day card from my twenty-year-old son, a handmade card titled “Happy Mother.” There I am, at a typewriter. Note, it says, “the whites of her eyes are white.” Also note: “She is drinking Perrier, not wine.”
That card walloped me where it hurt, and it ended my romance with the glass. For three years I carried it everywhere, tucking it into my diary or my daybook: the truth writ large from a man I loved, one I had let down and who was brave enough to tell me how he felt. This took guts.
Long before Jake said anything, or my sister Cate or my friend Gillian, Nicholas’s eloquent drawing ruined my love affair with drinking. True, it took me another three years to quit. But never again was it easy to see the experience as innocent, as something untainted by trouble. For me, the romance was over, and the tough part had only just begun.
10.
The Modern Woman’s Steroid
POPPING THE CORK ON MOTHER’S LITTLE HELPER
I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget that you’re a man.
—ENJOLI PERFUME AD, 1980
(“THE EIGHT-HOUR PERFUME FOR THE TWENTY-FOUR-HOUR WOMAN”)
Is alcohol the modern woman’s steroid, enabling her to do the heavy lifting involved in a complex, demanding world? Is it the escape valve women need, in the midst of a major social revolution still unfolding?
For many women, the answer is a resounding yes.
Racing in from a long day at the office, an evening of cooking and homework ahead: the first instinct is to go to the fridge or the cupboard and pop a cork, soothing the transition from day to night with a glass of white or red. Chopping, dicing, sipping: it’s a common modern ritual.
For years it was me at the cutting board, a glass of chilled white at my side. And for years this habit was harmless—or it seemed that way. My house wine was Santa Margherita, a pale straw-blond Italian Pinot Grigio. There was always a bottle in my fridge, and I’d often pour a second glass before dinner, with seeming impunity.
In the years when this was my routine, I rarely thought to put the kettle on instead. These days, my go-to drink is Celestial Seasonings Bengal Spice tea: a rich mix of cardamom, cloves, chicory, cinnamon, pepper, and ginger. But back then, as I burst through the front door, laden with groceries, wound up from the day, my first instinct was to shed some stress as quickly as I shed my coat. Once, after an unusually difficult day, Jake pointed out that the fridge was open before my coat was off. It pained me to hear this, but I know it was true.
Within a few minutes, I would be standing at the cutting board, phone cradled on my shoulder while I sipped and chopped and chatted, often to my friend Judith or my sister, Cate. Nicholas would be upstairs, doing homework, and dinner would be in process. Sip, chop, sip, chat, exhale, relax. Breathe. With two parents who had their own serious troubles with alcohol, alarm bells should have been ringing. But my habit seemed relatively harmless. Common, even. A glass or two seemed innocent enough.
And truth was, believe it or not: I got a lot done when I
was drinking. In my alpha dog years—when I was holding down a senior job at a magazine, raising an artistic, athletic young man, giving speeches on the circuit—life was more than full. Alcohol smoothed the switch from one role to the other. It seemed to make life purr. I could juggle a lot. Until, of course, I couldn’t.
That’s the thing about a drinking problem: it’s progressive. But for a long, long time, alcohol can step in as your able partner, providing welcome support—before you want to boot it out.
On a recent November evening, I took a stroll through the elegant streets of London’s Chelsea district around that witching hour—an hour when many had yet to pull the shades for the evening. Heading up from the Thames River, north on Tite Street, I passed more than one window with a woman standing at her kitchen counter, a half-drunk glass at her side while she worked on the evening meal. I passed a dad unloading children from a shiny BMW, children lugging heavy knapsacks, calling out to younger siblings waving in an upper window.
It was a cozy scene, and I found myself thinking wistfully of those rituals of younger years, when my son was under my roof—not far away in California, doing a master’s degree in fine art. Time was he would saunter into the kitchen, hungry and tall, and dance me around the room while dinner cooked—a boisterous little tango that left me flushed and laughing. More often he would serenade me with his guitar.
Those years were loud and rambunctious and incredibly busy, crammed with duties and chores. Once dinner was over, he’d do homework and I’d make lunches and then noodle with a little more work before bed. He was a rower and morning came early: I’d rise in the dark and ferry him down to the waterfront, standing with the other parents as the boys headed out on the water.
Those years were full of stress and laughter, in equal doses. Often, Nicholas and I would find ourselves up at night, talking in the kitchen: I would make popcorn and we would stand side by side, filling in the blanks for each other. We were a pack of two: our conversations were deep and rewarding, and we read each other easily. And when those precious years were over, when he went off to university, the house became very quiet. Too quiet: like a stage set after the actors exited. That’s when I wrote a column in the magazine, called “Mother Interrupted.” And that’s when I began to think that a third drink might make sense. And once it was three, I was in trouble.
Flying over to Britain, to do research for this book, I splurged with my airline points and booked myself a first-class ticket. Flight attendant to me, after dinner: “Would you care for some port with your cheese, madam?” “No, thank you, I have to work.” She frowns. “Lots of people drink port while they work.” And indeed, she pours some for the neighboring woman, who is laboring over a spreadsheet with a glass of wine. All I can think is: “That used to be me.” Six years ago, that would have been me, and my exit from the plane would have been a little fuzzy.
In a recent poll done by Netmums in Britain, 81 percent of those who drank above the safe drinking guidelines said they did so “to wind down from a stressful day.” And 86 percent said they felt they should drink less. Jungian analyst Jan Bauer, author of Alcoholism and Women: The Background and the Psychology, believes women are looking for what she calls “oblivion drinking.” “Alcohol offers a time out from doing it all—‘Take me out of my perfectionism.’ Superwoman is a cliché now, but it is extremely dangerous. I’ve seen such a perversion of feminism, where everything becomes work: raising children, reading all the books, not listening to their instincts. The main question is: what self are they trying to turn off? These women have climbed so high that when they fall, they crash—and alcohol’s a perfect way to crash.”
I ask Leslie Buckley, the psychiatrist who heads the women’s addiction program at Toronto’s University Health Network, if she sees a pattern in the professional women who come to see her. She doesn’t skip a beat: “Perfectionism.”
Such an unforgiving word, such an unforgiving way of being—echoed by yet another doctor, who speaks of patients who look like they stepped out of Vogue: perfect-looking women with perfect children at the right schools, living in perfect houses, aiming for a perfect performance at work, with eating disorders and serious substance abuse issues.
The tyrannical myth of perfection: it seizes the psyche and doesn’t let go. My mother was in its grip, and she paid a serious price for it. This was in the 1960s, when men came home from work and expected dinner and a stiff drink—except my father was usually traveling. For years my mother held down the fort. She wrote perfect thank-you notes, she cooked perfect meals. As a new bride, she ironed bedsheets and pillowcases; as a new mother, she starched our smocked dresses. My sister and I wore white gloves when we traveled, velvet hairbands in our hair, and wrote perfect thank-you notes, too. And then my mother was the one with the stiff drink, and it all crashed—but not before I had it imprinted on me: perfect was the way to be.
Perfect has been the way to be for several generations of women. I don’t remember my grandmothers suffering from this syndrome: women who raised families during the Depression, who baked and gardened and read well; who were fundamentally happy, and felt no pressure to look like stick figures.
But those Mad Men years took their toll. My mother wasn’t the only one self-medicating with a combination of alcohol and a benzodiazepine called Valium. By the end of the sixties, two-thirds of the users of psychoactive drugs—Valium, Librium—were women. In fact, between 1969 and 1982, Valium became the most commonly prescribed drug in the United States. In 1978, it was estimated that a fifth of American women were taking “mother’s little helper,” as the Rolling Stones called it.
By that time, its addictive properties were well known—and if they weren’t, the 1979 bestselling memoir I’m Dancing as Fast as I Can, by Emmy Award—winning Manhattan producer Barbara Gordon, blew the lid off. My mother weaned herself from the drug, with the help of rehab, and emerged a somewhat reformed perfectionist.
It never occurred to me—not for years—that alcohol was the mother’s little helper of my generation. But it is.
Today, women arrive home from work to face more work. So too do men—but there’s a difference. My ex-husband, and the man with whom I shared Nicholas’s rearing, is not a perfectionist. Constant? Always. An excellent father? The best. But I never considered him accountable in the way I was for certain essentials. We had a division of labor that worked well: he coached the sports teams, taught our son to ski, oversaw math. When it was Nicholas’s turn to eat at Will’s, there were three options for dinner: Kraft Dinner, Lean Cuisine, or take-out chili. It never varied. Dinner at my house was more nutritious—but often late. Breakfast was pancakes, from scratch. True, this brought me joy. So did making the Halloween costumes. I was not willing to miss out on some of the essential pleasures of being a mother just because I worked. And I wasn’t willing to miss out on some of the essential rewards of a great career just because I was a mother. As a result, my life was complex, truly jam-packed like a Christmas cake. If I could stuff in one more cherry, I did.
Truth be told, Will helped me do so: he did a lot of the ferrying of boys to and from events, up to the cottage for winter weekends. But I clung to the more traditional division of labor, and dined out on stories that bolstered my position. Like the time I came downstairs as a new mother, having allowed myself to sleep in. Will was reading the newspaper in the kitchen, arms wide, Nicholas at his feet. “How’s our boy?” I asked. “Just fine,” he said. “He’s right here.” With that, I saw my son, in yellow fuzzy sleepers, look up from the dog dish, a mouth full of kibble.
I had surgery when Nicholas was two months old. Will handled our newborn when I was in the hospital. When I got home, I asked a classic new-mother question: how did you manage the shopping, with the baby in the car seat, in the cart? “Oh, that’s not how you do it,” said Will. “You leave the cart at the end of one aisle, grab a few groceries, and then return to check on the baby.” “And what if someone decides to steal him while you’re shopping?” I a
sked. He didn’t have an answer.
These stories were anomalies, but the truth was, I always wanted to be the alpha dog when it came to our son. From the time he was born, I felt that Nicholas was an egg I carried on a spoon, one I was not to drop. I’m sure Will felt no differently, especially as the years wore on and Nicholas evolved.
For my own reasons, I spent a lot of time experimenting with my own customized formula of work-and-home-life balance. I experimented with part-time, flextime, and a journalism fellowship that sent me back to school when Nicholas was two. I tried it all. And when my marriage of twelve years collapsed, I quit my job of twelve years at the same time: I stayed home for the next eighteen months, using my savings to make ends meet. I figured that just as my son had lost, so too would he gain. Ending my marriage was extraordinarily painful, and that eighteen-month immersion in motherhood was necessary and healing.
Once that period was over, I was back to work full-time, with gusto. My son was seven, and I couldn’t afford a nanny. I shared some after-school babysitting and took on a project that became one of the most successful in Canadian publishing, winning a National Magazine Award that first year. It was a fifty-page examination of higher education, featuring rankings of Canadian universities. The magazine “went to bed” on Halloween: I made the costume, but I wasn’t out trick-or-treating with my tiny knight that evening. Will was.
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