Lean in, lean back: I’ve done both, sequentially. I’ve sat at home, in tears, believing I would never enter the workforce again. And I have sat at the office, exhausted, knowing I was missing a precious evening at home. Both positions have their downsides and their sweet rewards. One thing is for certain: straddling both roles can turn you into human Silly Putty. I remember when my son was born, receiving a card from the writer Marni Jackson—author of The Mother Zone—who wrote, perceptively: “Welcome to permanent ambivalence.”
“How do you juggle it all?” As Tina Fey wrote in Bossypants, it’s the rudest question you can ask a woman—ruder than “When you and your twin sister are alone with Mr. Hefner, do you have to pretend to be lesbians?” . . . “You’re fucking it all up, aren’t you? their eyes say.”
There were times when I did mess up. One winter, Nicholas came down with a bad case of whooping cough. (Turns out he and his pals had decided snow jackets were for sissies, playing every recess in their T-shirts.) I spent many nights awake, in his room. One morning I slept through the alarm. This happened to be the day the publisher of McClelland & Stewart was coming to the editor’s office to discuss a possible book contract—one I was to oversee. I missed the beginning of the meeting, but the publisher was gracious. He stood and shook my hand, and said, “Hats off to mothers.” You don’t forget a moment like that.
It was twenty-one years ago when I returned to work, full-time—the same year Hillary Clinton defended her personal choice with the following: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was fulfill my profession.” At the time, her comment drew scorn from many, but I was cheering. It was a pivotal moment in the mommy wars: the tension was deep.
Of course, this was also the era of Martha Stewart, who had a decade-plus run as the queen of perfectionism until she was incarcerated. Homemade Christmas ornaments were all the rage, and Martha was dictating the rules. Here’s a slice of her December to-do list, published helpfully at the front of Martha Stewart Living: by December 8, all fruitcake baked; by December 10, all gingerbread houses assembled; clean chandeliers on December 11. And so on. Women were outdoing themselves at work and on the home front, contorting themselves like Gumby in the process. Each year, like so many others, I performed the Christmas triathlon, and ended up sick or tired or both. After a few Sisyphean seasons, most of us realized that the more we outdid ourselves, the more we were undone. I cried uncle.
As the late Laurie Colwin once wrote, “It is my opinion that Norman Rockwell and his ilk have done more to make already anxious people feel guilty than anyone else.” It was up to us, she said, to reinvent traditions to make way for what she called life’s one great luxury: time together.
I took her advice seriously and tried to make room for that luxury. Many of us did. As life continued to speed up, especially with the introduction of smartphones, the need to slow down fast became increasingly attractive. In the 1990s came the proliferation of wine bars. In 2000, Time Inc. launched Real Simple magazine. In 2004, Carl Honoré’s In Praise of Slow hit the bestseller list. (Nice thought, but somewhat beside the point when you had carpal tunnel syndrome from overworking your BlackBerry.)
Long before that, I was using wine to decompress, to ease into the second shift of the evening—and so too were my friends, both the stay-at-home mothers and my professional peers. As many women discovered, a drink is a punctuation mark of sorts, between day and night. “It’s a shift of gears,” says Janice Lindsay, author of All About Colour, and mother of two grown children who have both returned home. “A glass of water doesn’t make me feel spoiled. A glass of wine says, ‘Now you can enter the pleasure part of your day.’ I put on some music, and it’s a treat, even if I’m chopping onions. What else can we do? A massage is almost a hundred dollars and it takes an hour I don’t have. Wine is right here, right now, and I can share it with whoever’s with me.”
Danielle Perron, the only female partner in a Toronto marketing company and the married mother of a five-year-old boy, pours her first of three glasses of white wine every night at six o’clock. She drinks that first one with dinner. She has the second after her son is in bed, and her third at ten o’clock. Each and every night, like clockwork. “I drink until I’m comfortably numb,” she says, “with the perfect sleepy buzz. I’m groggy almost every morning. I get my ass out of bed and I go for a run. Life is high stress, and I juggle a ton of balls every day. This is about peace, the right glass, a ritual.” Would she call herself an alcoholic? “No, my dad was a hard-core Leaving Las Vegas alcoholic—before he quit forty-three years ago. Never would I call myself an alcoholic. But am I dependent? Yes. For me, that glass of wine is a total joy.”
A total joy that is causing her grave doubts. The day I interview Perron, she is on her third day of a twenty-one-day cleanse, eliminating wheat, sugar, and wine. “I don’t like that I drink every day,” she says. “For the last year, I have been questioning it more. If I can do this for twenty-one days, I will give myself permission to continue. And if not? If after this, I’m still jonesing for a drink at six o’clock? Well . . .” Her voice trails off. She seems uncertain of the answer. “There are so many moments in life that are all about having a glass of wine. And if my drinking time is impeded—if I’m at a play, or working late—I feel aggressive. My glass of wine will be full, and gone in two minutes.”
Her friend Paige Cowan, with whom she is sharing the cleanse regimen, is clearer on the outcome. Cowan is a tall, expressive woman who owns Wild Bird, an eclectic little store in midtown Toronto that sells a wide variety of seed for birds and food for the spirit as well: books on Buddhism, meditation, healing. On a snowy winter day, I find myself drinking delicious coffee in her airy living room, nestled on citrus-colored armchairs, listening to her story of wrestling with alcohol, and the role it has played in her life. “In my twenties, it was just about having fun—it was so normalized to drink at the cottage. Partying was really a rite of passage. Then I had my two boys when I was twenty-seven and twenty-eight—that’s when I began to be conscious of my patterns with alcohol.”
Growing up, Cowan found herself without much parenting: her mother was a serious “self-medicator,” with pills. “This time last year, I became mindful about my relationship with alcohol,” she says. “Was I having a drink to deal with anxiety, self-medicating?” She decided to give up alcohol altogether—and not because she was an alcoholic. That’s when the pushback started. “Pretty much everyone I know is heavily into alcohol,” she says. “They disguise it as something sophisticated or chic. It’s uncomfortable when you don’t drink. People ask: ‘Have you stopped drinking altogether?’ Not everyone, but most. But I have noticed a big difference—and so has my husband. I have more vibrancy, my sense of humor is back. Alcohol adds a cloud, and the cloud lifts. It makes you wonder: ‘What was I doing to my body?’”
Perfectionism is a culprit that Cowan knows all too well. “At one point in my life I was trying to be the perfect woman: doing things in the community,” she says. “For a good ten years, I was unconsciously driving my life—and that’s when I self-medicated the most with wine. I was involved in so many community efforts—it was that feeling that I was never good enough. That whole perfectionist thing was driving everyone: you could bust your ass, and it wasn’t good enough. A relentless standard of perfection. I found it shocking how hard women are on other women. At our little school in a pretty little neighborhood, there was an abusive standard of perfection. You would often hear women say, ‘I’m going home and having a glass of wine’—as a release.”
“This is the way we are,” says Cowan. “We encourage young women to live their lives a certain way—and it has nothing to do with what feels right. We tell them they’re not pretty enough: that’s what we bombard them with. Get on the treadmill, bust your ass at work. I think we’re living in a culture that’s so demanding: you never feel like you’re good enough. It wears people down. People are exhausted at the end of
the day. They go home and have a drink as a way to cope with all of this—a lot of people have to self-medicate because it would be hard for them to look in the mirror otherwise. The whole concept of being conscious—that’s hard work. A lot of people just don’t want to sign up for it.”
Signing up to be conscious: this is what Lisa decided to do after many years of drinking too much. A prominent woman in her sixties with a packed Rolodex and a full calendar, Lisa is a mover and shaker. The former senior manager of several companies, she has spent much of her life in her adopted home of Canada, but has now settled back in the States near her grandchildren, in Chicago. Raised in Cleveland in an upper-class home, she says bluntly: “I had two raging alcoholic parents—a rich couple who lived a crazy life. They had a house in Florida and belonged to a club where there were many so-called functioning alcoholics—on the tennis court at seven a.m., drunk at lunch, asleep all afternoon, drinking again at five in the afternoon, in bed at nine. Repeat.
“My father drank himself into bankruptcy. He would scream and yell and leave the house in the middle of the night. Me? I didn’t stand a chance. I have two brothers—one who has been in and out of Hazelden and the other who is in AA.
“I actually remember the first time I got drunk,” says Lisa. “It was at Brown University, at a football game. I was visiting a boyfriend and I went back to my little hotel room and passed out. I was so horrified and ashamed, I didn’t answer the door when the guy visited that night.”
Lisa spent the 1970s in New York, working as a political lobbyist. “I would call people completely drunk,” she remembers. “I was conscious I drank too much, and I didn’t want to face it. I remember a birthday party for Bella Abzug on the top of the World Trade Center: I got blotto and ended up going home in a cab with a friend who called me on it—but I didn’t want to hear it.”
Married, she and her husband, Henry, ended up moving to Toronto when their three children were small. “It just got worse,” says Lisa. “For the first time, I wasn’t working, and I invited a group of women over for coffee. I remember going to the kitchen and filling my coffee cup with vodka. When they asked for my phone number, I couldn’t even write. Needless to say, I never heard from them again. But that didn’t stop me from drinking too much in front of my husband’s boss, and embarrassing the hell out of myself at a dinner party.”
Was she efficient when she drank? “Yes,” says Lisa. “I would pour a drink and stay up half the night to get stuff done, whether it was organizing Halloween costumes or pulling recipes for a dinner party we were having. All of those years, I would just run from one thing to the next, not really thinking. I was such a boozer—but I was an amazing organizer when I drank. Partly, it was to prove that I wasn’t a drunk; part of it was compensating for my drinking, my lying about not drinking. I was up early, making breakfasts. I used to go to McDonald’s every day on the way to work, ordering a hamburger—all that grease seemed to help with the hangovers. On the way home, I would say: ‘I will only have one drink tonight’ . . . and I always failed.”
She’s the first to admit she had a couple of close calls with her children. “One Sunday, we had friends over for brunch, and drank champagne. After they left, I decided to make hamburgers, while I had another glass. I started cooking them under the broiler and there was a fire. Henry raced in and he knew I was drunk. I also drove drunk once with the kids in the car. I was just sloshed and went straight to my bed when we got home, passing out. My eldest woke me up because he had been sick—and I had no awareness whatsoever. I was so lucky that I never set fire to the house or killed anybody.”
One night, sitting alone with a scotch, Lisa was watching TV and Betty Ford came on. “She said there are two things you need to know: One, it’s the first drink that gets you drunk. Two, this is a progressive disease—it only gets worse. That was the moment for me: if you start drinking and can’t stop, you’re an alcoholic.” Several days later, dressed in her Max Mara suit and her pearls, Lisa headed to AA. “The minute people started talking, I realized: ‘This is my life.’ I haven’t had a drink since. I may not have hit a horrible bottom, but I could see it, and it was terrifying.”
Lisa isn’t alone in pushing her drinking too far. Jennifer, who worked in sales, quit as well—but not before her drinking helped her get ahead in business. “Alcohol made me social—it was a lubricant, and allowed me to be more gregarious,” says the wealthy sixty-year-old, now retired. “I would end up, at the end of a conference or a show, in the bar with the guys to the wee hours, learning a lot from key businessmen. They were my mentors. We would go to a restaurant and after dinner, they would order shots of Kahlúa. I wanted to learn, so I drank what I could to keep up. Did it enable me to work harder? Yes, it enabled me to keep up the pace.”
And as we all know, keeping up the pace is everything.
As Jennifer makes clear, prosperity has presented options that didn’t exist for other generations. Professional women join their male counterparts after work, going drink for drink. Going drink for drink can be problematic, to say the least. As high-profile Toronto addiction counselor Andrew Galloway says: “In a work situation, who has the guts to say, ‘We’ll have another round—but leave her out of it’?”
What Galloway sees is a new generation of successful women in their late thirties to mid-forties, heading to rehab. Usually they choose high-end facilities, charging in the tens of thousands. And the biggest news? Like me and like Jennifer, they have the resources to pay for it themselves.
Perfectionism, alive and well, on a whole new level.
11.
The Last Taboo
DRINKING AND PREGNANCY
This may be the most stigmatized area of a very stigmatized subject.
—JANET CHRISTIE
Is it safe to drink while you’re pregnant? When I was pregnant with Nicholas, the commonly accepted answer was no. But in recent years, with equal certainty, science has given women three definitive answers: no, yes, and maybe.
In 2010, a widely reported British study stated that the children of mothers who drank small amounts of alcohol during their pregnancy were not at an increased risk for behavioral or intellectual developmental problems. The study, which was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, went further, saying that children of light drinkers were 30 percent less likely to have behavioral problems than children whose mothers were abstinent during pregnancy. The study also reported that children of light drinkers achieved higher cognitive scores than those whose mothers had abstained.
I remember being outraged by the study, and its success in undermining years of messaging on the risk of alcohol to the developing fetus. I wasn’t alone. But the comments sections of newspapers were filled with this sort of response: “My mother drank when she was pregnant with me, and I turned out just fine. I intend to do the same thing.” To which others responded: “Yes, look how you turned out: irresponsible and brain-damaged.” It went on and on: page after page of jousting. Clearly, this hit a nerve.
I turn to Sterling Clarren, CEO of the Canada Northwest Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder Research Network and one of the world’s leading researchers on fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASDs). He is measured in his reaction: “The U.K. study was unfortunate. Saying that you can have one or two is too simple.”
What if a woman drank before she knew she was pregnant: say, a glass of champagne on her birthday? “Obstetricians are confronted with this kind of question all the time,” says Clarren. “Drilling down is important. Was it really just one glass or half a bottle? How big was the glass? I have three kinds of champagne glasses at home.” He continues. “Was that really the only time you drank? Are you five-nine and heavy, or a small woman? The only ones who really know exactly what they drank are the beer drinkers because today, no one drinks standard drinks. Precision in drinking? That’s not how the world works.”
In the end, says Clarren, “all we can tell a woman is whether she is at high, medium, or low risk
, and she can make it lower if she doesn’t drink anymore. The reality is, there is a relative risk to drinking.”
What if the woman’s answer is different? “Voluminous amounts in early pregnancy once or twice a week? That doesn’t translate to one hundred percent risk. Fifty percent risk is more likely. Women want to know what low risk is. They’re asking for a simple, fair discussion of this.”
According to Clarren, there is a complicated formula for dose and effect, involving how much was consumed, the timing in pregnancy, and a host of other factors: the mother’s genes, the fetus’s genes, whether the mother smokes, her potential vitamin deficiencies, and so on. “It’s a complicated formula, and we don’t know how to fill it in—I doubt we ever will. And when we talk about risk, the question is: Risk for what? For massive malformations of the brain? For blindness? For diminished executive functioning? A mild brain disorder? No one knows the answer.”
So, what about that glass of wine on your birthday? “Of course, you can have it. You’re taking a risk—a very small risk. A true small amount on a rare occasion is not very risky.” He pauses. “But I don’t know what rare is, and I don’t know what small is. How much mercury is safe for the fetus? Raw cheese? We just say avoid it. The advice is the same with alcohol because we just don’t know.”
Canadian expert Nancy Poole, well known for her collaborative work on FASD-related research and her work with women, acknowledges that many want black-and-white answers. “Unfortunately,” says Poole, “the territory is gray. To represent the risk accurately for a wide range of women, I like to say simply that it’s safest not to drink in pregnancy. We need to balance the knowledge that alcohol is a teratogen and that one drink is unlikely to cause harm.”
Poole believes that there is a stumbling block in doctors’ offices: “When you scratch the surface, yes, they are asking the question—‘You’re not drinking, are you?’ But many physicians don’t know what to do when the answer is ‘yes.’”
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