Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife

by Brenda Wilhelmson

  A couple of days after that, Lida called me again. I happened to be angry with Charlie and started bitching about him. “He takes his boots off and leaves them in the middle of the stairs for the kids and me to trip over. I whip his shoes down the basement stairs and you’d think he’d get the hint, but he keeps doing it. I just threw his boots into the basement again. This morning he shoveled the sidewalk because I asked him to. He’d never have done it otherwise. He barely shoveled a shovel’s-width snaking path full of clumps. Now the shovel is lying in a mound of snow in the backyard. I’m looking at it from the window right now.”

  “Why do you think you’re so angry?” Lida asked.

  “Why?” I asked, totally irritated. “Because I expect Charlie to be a partner, not behave like one of the kids. I expect to nag my ten-year-old into a crap job, not my husband.”

  “I think there’s more to it than that,” Lida said. “We need to look at this and examine it more closely.”

  Another time Lida told me I was in denial about my alcoholism.

  “Alcohol wasn’t my favorite drug in high school or college,” I had told her. “But it was my downfall because it’s legal. It became my drug of choice after I became a parent. I think anyone can become addicted to drugs or alcohol if they keep doing them, regardless of genetics.”

  “No,” Lida said. “Your alcoholism kicked in the day you took your first drink. That first drink affects alcoholics differently than nonalcoholics. It’s a disease we’re born with.”

  “I didn’t like my first drink,” I told Lida. “I drank non-alcoholically for a long time before I developed a problem.”

  “You’re intellectualizing this,” Lida said testily. “And you’re in danger of drinking again. You could die!”

  I don’t believe I’ll die if I drink again. I suppose anything could happen, but I don’t see myself picking up a drink, guzzling the bottle, and killing myself in the process. I didn’t share this with Lida, however, for obvious reasons.

  A couple of weeks ago, Lida called me at dinnertime. While I was talking to her, Van showed me some of his drawings in his Blue’s Clues Handy Dandy Notebook, Max asked me a homework question, and Charlie motioned me toward the dining room for dinner.

  “Hey, I need to sit down with my family and eat,” I told her.

  “Yeah, I think that’s a good idea,” Lida snapped. “I’m tired of being interrupted!”

  “Look,” I said. “I have two children who need my attention. You called during the most hectic part of my day. It upsets my ten-year-old that I’ve been disappearing in the evenings to go to meetings, and I’m not about to push my kids off when I’m around. You don’t have children. You go to work, to meetings, and you’re in bed by nine. Our lives are very different.”

  Two days later, Lida called again. “I just want to say that if I’m going to continue to be your sponsor, you’re going to have to call me every other day and we’re going to have to meet at a meeting at least once a week,” she said.

  Lida had been bugging me to attend a meeting with her once a week that was an hour away from my house. I’d suggested meeting her halfway, but she said, “I only go to meetings where people talk about their feelings. We need to go to this one because people really talk about their feelings there.” There was no way I was going to that meeting, and there was no way I was going to call her.

  “Thanks for being my sponsor, I really appreciate it, but I need to find a sponsor who lives closer,” I told Lida.

  “Oh,” said Lida. “Well, uh, I’ll continue to be your sponsor until you find a new one.”

  “Uh, okay,” I said, irritated with myself for not saying, “No.”

  So today Lida called and said, “I still want to be your sponsor.”

  “I asked someone else to be my sponsor today,” I told her. “She lives close by, I see her at meetings, and I think she’ll be a good sponsor.”

  I’d thought about replacing Lida with Sara weeks ago. Sara’s smart, says insightful things, and has been sober for ten years, but I changed my mind during a meeting when Sara mentioned her son had been taken away from her when she was drinking and she’d spent time in a loony bin. Sara got her kid back years ago and works as a psychotherapist now, so hopefully I made a good choice.

  “You know, a lot of people have two sponsors,” Lida said.

  “Oh, really?”

  “Yeah, so I’ll continue to be your sponsor,” she said.

  “Uh, okay,” I said, hating myself for being gutless.

  [Monday, February 24]

  I called Lida at home when I knew she’d be at work. It’s cowardly, but I didn’t want to deal with her. I left a message on her answering machine thanking her for her help and telling her, “I only want one sponsor.” I hope Lida doesn’t call back. I don’t want to hear anymore about how I should get rid of my mouthwash and Grey Poupon because they contain alcohol.

  “They could trigger you,” Lida insisted. “Did you get rid of them like I told you to? If you drink again you’ll die!”

  [Saturday, March 1]

  I went downtown for a makeover at Nordstrom. Sue Devitt, the Aussie cosmetics diva herself, selected colors for me out of her new cosmetics line and a makeup artist did my face. I dropped a bundle and went to the Art Institute. It felt great!

  [Sunday, March 9]

  Audrey is moving to Detroit and Hope threw a good-bye brunch for her today. I made a blintz soufflé, and Hope bought lox and bagels. I don’t know what Audrey sees in Nehemiah. He’s fat, sixteen years older than she is, and doesn’t have two nickels to rub together. I’m really going to miss her, but I have a feeling she’ll be back.

  [Tuesday, March 11]

  I want to drink again. Maybe I can do it. It’s hard to relate to the homeless stories, whoring stories, my-children-were-taken-away-from-me stories. I’ve been trying to work the Steps, but I’ve been having a hard time.

  Step One: “We admitted we were powerless over (enter substance or behavior)—that our lives had become unmanageable.” I go back and forth with this one but, yeah, I know I’m powerless over alcohol, especially when I remind myself that part of the reason I had Van was to sober up.

  Step Two: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I never thought I was insane. I was a pothead-turned-drinker who let alcohol spin out of control.

  I started smoking pot my junior year of high school. I liked it. It made me feel uninhibited and comfortable in my own skin. My usual negative thoughts—I’m not pretty enough, I’m too skinny, I’m a Seventh-Day Adventist freak—evaporated when I got high.

  I had attended a parochial Seventh-Day Adventist school from first grade through ninth grade. My mother was devout and she, my sister, and I kept the Sabbath from Friday night sundown to Saturday night sundown and went to church on Saturday. My sister and I were taught that drinking was bad, gambling was bad, dancing was bad, wearing jewelry was bad, reading novels was bad, going to movies was bad. My father, however, had immunity. He spent Friday nights at the Moose Lodge playing poker and getting sloshed and never went to church.

  Paula and I were allowed to watch The Brady Bunch, Little House on the Prairie, Happy Days, and The Waltons. We wished we could be like the normal kids on TV who went to parties and danced.

  My sophomore year of high school, I began attending public school. The Adventist school I’d gone to for nine years, North Shore, ended after ninth grade. The plan had always been for me to attend an Adventist boarding school, but I decided I wanted to mainstream and go to public high school. One evening, while my mother was filling out the paperwork to send me away, I told her I wanted to go to the public school. My mother told me I was going to Broadview Academy. I told her I wasn’t. She told me I was.

  “If you force me to go to Broadview, I’ll get kicked out,” I threatened. “You’ll have to pack me up because I won’t pack. When we get there, I’ll sit in the lobby of the girls’ dorm and chain smoke and swear at everybody.
We’ll be out of there in ten minutes.”

  My mother glared at me and said, “If you go to public school, your sister won’t have to go to North Shore for her freshman year. I’ll send her to Broadview this year instead of you.”

  I had begged my mother to send me to Broadview a year ago. North Shore was the last place I wanted to spend my first year of high school. I resented having to attend a school where first and second grades share a classroom, third and fourth grades share a classroom, fifth and sixth grades share a classroom, and seventh and eighth grades share a classroom. Paula was a year behind me so every other year we were in the same room. Ninth grade, high school, got its own classroom. What a privilege.

  “Go ahead,” I told my mother. “Put Paula’s name on the paperwork.”

  This was working out better than I expected. I was going to public school and getting rid of my sister in one fell swoop.

  A hateful look crossed my mother’s face. “You’re going to be miserable in public school,” she growled. “You won’t be able to participate in anything. All extracurricular activities are on the Sabbath. You’ll go to school and do nothing else.”

  I knew from watching TV that the popular girls were cheerleaders, and I desperately wanted to be one. Football and basketball games were on Friday nights or Saturdays, however, so I didn’t bother trying out. Instead, I auditioned for the school musical. I was cast in fifty percent of the show, but one of the performances was on Friday night. After going to two rehearsals, I got up the courage to tell the student directors, two upper-classmen, that I couldn’t perform on Friday night.

  “We can’t recast all your parts for one night,” Ellie said. “Why don’t we talk to your mother and see if she’ll change her mind.”

  I shook my head and started to cry. “You don’t know her,” I said. “She’s not going to let me do it.”

  Norman, Ellie’s codirector, drove me home. My mother was in the kitchen, and I sat down at the kitchen table and sobbed. My mother sat down next to me. When I lifted my head, I saw that she was smirking. “I told you this would happen,” she said.

  Next year, I discovered the joys of marijuana and alcohol. I started questioning authority, who I was, the existence of God. The first two questions persist today. As for the third, once I had Max, I started thinking it might be a good idea for him to believe in God. Believing in God would give Max a moral compass, and why not hedge Max’s bets? If there were a heaven and hell, believing in God would be Max’s ticket to the good life. But I couldn’t teach Max something I didn’t believe.

  One evening, while I was flipping through TV stations, I landed on a cartoon where a rabbi and a priest were explaining God to children. The cartoon rabbi pointed to objects in a room. He explained that everything in the room had to be designed before it was made. Before the world existed, the rabbi said, it had to be designed, too. You can think of God as the master designer, he explained. That made sense to me.

  So back to Step Two: “Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” I do believe in a Power greater than myself. And recently, I came to believe my behavior—throwing mass quantities of booze down my throat and repeatedly promising myself I wouldn’t drink like that again—was, yes, insane.

  So I guess I’m on the Third Step: “Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.”

  I don’t know about this. What if God’s will doesn’t jibe with mine? What if God’s will is going to be unpleasant and painful, as most character building stuff is? How am I supposed to figure out His will anyway?

  Last night I went to a meeting and the woman who gave the lead talked about Step Three. She said she used to have grandiose ideas of making a mark on the world, becoming a historical figure. “But now,” she said, “I’m looking for something right-sized, not so big, so grand. I just want to do the next right thing, not focus on winning prestige and honor.”

  How uncomplicated and pure. But what’s wrong with wanting to make a mark on the world? Furthermore, it’s not always clear what the next right thing to do is.

  When Charlie and I went to dinner with Reed and Liv on Valentine’s Day, Reed said he was reading a book about the fifteen rules of success. The most important rule, Reed said, was to avoid the unhappy and unlucky at all costs. Last night, when I looked around the room at the people in the meeting, I thought, Here are the unhappy and unlucky.

  [Saturday, March 15]

  Tonight was Kelly’s turn to host the Bacchanal Dinner Club. She had a fondue party—again. The last time Kelly served fondue, Charlie had to sling me over his shoulder and carry me out of her house after I lost my balance and fell into her recycling bin while smoking a cigarette in her garage.

  I believe Kelly wants to get her guests as plastered as possible. Fondue requires heating oil to the right temperature in little pots, placing bowls of dipping sauces all over the table, and diners cooking each bite-size morsel of food before eating it. Kelly’s first fondue was served just before midnight. I don’t even remember eating. Tonight, it was served just after nine and everyone was sloshed, except me.

  Before dinner Liv started tap dancing and unsuccessfully attempted the pepper grinder. The pepper grinder is when the dancer squats and swings her legs around like the top of a pepper grinder. Liv gave it a try, flopped on the floor, picked herself up, and yanked Wendy into the family room and begged Wendy to dance with her. Wendy humored Liv for a couple of minutes and when the song ended, backed away saying, “Enough.” Liv grabbed Joel and danced him into the couch. She fell onto the couch, yanking Joel on top of her. Kelly watched her husband and Liv struggle to get up with an unpleasant look on her face. She turned and set out a pot of bubbling cheese fondue. I grabbed a bowl of bread cubes and placed them next to the molten cheese.

  “I’m determined to get you drunk,” Kelly said. “Eat a lot of this cheese. There’s a shitload of alcohol in it.”

  “Cooking burns off the alcohol,” I laughed and popped a cheese-drenched chunk of bread into my mouth.

  Kelly made a face. “I could never quit drinking.”

  “You could if you wanted to.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “Then don’t.”

  Kelly frowned.

  Feeling compelled to make Kelly feel better, I said, “I can’t have one or two glasses of wine. I want a bottle or two.”

  “Well I drink a bottle or more.”

  “Yeah, but I drank like that almost every night.”

  “Hmm.”

  Wendy walked over. She patted my head like a puppy and hugged me. “I’m so proud of you,” she said. “You’re so strong. You just decide not to drink and you stop. What willpower! I don’t think I could do that. I know I couldn’t.”

  “I got bored with drinking,” I said. “It was old. Being sober is different and interesting.”

  “That’s what my brother said,” Wendy said. “He quit drinking for thirteen years. He just started up again. He got bored with not drinking.”

  “How’s that going for him?” I asked, feeling giddy at the thought of drinking again.

  “Okay, I guess.”

  “I’ll probably get bored with not drinking, too,” I said.

  “Wanna smoke?” Wendy asked.

  “Yeah.”

  We walked out the sliding glass doors that led from the kitchen to the back deck. Kelly followed us out. “What do you think about the book club book?” Kelly asked me with a smile.

  “I don’t think there’s much to discuss,” I said. “The characters are cardboard cutouts. It’s a cheap romance novel, for God’s sake.”

  Kelly’s face fell.

  “But I’m enjoying it,” I added quickly. “It’s a page-turner.”

  Kelly looked crestfallen. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. She hadn’t picked the book, but she apparently loved it. We left the deck and returned to the kitchen.

  “You left me out!” Liv bleated, staggering over. �
�You didn’t come get me before you went out! You didn’t want me around!”

  “We need a group hug!” Wendy said. We group hugged and almost fell over.

  “Let’s have dinner,” Kelly said.

  Everyone sat down to dinner, skewered chunks of meat and vegetables, stuck their skewers into pots of bubbling oil, and waited for their food to cook. Wendy’s husband, Tom, leaned over the table. “So what’s it like not drinking?” he asked. “Does everyone seem stupid?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  Tom blanched. “Really?”

  “Oh, you know, it’s funny,” I laughed. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there.

  [Sunday, March 16]

  I called Kelly and thanked her for a lovely party.

  “I hope you had a good time,” she said.

  “Charlie and I had a great time,” I said.

  “Charlie looked bummed when you said you had to leave,” she said. “He looked like a sad puppy.”

  “Really? He was the one who tapped my watch and pointed out we had to relieve the babysitter.”

  “Did he have a good time?” Kelly asked, sounding worried.

  “Yeah. Did everyone else stay late?”

  “Liv and Reed stayed until two,” she said. “I had so much fun with them. I just love Liv. I’m so glad she’s my friend.”

  I pictured Liv and Kelly hugging and telling each other how much they loved each other. It turned my stomach.

  When I got off the phone, I called my new sponsor, Sara, and told her about the party.

  “What was interesting,” I said, “was that I had no problem not drinking. I wasn’t tempted at all.”

  “Look out for that,” she said. “Thinking you have no problem not drinking can get you into trouble. It can sneak up on you at unexpected moments in unexpected ways.”

  [Monday, March 17]

  Charlie and I flew to Savannah, Georgia, today. Charlie’s here for a conference and will be working most of the five days we’re here. I’ll sightsee on my own, which is what I like to do anyway, and save the best stuff for when Charlie can join me.