فصل 18

CHAPTER 18

The Lie

I NEED A DRINK

The first time I ever had a drink of alcohol, I was fifteen years old. It’s sounds pretty scandalous, but honestly, it was basically harmless. My big sister Christina let me have a sip of her Midori Sour one night when I was spending the night at her apartment. She made it in a plastic tumbler that came with the purchase of Big Gulps circa 1998—so we were keeping it way classy. The drink itself was sweeter than Pixy Stix powder and a shade of neon green that’s typically only found in something radioactive. I was excited to try it out because it made me feel mature, but it certainly wasn’t a gateway drug to partying at Studio 54.

The second time I had a drink I was seventeen years old. My best friend Kim and I drank half a bottle of cheap tequila between the two of us. It was the color of maple syrup—the kind of high-quality liquor reserved for idiot teenagers and sailors on shore leave. We threw up everything that wasn’t permanently attached to our insides, positive we were going to die.

It’s a miracle we didn’t. It’s also a miracle neither of our mamas found out and murdered us in cold blood.

Those first two experiences are pretty solidified in my memory because they were so out of the ordinary. Alcohol was never present in my late teenage years and only made a rare appearance in my early twenties. Oh sure, I had some Boone’s Farm just like every other poor, confused, college-age girl . . . but drinking wasn’t on my radar. On my wedding day I had a few sips of champagne. On our honeymoon I probably tried some kind of blended drink, but that was really more for the milkshake quality than any medicinal aspects. In fact, I remember going to a dinner party not so long into our marriage and another couple talked about how much wine they consumed. Dave and I drove home talking about it.

“Did you hear how much wine she says she drinks? That’s crazy!”

I sat atop my glass house and judged a behavior I couldn’t understand.

Then I had kids.

Then I had kids, and wine became my best friend. Cocktails? They were like favorite cousins you only see on the holidays—which is to say, I only really got to enjoy them on special occasions.

Is it funny or depressing to admit that before I had kids, I never really understood why anyone drank? Then suddenly I found myself exhausted, overwhelmed, and on edge. I discovered that I could have a glass of wine that magically muted the edges.

When my older boys were toddlers, drinking became a regular part of my routine. I’d come home from work, change into my pajamas (because bras are the Devil’s work), and pour myself a glass of wine while I got dinner ready.

When I was a teenager I watched Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and fell in love with Elizabeth Taylor and Paul Newman fighting their way through a Southern plantation. In the film adaptation of that play, Brick has become an alcoholic, and in one scene in particular he’s fighting with Big Daddy (played impeccably by Burl Ives) and arguing that he needs a drink. He keeps talking about a click that happens when he drinks enough that makes him feel better.

My teenage self thought Paul Newman was really overselling it, that the description of that “click” was Southern dramatics. But then I started drinking wine in the evening when I got home from work. Without realizing, I counted my way toward that click with every sip of white wine. Between the first swallow and the fifth I’d feel myself start to relax. By the tenth sip I was totally calm, able to parent my children better and more easily.

One glass of wine at night turned into two glasses of wine at night. Two glasses of wine a night turned into a seven-day-a-week habit that increased in quantity on the weekend.

Each morning I would wake up feeling a little queasy or have to take ibuprofen to counteract my headache. Each morning I would chalk it up to hormones or lack of sleep.

I refused to acknowledge my daily hangover for what it was.

At social gatherings or work events I would pound a cocktail or a glass of the signature drink as soon as I got in the room. Being in a crowd made me hyperaware of getting it right. I reasoned that if I was more relaxed I’d be better able to carry on more meaningful conversations.

Alcohol gave me courage.

It gave me the courage to parent. It gave me the courage to have conversations with strangers. It gave me the courage to feel sexy. It washed away things like anxiety, fear, frustration, and anger with juicy acidity and a balanced flavor profile.

I’m trying to remember the moment I realized how unhealthy all of this was for me, and I don’t have a clear defining instant in my mind. I only recall that one day I suddenly caught myself saying, “I need a glass of wine.”

As a writer, I pay a lot of attention to words. In this instance, on this random day, I caught the word need.

Need implies that something is essential, necessary. So when had I gone from thinking wine might be a nice addition to my night to believing it was essential for my survival? The idea was terrifying.

Terrifying because I come from a long line of alcoholics and I didn’t want to become one myself. I stopped cold turkey. Gave up any kind of alcohol for as long as it took me to realize I didn’t actually need it. After about a month without any alcohol, and after discovering that the world would continue to spin on its axis even without it, I felt more in control. I would occasionally have a drink, but truly didn’t feel the desire to drink when I was stressed.

And then we had foster kids.

That summer we signed up for the foster-to-adopt system in LA County. We jumped right in. In retrospect we were so euphoric about the time we had with the children, so eager to be helpful. We should have taken a step back before we agreed to anything. We didn’t know that at the time, though. We were naïve about all that was coming or how hard it would be, so we said yes and went from three boys to five children in the span of a couple of weeks.

Those days were absolute chaos in the most beautiful way. Dave and I were in straight-up survival mode; our only mission each and every day was to occupy five children between six in the morning and eight o’clock at night. We ran around the yard, jumped on the trampoline, and spent hours and hours swimming in the pool. We navigated severe health issues with the baby and her big sister’s trauma. We cleaned up a thousand spills and kissed skinned knees and reminded everyone to be kind at least thirty times a day. And at night, when they were snuggled in their beds? We drank vodka.

Wine? Wine was long gone. Wine wouldn’t even touch the level of exhaustion and fear and overwhelm we were feeling. Vodka was my copilot, and I was deeply grateful for its presence in my life. We began to navigate visits with bio parents and medical appointments several times a week. We became entrenched in DCFS and battled against a broken system we were inside of.

How do you keep taking babies to see parents who aren’t parenting? How do you give up half a Saturday to wait in a McDonald’s playland for addicts who may or may not show up, then hand over an innocent baby and watch them erase whatever progress you’ve made with their daughter? How do you do all of this knowing that they’ll be reunited at the end of it all, and there’s nothing you can do about it? If you’re like me, you find a way. But at night, when no one is looking, you drink, and when it gets really bad, you take a Xanax too.

I look back on that time and feel sad for that version of me. I feel sad for the younger mom who needed her nightly wine and for the woman who was fighting so hard to keep her head above water. On some level I feel like there’s a bit of shame as well, because if I can’t be strong for myself, I at least want to be strong for my babies. I don’t want them to know a version of me that used anything to dull the sharp edges. It makes me hyperaware of that bio mom I met every week at McDonald’s, and it makes me consider her addiction in another light. It makes me wonder if maybe some of you reading this now have your own version of this kind of coping too.

Over the last year I’ve gotten more and more emails from women who are struggling with how much they drink. The drinking isn’t enough to be a real problem, they tell me . . . yet. Right now their family and friends think they’re just the life of the party, or they don’t know how much they’re actually consuming. But they worry it’s getting worse. They’re gaining weight and spending money. Drinking is hard to walk away from because the action is just so easy. One sip, one click is all that’s standing between them and not screaming at their children. A little bit of alcohol will make the difference between anxiety and ease or frustration and contentment.

For the last few years of my career I’ve gotten notes from people thanking me for my honesty. I’ve heard that when I shared my story, other women felt like they’re not so alone. Those women who send me notes about their drinking? They’ve done that for me in return. They’ve also given me a powerful piece of truth to fight against this lie my struggle is not unique, and therefore there’s nothing wrong with me. If there’s nothing wrong with me, I don’t have any reason to medicate myself.

Make no mistake drinking the way I drank is a form of medication. Life felt hard or overwhelming, so I put something into my body to make it feel better. But it was a short-term solution to a problem that was not going away. When the alcohol wore off, my problems were still there. When the vodka ran out, I still had to sit in one of the hardest experiences of my life; I still had to pack up bags for those babies and load them into a car with a social worker to head back to their family.

Drinking can be an attempt to escape, but you cannot escape the realities of your life forever. In the morning they’re still there, only now your ability to take them on is diminished by the fact that your “medicine” made you sicker.

In fact, there is only one way to manage the stresses of this life properly, and that is to build up a healthy “immune” system (for lack of a better, cooler description). Stick with me here I promise these analogies will make sense in a minute.

When you’re born, you come screaming into the world without any real protection. Your immune system is basically nonexistent, which is why worriers like me keep their newborns wrapped up like Eskimos even in the middle of summertime. As you get older you’ll eventually get sick for the first time, likely because you have an older brother who brings home some kind of virulent flu from preschool with him. Getting sick with something you’ve never had before can be scary, but it’s also entirely necessary to build up your immune system. Once you survive, your body is forever able to battle off that kind of sickness, and it can take on similar types of trouble because it’s been through it all before.

Occasionally we’ll get an infection that our immune system isn’t quite strong enough to manage, so someone prescribes some antibiotics. Back when I was a little girl, they handed out antibiotics for everything! Tonsillitis? Antibiotics. Stub your toe? Antibiotics. Then, at some point in between when I was small and when I had my own children, doctors realized that if you took antibiotics too much, your body would never learn how to fight off anything on its own. Your immune system needed to be put through the test; it needed to get sick and learn what tools were necessary to pull itself out of there.

You see where I’m going, right?

The difficult seasons we walk through are how we learn to build up strength to manage any situation. The strongest people you know? They’ve probably walked some pretty hard roads and built up the skills necessary to be emotional giants. When they encounter hard things, their seasoned bodies rely on the good antibodies they’ve built up to handle that sort of scenario. They don’t medicate because they’re strong enough to manage on their own, and they know that medicating will likely make them weaker.

I had to teach myself better ways to handle stress and painful seasons. I had to teach myself better habits. Having a drink will always be the easiest way out; it requires the least effort but demands the most in retribution. Running, having dinner with my girlfriends, praying, going to therapy, or allowing myself to cry are the best methods I know of for building up the strength necessary to carry on. These habits make me strong enough to handle the hard stuff, meaning I don’t reach for the easy way out.

For the longest time I thought I needed a drink. Maybe you have no idea what that feels like. Maybe for you the “drink” is prescription pills or food or pornography. Or maybe right now you’re reading this and thinking you’d never do anything so dire. I’d ask you, then, to take a good look at your life. I know many women who binge-watch TV or read romance novels obsessively because in those spaces they are closed off from the world; in those spaces they can escape the hard parts of their lives by muting them with distraction. Food, water, shelter, healthy relationships . . . those are things you need. Anything else you insert into that category becomes a dangerous crutch—and you don’t need a crutch if you are strong enough to walk on your own.

If you don’t feel strong, if as you read these lines you feel weak in your soul . . . I want you to ask yourself if you are pushing to find strength or if you’re reaching for a quick fix. Strength is never easy to come by.

It’s like building up muscles at the gym. First you have to break down the weaker parts of yourself before you can build them back up. The process is often painful, and it takes time—often way longer than anyone expects it to. Just like with your immune system, you’ll get stronger in one area and then something hard will come along that you’ve never encountered before. You’ll have to learn and grow in a new area, which can feel discouraging if you’ve already walked through hard seasons in the past. But fighting through those times is how you get tougher; it’s how you become the person you were meant to be.

THINGS THAT HELPED ME . . .

1. Learning about habits. I read an awesome book last year called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Turns out, so many of our negative behaviors—drinking, smoking, etc.—are long-engrained habits triggered by a specific cue. So for me, I felt stressed out, which cued a bad habit in drinking. By identifying my cue, I could replace it with a better coping mechanism, which for me is time with my girlfriends or a long-distance run.

2. Acknowledging my reality. Self-awareness is one of the most important skills to acquire in the world. For months I ignored the negative side effects of drinking, until one day I finally forced myself to acknowledge who I was and what was really going on. It’s so easy to ignore weakness like that, particularly if it’s wrapped up in self-care or coping; but you’re never going to move past a problem if you can’t even admit to having it in the first place.

3. Removing the temptation. If you’re struggling with how much you drink, remove access to alcohol. If you binge-eat cookies when you get stressed out, don’t bring cookies into your home. Obviously real struggles run so much deeper than simply having access, but it’s much easier to fall into those temptations if they’re sitting right in front of you.