Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife Read Free

timber wolves, mountain lions, and bear looked out from dark wood paneling.
    “Wow!” I gasped.
    Lou clapped Charlie on the back and led him from a snarling bobcat to a stately buck. Vicky grabbed my arm. “Do you know what it’s like to have to vacuum and dust down here? It’s a nightmare.”
    The four of us padded across the expensive carpet to the bar. Five muscle men in tight-fitting shirts were sitting there with their pretty women. Lou introduced us and poured us stiff drinks. The men continued talking about their BMWs and Mercedes. Lou slapped one on the back and laughed. “Alex here’s got a house in Barrington the size of an airplane hangar. Better watch it, mafioso.”
    Alex smiled sheepishly. He turned his doughy face to his blond glamour girl, and she shot him a cold smile.
    Charlie and I drank heavily. We rang in the New Year and quickly left.

    Spring approached, and by that time Mike and I’d been partying for almost a year. Charlie finally reached his limit.
    “This is not what I want,” he blurted one night after Mike left. “I don’t want to come home to a tanked wife. Your cousin is here all the time.” Charlie flicked his hand disgustedly at the door. “You have to do something.”
    I could see Charlie’s point, but what a buzz kill. I’d already had my backyard epiphany. My hangovers were getting hellish, so I nodded in agreement. When Mike called the next afternoon, I told him about my conversation with Charlie and suggested cutting our happy hours down to once or twice a week. Mike wasn’t thrilled, but what could he do?
    I began drinking in moderation by myself. When Mike showed up, we hit the booze hard. One morning, after Mike had been over, I woke up feeling like I’d done serious damage to myself. Every molecule in my body was vibrating, and it felt like someone had split my skull with an ax. I couldn’t think. Charlie’s friend, Sean, had recently gone to a posh rehab out west and sobered up with an aging rock star. He went to meetings, took up running, and looked great. Jim, another alcoholic high school buddy of Charlie’s, had been sober ten years. I didn’t want to spend money on rehab or tell my insurance company I was an alcoholic, so I picked up the Yellow Pages, sat down at my kitchen island, and dialed a number for recovery meetings. A woman answered and I began blubbering.
    “Ma’am,” the woman said. “Ma’am, this is the answering service. If you just give me your name and number, I’ll have someone call you back.”
    I choked out my phone number and hung up. Ten minutes later, the phone rang.
    “Hi, this is Maggie—from the recovery program,” a woman said. I started crying again. “Did you call the program?”
    “Yes,” I croaked.
    “Do you think you might have a drinking problem?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “If you want, I could tell you a little about myself.”
    “Okay.”
    “My husband died and I was left with four small children,” Maggie began. “This was a number of years ago. I felt very sorry for myself, very, very sorry for myself for having to raise four children on my own. That’s when I started drinking.”
    “You had good reason,” I sniffed.
    “I didn’t know how I was going to raise those kids,” Maggie continued. “I didn’t want to think about it, so I started drinking as soon as I woke up and kept it up until I went to bed. I wasn’t cooking, wasn’t cleaning. The kids were taking care of themselves. My oldest son was getting everybody off to school. He hated me. Then somebody, I think it was a neighbor, called the Department of Children and Family Services.”
    I stopped connecting with Maggie and thought,
Rotten mother. Loser.
    “Blah, blah, blah,” went Maggie. “That was twenty years ago and I’ve been sober since.”
    “I don’t drink during the day,” I told Maggie. “And my drinking doesn’t interfere with my work or being a good mother. So, I don’t know.”
    “There’s a meeting tonight at the United