Drunk Mom Read Free

these days.

I’M A DRUNK
    O h, in case you’re wondering: I’m not a cocaine addict.
    I prefer to drink.
    You found me in the middle of my story and I happened to have just found a baggie of cocaine in that bathroom.
    But honestly, I prefer drinking.
    I prefer drinking to anything in the world: sex, food, sleep. My child, my lover, anything.
    I love to drink. Sometimes I think: No, I
am
drink.
    It’s like my blood. Even before I get it, I can feel it in my veins. I’m not being poetic—I can actually feel it in my veins.
    It’s gold. It’s like little zaps of gold going through me, charging me, starting me up.
    When I drink, I fill with real gold and become god-like.
    So I’m not a cocaine addict. I’m a drunk.
    I had been a drunk for a long time. I stopped drinking for a time, andthen I started again.
    I believe that you’re never cured of alcoholism. I use the word
cure
but it is not strictly a disease. Go to any AA meeting, watch or read anything about addiction, and sooner or later you will hear the word “disease.” But it is not a disease. Disease implies you can maybe cure it. In my opinion it’s closer to a condition or, perhaps, a habit you can’t unlearn completely once you stop it. Even if dormant, it is ingrained in you.
    For example, my first language is Polish. I don’t use it often yet I will never unlearn it. When needed, I can speak it fluently, just like that.
    I’m always going to be a speaker of the language of alcoholism too—if I relapse, picking up right where I left off, catching up to my last number of drinks with an extra drink to top it off, my vocabulary expanding.
    People also tend to mistake alcoholism for drinking: “I’m going to slow down. Cut down on my drinking.” Okay. You do that. But if you’re an alcoholic, you can’t do just that. Alcoholism is not drinking, just like hemophilia is not bleeding. You can’t slow down, cut down on your alcoholism. You can’t unlearn its language. You can stop using it and forget some of the words, but you still know it. With drinking too, you can stop drinking and hope it’ll stay stopped. Alcoholism is a habit, a permanent condition of having the habit—like this
wanting
is, at least in my case. Sometimes the wanting gets too strong and I run. I run with it, run so fast I’m out of breath, and then run even faster.
    I relapsed when the wanting got particularly strong.
    To relapse means to “suffer deterioration after a period of improvement.”
    There was a period of improvement when I became sober for the first time, at the age of twenty-seven. But before that, I was the kind of drunk girl who ran so fast with it, drinking, she could never catch her breath.
    I was the girl who danced barefoot on tables or sometimes fell asleepwith her shoes on, or sometimes lost a job or a relationship. I was the type of tragic girl that boys would try to fix, or try to drink with although only until they’d had enough, and there I would be, moving apartments yet again only to move in with another boyfriend who claimed he’d be better at fixing me.
    I always had three drinks to your one, I always prepared for a night out with a bottle of wine, always opened another beer at 4 a.m., after coming home after a night of partying.
    But it’s easy to hide your drinking in your twenties, when many of your peers seem to be bent on oblivion too, when comparing hangovers is par for the course. Except that I kept quiet when people discussed having blacked out as if it was something unusual. It happened to me all the time. And I too shook my head in disbelief when a friend would do something silly while intoxicated—steal a garden gnome, climb on a roof, make out with not-his-girlfriend. Look at that guy! Guy, you really need to cut down on your drinking!
    Me? You couldn’t catch me. I juggled friends and environments. Except for those poor boyfriends, there weren’t that many people who witnessed my demise. It’s easy to flit from party to party,