January 4th, 2020.
“What happened to you last night?”
The winter sunlight blared through my barely opened eyes. I snapped them tightly shut. I can’t entirely blame the brightness. The truth was I didn’t want to face David’s inquiry. I couldn’t bear to look at my husband, much less face my three daughters. I could hear their chatter over the Mickey Mouse show they had on in the living room. And even if I could’ve mustered it, I didn’t have a clear answer to his question.
“You smell awful.”
I did. Cotton mouth sour breath. The garbage scent that arises from flesh when you sweat out the alcohol.
“You called me six times, saying you were lost. And when you walked through the door, you fell down in the hallway.”
I didn’t remember calling. I didn’t remember falling. I tried to piece it together, and I couldn’t.
I clamped my eyelids together even tighter. Tears swelled beneath them and poured down my cheeks through the cracks. Pathetic, the way I felt the two single teardrops make their way straight down to the edge of my chin and then drip onto my bare chest.
David had seen this all before – the afterness of a big night, evidenced by the crying, the crumpled fetal position hidden under layers of blankets, the all-day in-bed television-blaring Pedialyte-chugging shameover. Shameover. A hangover gives the body a beating, but shameover coats the physical aftermath with waves of intense embarrassment, humiliating you like a bad bully. Yet, you can only blame yourself because its a bully that you welcomed, a bully that you invited in to sit down for dinner, a bully that you knew would give you what you deserved anyway. You had it coming.
My big night began long before getting out the plastic seashell-printed goblet from the cabinet, before the pouring and the sipping and the chugging and the secrecy. It started from the moment I woke up on January 3rd, with the two facts playing in my in my mind like an infinite newsreels ticker tape.
Number One: You Failed Your Father.
Number Two: You Failed Your Children.
My father’s slow suicide caused by alcohol and opiods lasted two decades before he drew his last breath just days before Christmas 2019.
I flew from Boston to Baltimore and hid out at my grandmother’s house while he spent his last days in the hospital. I didn’t want to visit him alive. My mother, who had left my father two decades earlier, wanted me to come and help her get ready for the holidays an hour south in Washington D.C. I wanted nothing to do with it.
At my grandmother’s house, I read a stack of book, watched Turner Classic Movies, and popped Trazodone. At my grandmother’s house, I didn’t drink. At my grandmother’s, I felt free to freeze, to do whatever I wanted to do because my mother’s mother didn’t judge me the way my mother did. My grandmother expected nothing more than my existence.
My mother expected nothing less than I continue on like normal. I couldn’t do it.
“What do you care if your father dies? You didn’t talk to him for twenty years.”
But it’s still my father. How could that not affect me? But my mother was saying: I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t feel. I should be able to just get ready for the holidays. My mother was saying: Why can’t you just do the impossible? Why can’t you just handle it? Why can’t you just deal with it? My mother was saying: I’m so superior that I can just keep things moving to get ready for your children’s holidays. Her two sentences said all those things to me.
And she had never bothered to ask why my father and I hadn’t spoken. That didn’t matter. What mattered was that Christmas was upon us, and she was getting things ready for my children. She didn’t know that I would’ve rather stayed home and drank in peace.
I can see now that maybe my mother had a right to her anger. She did a million things to get ready: decorated and childproofed her entire house, bought and wrapped gifts for the kids, purchased and prepared food. I took her hours. And I didn’t appreciate it at all. I could think only about the history between myself and my father, the memories I wanted to obliterate.
I barely remember Christmas Eve. All I know is that I drank a lot and my mother and brother and husband put the children to bed and placed t their Christmas gifts under the tree. The three of us watched some movie after the kids went to bed, maybe Home Alone or Scrooged, something that came out long before my children came into the world, back when my brother and I had been the children. We didn’t talk about our parents’ problems back then. Two decades later, we still couldn’t talk about them. My brother, my mother, and my husband played a psychological long game of “Everything’s Just Fine”, but I couldn’t bring myself to join this facade of normalcy.
The game continued for days, and I eventually joined in at my father’s funeral on December 29th. The guests chatted with myself, my brother, and my mother as if we had been in some Leave It to Beaver family that lost its dear patriarch. Forget my parents’ divorce. Forget the time my father ripped the side mirror off my mom’s car in a fit of rage. Forget the man’s inability to leave the house for years. Forget when he called me a little bitch, that last straw, that catalyst for cutting off our relationship. Of course, the guests didn’t know all that. We played it perfectly, but the whole thing was bullshit, and I wanted to drink it all away.
On New Year’s Eve, David, the kids, and I returned home, and I could again drink in the privacy of my own home. 2019 had sucked. Six months before my father’s death, my husband’s dad as well. Rob’s neighbor found him in his trailer in July 2019, his body reeking after a week of decay. They both died at 67, both living alone, not working, hardly talking to anyone, stringing together bleak lonesome days, perhaps inviting their own demises. On any given day, Rob smoked a ton of weed, listened to the Dead, and walked his mangy golden retriever. My father boozed, popped pills, and watched reruns of F Troop and The Waltons on TV Land. At least I had my husband, my kids, my teaching career, a few things to keep me tethered.
On Friday, January 3rd, my husband went to his office for the day, and I tried to spend a day as the mother I wanted to be. I took the girls to an indoor playground. I read them stories. I helped them glue pom-poms and foam geometric shapes on construction paper. I even got the lavash bread, tomato sauce, and shredded mozzarella and parmesan I need to make a recipe for healthy homemade pizza.
While I made the pizza, I poured myself a glass of wine. You know, just a little glass of wine to sip while I made that pizza. I took a sip after every little step of making that pizza. After opening the fridge. After pressing the buttons to preheat the oven. After spraying cooking spray on a baking tray. And so on and so forth. And by the time that pizza went in the oven, I had drank a bottle of wine. While the pizza cooked, I hid the wine in the trash and brushed my teeth and my husband came home just as I was getting the pizza out of the oven.
Look at Me. I’m Normal. I Made a Pizza.
You Failed Your Father.
You Failed Your Kids.
Look at Me. I’m Normal. I Made a Pizza.
You Failed Your Father.
You Failed Your Kids.
The words swished around in my brain. I had to get out of there, as if I could outrun them. I searched the internet for events nearby. Square Root, a little coffeeshop and bar in our neighborhood had some multi-band Beatles tribute.
“I’m going to head down to Square Root for a bit,” I announced, trying to assume a casual tone,” I just need to get out of the house.”
“Okay,” my husband consented, even though his eyebrows raised a bit.
I never went out at night. I usually drank at home. I didn’t care about the Beatles. But our apartment was suffocating me, so I went anyway.
After slapping on some lipstick and bundling up in the royal blue winter coat I’d received from my mother for Christmas, I couldn’t run out of that house fast enough and down the hills of Roslindale. Festive lights hung along the window panes outside the Square Root Cafe, adorning its enormous plate glass windows, all fogged up from the chill outside and the breath of the people inside.
From that point on, the night blurs together. Drinks. Beatles. Talking with the doorman. Chatting up the owner. A vague memory of angling for some sort of afterparty. The room filled with ladies my mothers age and their cringey dancing. Each band played the Beatles pop hits. But every time one tune ended, I hoped to next hear the whirring metallic harmonics of “Tomorrow Never Knows”. Its lyrics suited my state of mind: All play the game Existence to the end.
That’s the last thought I recall before waking up on January 4th.
In the immediate aftermath, a brief stringing together three or four sober days I interrogated myself:
Where did I go?
How did I get home?
Who saw me?
Who do I know that saw me?
Did someone help me get home?
I got a Facebook message from the owner of the Square Root Cafe: I hope you made it home safely. Sorry. My father died. I didn’t really know what I had apologized for or if even had any need for apology. Looking back, I wonder if this apology, directed at a virtual stranger, somehow substituted for the dialogue I should have with my mother, my husband, my brother, and my daughters. This small apology someone eased an ounce or two out of the pounds of guilt I had, a small good deed to make up for the enormous ones I should do for my family to atone for my horrible behavior.
Other people’s fathers die all the time, and not everyone uses it as a reason to get loaded. But I did.
I lectured myself:
You could’ve been raped.
You could’ve been murdered.
You could’ve woken up in the gutter.
But perhaps I’d wanted something awful to happen. Something terrible enough to land me in the hospital, to hole away in some inpatient unit for awhile, to hide out from the entire world. If I didn’t drink drink, I would become overexposed, my emotions dangling around me for everyone to see.
But as the drinking picked back up, the warnings I gave myself faded into the background, the process helped along by my nightly wine rituals in the safety of my own home. January 3rd should have been my warning, but the only lesson I learned in the days that followed:
Drink at Home. (You know, so you won’t get lost in the streets. So no one will know.)
The real change I made after that night: I avoided the Square Root Cafe by any means necessary. That rule has stuck like super glue. I follow it to this very day.
A shame because I used to go and write there on weeknights. And meet a teacher friend there on Saturday mornings to chat over cappuccino while my daughters munched on cookies and played on their tablets. And go with my husband to Sunday night karaoke.
The music they pumped into the speakers matched the track of the playlists I made on my phone: Joy Division, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Iggy, Siouxsie, Sonic Youth. A I’d smile to myself when they played one of my more obscure favorites like Le Orme’s “Ad Gloriam” and Brian Eno’s “Music For Airports”. I recognized every tune on the Square Root hipster soundtrack.
I blew it with the one cool place in my sleepy little Boston neighborhood of Roslindale. The one place I had a chance to fit in.
I still go to the pharmacy across the street all the time, but I wear a baseball cap and walk with my body at an awkward angle. I don’t want to see my reflection in those plate glass. I don’t want to look at myself framed in those plate glass windows. I would see the portrait of a loser, a shameless bottomless failure of a daughter, failure of a mother, a women who couldn’t exude the holiday love and familial duty that women and especially mothers should.
But my biggest question about this whole experience still mystifies me: Why wasn’t this my bottom? What wasn’t it enough of a wake-up call for me to stop?
I’d had other should’ve-been-bottoms over the years The time in the early aughts that I drove drunk the wrong way on a one way street in Downtown Baltimore. The time a couple years later when I woke up next to a guy in an unfamiliar room and couldn’t remember his name or how I’d gotten there. The time I attended a workparty in 2017, intending to have one drink and drive home, but ended up having a dozen drinks and ended up being put in an Uber by a coworker that he generously paid for with his app because I’d been too drunk to remember my cell phone password. All the times I’d blacked out and fell in the shower or the countless times so fearful that I’d called ambulances to bring me to the emergency room, where all they ever did was give me an IV drip and send me on my way.
My bottom came on May 6th, 2021, after just another shaky day at work after an up all night binge, where I taught my students just fine while my insides shook like gelatin, my face flushed hot, and my numbed fingers struggled to grip the whiteboard markers. Nothing remarkable happened that day. I didn’t crash a car or get arrested or spectacularly break my fist in a barroom brawl. For some mysterious reason, this seemingly insignificant day marked the end of two decades of drinking.
What I do remember is thinking about how much I wanted to use my hands and how I couldn’t continue writing if I couldn’t use my hands. What if I couldn’t hold a fork or flip through the pages of a magazine? There wasn’t much joy in my life, but writing, eating, and reading ranked at the top of tolerable activities, acts that made life worth living.
By early 2021, my extremities tingled and numbed whenever I had a big night, and those big nights had happened more and more frequently since my father’s death. I suspected that the problem with my hands had something to do with the alcohol. Although I had no medical test to prove this causation, I have to say I haven’t felt those physical sensations since I quit.
I used to think that a bottom meant a gigantic wake up call from the universe, some spiritual epiphany, some significant moment. Maybe that’s what it’s like for some people. Only now do I see that my failings and the shame that surrounded them did nothing but push my drinking further along. The realization of my bodily breakdown from alcohol frightened me enough to get me to quit. I feel I’m a fairly smart person, but I couldn’t think my way out of drinking. I had to really be broken in order to realize I’d been suffering. It took my body itself, not an emotional experience or external event, to impress upon me the danger I put myself in.
For years, I’d heard people say listen to your body. But I preferred to ignore everything about myself. My body didn’t look the way I wanted it to, so I avoided mirrors. My mind didn’t work the way I wanted it to, so I drank. If I couldn’t look sexy, if I couldn’t make myself happy, why couldn’t I just disappear? It wasn’t until I faced the true loss of myself, my hands, in this small way, that I came to believe I had something worth saving, the use of a part of my body that I really wanted to keep using. In the end, my body itself provided the bottom that my mind and the outside world couldn’t. I live inside such a remarkable machine.
I used to think my body trapped me. I used to wonder why I had to live when it felt so painful. But, sober, I inhabit my body with ease. Now months have passed without the sensation of imprisonment. As a matter of fact, since that day when I listened to my body’s warning, I have never felt so genuinely free.
Jennifer Dines is a Boston-based writer, bilingual teacher, and mother of three. She has published essays in Current Affairs, Rooted In Rights, WBUR Cognoscenti, and Motherwell. Her writing portfolio can be found here: https://literacychange.org/writing-portfolio/ twitter: @DinesJennifer instagram: @jenniferdineswrites.
