Cheers!

PART ONE

Five or six years ago, every time I drank a beer, especially if I had had one the night before, or even two nights before, my teenage daughter would ask, “Mom, are you an alcoholic?” 

I found this triggering. Never had I ever had anyone monitor or even notice my alcohol consumption. Alcohol monitoring was my job.

Three out of four of my grandparents were alcoholics, one out of two of my parents was an alcoholic, and one out of two of their kids—and that one kid is not me. I gave birth to one kid who has, I think, grown up to be a normal social drinker. 

But wait, what even is that? Couples my age split a bottle of wine every night; because of luck or grace or genetics, I’m just not into it, as a nightly habit. When I ask my daughter if she drinks alcohol daily, she reminds me how many of her peers get blackout drunk, or drink till they vomit. That answer reminds me of when I asked my mom if her father had been an alcoholic, and she responded, “My father never missed a day of work in his life” –-because apparently that was the criterion for not being an alcoholic. Anyway, everyone drank every day back then; haven’t you seen Mad Men?

While it is not my responsibility, and, come to think of it, none of my business how much or how often my daughter drinks, it is hard to not wonder, and I feel like I could save her a ton, a lifetime, of energy and effort and anguish, if she would heed my advice to enjoy alcohol sparingly, advice she likely doesn’t actually need. I mean...I hope she doesn’t need it. 

I love when she hangs out with sober people; I’m always relieved when she’s having dinner with Susan, or Patrick, because I know, in solidarity, she won’t drink. Clearly, she doesn’t want wine so much that she orders it when she’s out with sober people, even if everyone else is drinking. Does that mean she’s in the clear? Does that mean I can take that off my rapidly decreasing list of parental concerns? 

She says it is, and it does, and I can. 

“Mom,” she has said, “I don’t have a drinking problem,” and I have refrained from saying, well, yes, of course, that is what people with drinking problems say.

My mom died of cirrhosis of the liver a few months ago. “I never really thought of your mom as a heavy drinker,” my cousin Lisa (whose mom had died a decade ago after 30 years' sobriety) said to me, when my mom was on her literal death bed. “I mean, have you ever even seen her drunk?” she asked. 

“Not really,” I said. I mean, certainly it had been awhile. Though I should point out that I had told my mom in 1986 not to call me if she’d been drinking, not to answer her phone if she thought it was me. 

So how would I even know? 

Last month, my brother left six progressively drunker voicemails, from a number I didn’t recognize, while I was teaching at a sacred sexuality retreat in Maui. I had no capacity, or time, or cellular signal, to help him in any way. He was convinced that our father had died, and that I hadn’t informed him—“just like when mom died,” he accused, through tears, and I involuntarily giggled. He had gone from concern about the whereabouts of my dad and slightly slurring, to very drunk and flat-out victimhood, crying to me via his final voicemail: “What kind of way is that to treat your brother?” I giggled. How did he even have my number? I texted my dad and suggested he reach out to my brother. I didn’t tell him that his man-child thought he was dead. A week later, back in Chicago, I played his string of progressively drunker voicemails and giggled again, without judging myself. 

But when my daughter posts a fun Instagram story of herself in which she drinks from the wine bottle, I don’t giggle. 

PART TWO

Lily has a certain skewed perspective on what constitutes alcoholism. While my mom considered the condition to be a moral flaw, my daughter seems to think it’s a lack of discipline. While my mom needed an inch or two of alcohol every day just to take the edge off, the primary alcoholic in Lily’s life is a dear friend her age who would “lose count” and accidentally have 19 drinks, instead of the three he’d planned to have. “But I lost count!” he would explain, each time. He was known to throw it up later, in epic proportions. It was all rather dramatic. 

That’s one way to do it. 

For me, alcoholism looks like drinking in secrecy, in small quantities, because that’s what my mom did, back in the day, back when my 13-year-old brother reported it to 16-year-old me, and I told my dad about the ever-decreasing vodka bottle. 

My mom could never really love me as much, after that.

I went to visit her in her rehab facility last January—rehab for starting to walk again, not rehab from alcohol use, even though alcohol is what led to her not being able to walk. Too many enzymes in her liver had led to an intestinal infection, which had led to a prescription and a warning not to drink while taking the medication. And she didn’t. But if you’ve been a daily drinker for decades, you apparently can’t just stop drinking, or you’ll have a seizure, and she did--a seizure from which she never recovered. Who knew? Apparently not my mom, or the doctor, whom she probably hadn’t told about her “little alcohol thing” (which is how my mother once flippantly referred to her drinking problem). I imagine she filled out a form for the physician and checked the box that said 3-5 cocktails a week, so as not to incriminate herself.

Having grown up with the mom I grew up with, my level of vigilance began with my first bitterly undrinkable beer in college. Would my drinking become unmanageable? I will never know if it didn’t because I never let it, or because I just didn’t have the gene. My daughter has none of the vigilance she might have had if I had been a secret or excessive drinker. She just has a mom who seems a wee bit paranoid about alcohol. 

When I spent a few days with my mother last winter, I wanted to optimize what was likely the last time we’d be together. I went through our old photos and articles and brought them to the facility to remind her of our past adventures and holidays and conversations. She hadn’t exactly been a person who sucked the marrow out of every morsel of everyday existence before the seizure, so I wasn’t expecting much emotional payoff for either of us that day. But, in those photos, 30 and 40 years ago, she sure looks like she’s having a good time. 

“You know, that can be addictive,” my mother warned, interrupting me from her wheelchair. “I read an article about it.” 

She was referring to my lip balm, which was made of, I feel compelled to mention, an organic blend of beeswax, coconut oil, vanilla, and rosemary. At any other time in my life I would have announced the ingredients that second, or protested that even if lip balm were addictive, it was the kind of addiction like exercise, or drinking water: arguably good for you. Her observation about my lip balm addiction reminded me of the time, about 15 years ago, when I had told her about an Ayurvedic product called nasal oil, which was an organic blend of sesame oil, eucalyptus, and healing herbs. It was a uniquely helpful, alternative-medicinal product, and I had no idea why it didn’t fly off American pharmacy shelves. As I rhapsodized about how much I loved nasal oil, my mom had informed me that one of the worst addictions a person could have was putting substances up one’s nose. 

That was the kind of alcoholic she was: the kind who accused other people of being addicted to their lip balm. 

When I speculate on what kind of alcoholic my daughter would hypothetically be--and believe me, this is not something I even want to do, but if I don’t, it will haunt me, so, in a fit of negative self-indulgence, I can’t help but speculate that my kid would be, first of all, fun. 

When her fun had peaked, she would want whichever friend she was with to tell her that she was their best friend. Once assured, she’d suddenly regret drinking in the first place, leave, and on her Uber ride home, develop a compensatory workout routine, and post the hilarious drunk-Uber exercises on her Instagram the next day. She’d have only the slightest hangover, and I’d be—virtually--proud of her creativity in a way that would predictably warp into sadness and guilt, and that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be: a fun one, a funny one, who nevertheless elicits my refined sense of guilt. “Mom,” she’d say, with an eye roll I could hear over the phone, “I left before midnight, and my workout post got more than 12,000 likes!” In fact, it would probably go viral and she’d probably get a web tv series out of it, because that’s the kind of alcoholic she’d be.

But I would nevertheless feel a sense of personal guilt, because who would have brought a child into the world with 50-50 odds? I’d look back to now, and wonder what I could have done. But I know, as well as I know anything, that there’s nothing I, or anyone, could do, or say. It’s in the genes and it’s in the stars, and back in the day when I felt compelled to pry glasses out of people’s hands and stomp on people’s cigarette packs, I ultimately realized that rash oaths and grand gestures don’t work, because that’s not the way it works; that’s what I learned back then, and haven’t needed to revisit the topic. It’s been decades since I’ve secret-policed how much other people drink. 

But, I am told, “the little alcohol thing” can skip a generation. As a mother, that’s both a blessing and a curse.

Another equally irreverent blog regarding my mother's death: Barbara Terket Thomas Connolly (1940-2018)