Communion of Saints
When I became a mom, the only people I wanted to talk to were other moms.
They were the only people to whom I wouldn’t have to explain the sensation of sacrificing my proper-noun self for the anonymity of a collective noun entity. Because that’s what mother is: a collective noun, a single word that absorbs multiple individuals: the mother and child, or in my case, the mother and children.
After a lifetime of being a singularity, I was suddenly a fragment, one-half of a complete entity, and then, a couple years later, one-third.
I sank into the company of women who were also groping their way through the transition to collective nounhood, and who had also, somewhat transgressively in a way we didn’t yet understand, refused to let go of their proper noun selves. We were all new mothers, and in rooms full of non-mothers, that was all we were.
I once recommended a book to a stranger at a Hudson News in the airport—I was wearing my second son in a baby carrier at the time, and he was looking at the cover, considering—and the man asked me if it was a parenting book.
It was The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead.
That’s a blatant example, but those signals surrounded me in subtle and unsubtle ways: Mothers have adorable expertise in a lesser discipline; I had sacrificed my personhood to become a breeder and now I was bored, frustrated and uninteresting, unlike the awesome career people who were always thrilled to go to work on their top-secret outer space jetpack ninja projects; I’d volunteered to become a fraction of a person.
I felt like my lifetime of interesting ideas and experiences was wiped out in the reboot of birth. When I restarted again, I’d been converted to simple folk.
The kind of person who calls cappelini pomodoro “noodles with red sauce.” If I brought up my interesting or unique experiences or ideas, I was trying to prove something. I was trying to prove I wasn’t really a mom. Not a Mom-mom.
Yet when I sat in a room with a group of mothers, I was a mom, and a woman, and even still just a person with nothing to prove when communicating her thoughts, if you can imagine it! Our conversations flowed easily from diaper rash to sex, to weeknight dinner recipes, to exes, to animated movies that just came out, to our favorite all-time books, and of course, at some point, someone opened a bottle.
That’s what you do when you’re connecting with your people - you break bread, you share a tonic, you raise a glass to bless the union. Food and drink create a common ground among people who would have been strangers a year ago.
One of my new mom friends had immigrated to the US from Eastern Europe as a teenager, and earned an MBA from Harvard. Another, the daughter of a southern California milkman, held a PhD in History. Another owned and operated a number of successful restaurants in Seattle, a bona fide restaurant town. Another was getting her Associate’s degree at night while her son co-slept in bed beside her. I’d left a boring job in a glorified call center to become a full-time caregiver. None of us would ever have met each other if not for the happenstance of our coordinated births, yet here we were, sitting cross-legged on the same rug with our children all lurking around the same milestones. Among these interesting and capable women, I too found myself interesting and capable, a feeling I’d taken for granted before I had children, a feeling I’d mourned as the first days of early parenthood razed me to the ground.
As what the social media directors would call Wine Moms, we refused to accept damnation or shame for drinking wine. That glass of wine symbolized our refusal to subscribe to the “angel in the house” narrative that silences or shames the real, isolating, frustrating, terrifying experience of new motherhood. That gulp of syrah was my refusal to try to be the moral of the center of my family. We didn’t have time to be a moral center! Do you even know how much laundry a baby makes? Besides, birthing a baby didn’t make me kinder or wiser; it made me tired with bigger feet, yet endowed against my will with the responsibility to change the world one shitty diaper at a time.
If I had to change the world or one more diaper, I was going to enjoy the hell out of a bowl of sauvignon blanc while I did it.
Motherhood catapulted me into a life of mandatory selflessness. I think it pushes all women into some form of that state. Even if you’re one of those moms who holds bad ass self-protective boundaries with your young children, refusing to give your child a sip of your water or a bite of your cookie (and if you are one of those moms, please start a podcast. There is much I wish to learn from you), you still have to design your days around someone else’s sleep, poop, hunger, and growth. Even if you are a parent who works outside the home, you still have to invent the systems that will tend to your child’s sleep, poop, hunger, and growth.
The to-do list that defined my pre-baby life became a laughable relic. “To do”? I couldn’t imagine the length of a list that truly defined all the things I had “to do” on a given day. So many tasks would be undone as soon as I did them: Change the baby’s diaper. Oh, wait. He’s making the face. Yep, change it again. And again. Aaaaaaand again. Now feed the baby. Feed the baby. Feed the baby. Feed the baby.
Other tasks could be summarized in a deceptive snack of words that masked a Thanksgiving feast of chores. “Put the baby down for a nap” sounds simple. Yet you begin this seven-word chore 45 minutes before nap time:
Go into the quiet bedroom and draw the shades.
Turn on the white noise.
Change the diaper.
Swaddle.
Nurse.
Read a story.
Hum a lullaby.
Invent the naptime routine.
Lay him on his back.
Lay a hand on his belly to comfort him if he startles.
Creep out of the nursery.
Spend 30 full seconds closing the door because I’ll be damned but when that door knob clicks into place in its little metal plate, it echoes like a pistol cocked in a bath house.
A task I jotted down in seven words translated to an hour of labor that bought me twenty minutes of peace, which I most often spent making lists of all the things I had failed to accomplish that day.
Every minute was like this: spoken for, three times over.
If the baby didn’t need me (and the baby always needed me), then the house needed me. If the house didn’t need me… just kidding, the house always needed me, too. But if I managed to mute the baby and ignore the house, then my hunger demanded to be sated, my head was itchy from too many days without shampoo, my future self begged me to pump so I could leave one of these evenings and let Ryan take a turn swallowing down the gut-flooding fear that nothing, not even our own selves, would ever be the same again. And I was thirsty.
Wine was a thread of the safety net that caught my gang of exhausted new moms when we plummeted, daily. A glass in our hands reminded us that we were still women with palates and jokes and the ability to recall words like “palate” and “joke.” But it was also a key part of my own self-care. After a day spent watching Elmo, a drink made me feel adult again. I was starved for personhood, and a good (or even not so good) glass of wine was the easiest way to resuscitate my sense of self.
“But Katie, why not go to yoga or read a book?”
WOW GREAT IDEA! Books and yoga are fantastic!
Wait, though. Have you ever tried to multitask with books and yoga? Try doing yoga while folding a load of the baby’s laundry, which by the sick, sadistic laws of physics actually contains no fewer than 8,000 unique items in need of folding.
I couldn’t read a book while I loaded the dishwasher. I couldn’t go to yoga while I took my weekly shower.
Besides, remember that deceptive snack of words that masks a Thanksgiving dinner of tasks? “Go to yoga,” is one such lying liar of a snack. So easy to say, so hard to do. Look, people without babies have a hard time making it to yoga. Now imagine that all of the barriers that afflict babyless people are compounded by the need to ensure that your baby knows how to drink from a bottle before you can leave them for 2 hours in the evening, the time of day at which they are most likely to adopt their own version of Patrick Henry’s battle cry: “Give me nipple or give me screaming.” Also, before you go you have to brief your partner on all of the things that you’ve learned about the baby today, which can be as much work as just staying home and doing baby yourself.
“He doesn’t like the lion swaddle anymore. He needs the giraffe swaddle. And use the white noise that sounds like a shower, not the static.”
“Why?”
“What do you mean, why.”
“Why doesn’t he like the lion swaddle? Isn’t it the same as the giraffe swaddle, just with a different pattern?”
I stared at my husband, wondering why I married a person who would stand in front of a woman whose filthy hair is turning into a single dreadlock and who is wearing a yoga tank top and no pants whatsoever, and ask such a stupid fucking question.
Of course I didn’t know why. I’d learned that why doesn’t matter, and apparently I was the only one in this marriage who’d learned that the only thing that matters is sleep. And the giraffe swaddle meant sleep. If I had more kindness I might have found a way to explain it, but I was fresh out of kindness.
“I don’t know why,” I said very slowly. “He didn’t explain his preference to me. But you’re free to ask him while he’s screaming in the lion swaddle.”
“Okay, okay. Jeez,” he said, defensive.
It can’t be easy to leave the house every day and return home to a mystery grab bag of intense feelings from a partner you could once count on to be one of three and only three things at 6 pm: watching BBC detective dramas, getting ready for the gym, or making cappelini pomodoro. I don’t envy parents who work outside the home and have to navigate the minefield of the stay-at-home-parent’s resentment and frustration after they’ve spent their day trying to appease a nonverbal succubus with bottomless needs that they will spend far more time failing to meet than meeting successfully.
So, yeah. Wine.
Wine was easier to fold into my necessary work than yoga was. It helped me like my husband more. It helped him like me more, too. We could laugh at our situation over a glass of wine the way we could not over mugs of tea or my naked bottom half in the living room.
For almost seven years, I wove wine into my motherhood alongside my leggings, my basic first aid knowledge, and my acceptance that I will never be one of those moms who does elaborate art projects at home. Wine was there, connecting me to other floundering women when sea level was exactly at our heads, and once the water receded to a less urgent threat (it hovers at about my chin these days), the wine remained.
Alcohol became one of my tools, like screen time and candy bribes on school picture day. Something I didn’t brag about, but that nevertheless kept my train on the tracks.
Sometimes I’d catch myself asking my other mom friends, “Hey, do you lie to your doctor about how much you drink?” We would agree that we did, but only because American doctors were such prissy Puritans about alcohol consumption.
I had a sneaking suspicion that it wasn’t exactly healthy that I didn’t need a drink to feel good about my life choices, but that a drink never hurt. When I checked in with my friends, joking that it had been a bit of a day at the zoo, to the tune of an entire bottle of pinot gris tonight, they responded with “girl same” and gifs of Amy Schumer pounding a goblet of wine as tall as a regulation canoe paddle. I felt better and I opened the bottle, knowing the moms I loved and trusted were probably doing the same in their messy kitchens, too.
It’s not that I was wrong to seek their comfort, or that they were wrong to embrace me in moments when I joked, not joking, that I was about to self-medicate myself out of my current reality. I embraced them, too. We urged each other to stay alive by any means necessary. We talked about survival, joking and not joking, and getting in a car and making a run for Canada, lol, but seriously. We were all looking for a temporary escape, one that would only affect our moods, not our corporeal forms.
We couldn’t actually leave; the mothers we’d become would have died first. We needed to leave; the women we’d been were dying.
We wanted an escape that would wear off after a long night’s sleep, one that we could hold in reserve. After all, we wouldn’t need it when the baby was giggling in the bathtub, or when big sister said, “Here, baby, I can help,” and opened the applesauce pouch for her little brother.
Sometimes I’d catch myself holding my breath when I kissed my toddler son good-night; I didn’t want him to associate the hot cloud of Italian red wine with his mother’s easy affection after a day in which I’d snapped at him far more than I’d folded him into hugs. Sometimes I’d be on the road home, counting to three for the thousandth time, and already imagining how good it would feel to get home, turn on Daniel Tiger, and have a moment to myself to make a real dinner, chop an onion into white confetti, and sip a glass of wine while I listened to a podcast. Wine wasn’t the centerpiece of that oasis, I told myself. It was a lie; I knew wine was the tonic that would braid my frayed ends back into composure. Not the pleasingly chopped onion. Not the hot dinner from scratch. Not the sound of someone telling me a story while my children sat holding hands on the couch. I wanted to be present to enjoy the beauty of their unconscious connection, but I was so fucking tired.
Wine, then scotch, then whiskey all became part of our family. After I staggered, comprehensively pooped, from the boys’ bedroom, Ryan would hand me a glass of amber liquid with one small ice cube in it.
I would remember that I was still a person, not just that collective noun that holds on for dear life on the vibrating wire strung between two screws and plucked, mercilessly, all day long.
I don’t think it was wrong of me to seek comfort through some of the hardest days of my life. I think one of the hardest things about parenting is that it isn’t prescriptive. There are no hacks. There are no answers. You’re steering toward a lighthouse through the fog. You’re guessing at the best way to do the most important job you’ve ever had, for the person you love most in the whole world, and at the end of the day, sometimes you just really want a straight answer. And for some of us, the straight answer is, “have a drink. You will feel better if you have a drink.” For my upset feelings, if not for the lifetime of work ahead of me, there is a prescription. Or maybe just a band-aid.
I didn’t sleep well for about 2 weeks straight after a traumatic hospital stay with my first son. I lay awake in bed listening to him breathe, as if my ears and terror kept him alive. Sustained sleep deprivation is how they break you, and by, “they” I don’t mean babies. I mean black-ops counterintelligence operatives.
“How are you doing?” The pediatrician asked me when we brought Chicken in for his 2-week checkup.
“Fine,” I said.
“No, how are you really doing?” I looked like I’d barely survived 14 days in Gitmo.
“Not great,” I admitted. “I’m having a hard time sleeping. I’m worried about everything.”
“Have a drink,” he told me. “Let your husband and mom take care of the baby tonight. Have a drink and go to sleep.”
I went home, had a beer, and fell facedown in bed where I slept without moving for 10 hours. When I woke up, the baby was pink-cheeked and round and obviously not about to die. I felt a stillness in my body that I hadn’t noticed had been missing. How can I describe it? You know how an old television set would be left on sometimes, even though there was no input, and the black screen would emit a high-frequency scream, one that urged you closer and closer to rage even as you didn’t really even hear it? You know how it felt when someone would pick up the remote and turn off the screen, and in the silence that flooded into the room you would suddenly have been able to hear the screaming whine that had hovered just beneath your awareness for God knew how long? “Have a drink,” the doctor had said, and when I did, he might as well have picked up the remote and turned off the screaming, blank screen.
I picked up my son and noticed a light sprinkling of baby acne just emerging across his cheeks. I was surprised to feel no panic when I saw it. I did not suspect it was flesh-eating bacteria, as I might have only 24 hours earlier. Damn, why hadn’t I had a drink a week ago? I crooned, “Hey, kiddo!” He looked up at me with his new human eyes still both brown and blue.
Ryan and my mom were relieved. I hadn’t realized how scared they’d been that I wouldn’t be able to handle it, and with that realization came my certainty that it was time to suck it up already. That evening Ryan poured another beer into a pint glass and set it down in front of me. “I’ll take the first shift tonight,” he said. “I want you to get at least 6 hours.”
The drink sedated the bees that buzzed in my joints whenever one of my terrifying thoughts kicked down the door.
I believed in the power of a drink, one drink, to put me down, out of the miserable anxiety that led me to ask questions like “Would I ever hurt the baby? What would happen to the baby if I fell down and hit my head? What if they missed something at the hospital?” A nightly drink became part of the postpartum regime, along with the stool softeners, ice packs, and enormous mesh panties lined with spiral-notebook-sized pads. The skillful application of a drink put me to sleep, but when I was awake, the thoughts returned.
A few days after the pediatrician appointment, my midwife came to the apartment to check on me.
“How are you doing?” She asked.
“Oh, it’s pretty hard,” I said.
“Hard how?”
“I’m really anxious,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Yeah. I keep waiting for him to die.”
“Well,” she clicked her pen closed and thought it over. “You know, Katie. That’s not good enough. It’s supposed to be hard, but you’re also supposed to be able to enjoy parts of it, sometimes. So I’d like to get you some help right away.”
I think that was the same thing the pediatrician had been trying to say - it’s supposed to be hard but also good. Relax. Let’s get you some help. The difference was that instead of telling me to get a drink, my midwife referred me to a postpartum psychiatrist, a grandmotherly woman who looked like she should smell like bread. She specialized in evaluating new mothers. At the appointment, I brought my son into her office and we talked about the birth, my fears, my obsessive thoughts, while I nursed him, changed him, and jiggled his round belly while he lay on a blanket on the floor of her office.
She told me she thought I would be fine, that I was bonding with the baby, responsive to his needs, and she thought I would come out of this just fine. She also prescribed Lorazepam, in case of panic attacks. “Take half,” she advised me. “And call me if you need anything.”
I never ended up taking any of the Lorazepam, though I often checked the medicine cabinet to make sure it was still there. Just having it there made me feel like I would be okay, which was the difference between the medication and the self-medication. The presence of a bottle chilling in the fridge didn’t comfort me; I needed to consume it in order to feel better. I don’t know what that means about my relationship with the two substances. Ever since I barfed up my Vicodin after my wisdom teeth extraction, I’ve feared pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, I’ve barfed dozens of times from drinking too much (don’t judge me, I went to college in New Orleans), but I still think of alcohol as a friend. Not my best friend, not even the best person of my friends, but a reliable jamoke, a sketchy character with a heart of gold.
Booze always had my back when times got tough, and didn’t give a shit about the high road. Booze always cared the most about helping me feel better right-the-fuck-now.
I’ve never driven drunk. I’ve never set fire to the stove, forgotten a child in the bath, or pissed my pants onstage at the Grammys. And when it comes to stories about dysfunctional alcohol consumption, we tend to think of dysfunction as operatic and traumatic, something that would go viral on Reddit if we ever wrote about it. The reality of my wine mom experience is that I spent a good seven years feeling almost as uncomfortable with drinking as I was desperate for the effects of the alcohol I drank. When Ryan went on a four-day work trip, I bought and drank three bottles of wine. I wasn’t proud of it, but listen, so much of parenting is doing things you’re not quite proud of because it’s the only tool left in the box by 5:30 p.m., or a.m. for that matter. You don’t see a lot of influencers Instagramming their 10-month-olds watching Dinosaur Train on a tablet while mom sleeps as hard as a murder victim, with one hand locked around the baby’s ankle to make sure he doesn’t fall off the bed.
I wished I didn’t need a drink to feel like more than a sweaty, milkable beast of burden who had read tens of thousands of books but could only remember the plot of Little Blue Truck.
When I first became a mother I pushed back against my own demotion to “just a mom.” I was still funny and weird, dammit! But at a certain point, my fear shifted. Where I’d once been afraid that strangers would be wrong about me, I began to fear that they’d be right. Maybe I was dull, sweet as vanilla, just another breeder. Just another legging-clad woman who evangelizes Trader Joe’s and drinks a fat goblet of two buck chuck with her chicken nugget dinner. I lived that life, which fed my fear, which sent me running to prove I was still me.
So, when my metabolic panel came back with elevated liver enzymes, I shrugged it off. When my son had to go into Children’s for stitches in his eyebrow, I waited an extra half an hour for my husband to get home because I’d already had a glass of wine and didn’t want to bring my son into an ER with a facial laceration and alcohol on my breath. It wouldn’t look good, even though it had really just been one glass, and the bonk had happened on the babysitter’s watch, not mine.
At dinner one night, when I popped a can of sparkling water, my son asked me, “Aren’t you going to have some wine?” Ryan and I laughed. ‘Twas the stuff of mommy juice memes. I could have texted it to my friends, joking, not joking.
These aren’t horror stories; I wasn’t unconscious when my son ran into his brother and split open his eyebrow. And yet, as my midwife said when she sat back and clicked her pen closed, it wasn’t good enough.
I all but stopped drinking earlier this year. I’m not pregnant. There was no rock bottom. I just didn’t feel like it anymore. Two glasses of wine a night made mornings come so much earlier. I felt bloated and exhausted, and thirsty for actual water. Besides, I’m raising kids with bilateral, multigenerational family histories of addiction and alcoholism. Perhaps the mandatory selflessness that led me to seek comfort in wine, and other women, and other women with wine, is the same mandatory selflessness that will lead me out of that season of my life.
The last time I got together with my girls, we all sat in the evening sun at the rooftop table to eat our Ba Bar takeout, and one by one we all admitted that we just wanted water, actually.
“I’m not drinking right now,” I said. “I realized my sons were watching me when I said, ‘Ugh, I’m having the worst day!’ while pouring myself a glass of wine. Not a great feeling.”
The bottle stood unopened on the table and our conversation flowed easily from elementary school STEM programming to great books we were reading, to feminist artists, to vacations, to work, to how we could teach our children to love their siblings, as if that was something we could control.
I sat at the table with women who’d texted me virtual high fives when I’d confessed to finishing a bottle of chardonnay after I spent four hours holding a barfing toddler over the toilet bowl while Ryan was out of town.
These were the women with whom it was my privilege to weave silvery, digital safety nets constructed out of Hunger Games salute gifs, laugh-cry emojis, and all-caps texts like YOU ARE A CHAMPION and DRUG THE BABY WITH BENADRYL I WON’T TELL. We took turns reaching across cities and continents to confess we were scared.
We took turns catching each other with confessions of our own, with the blessed connection to people who understood why the answer to “How are you?” is always both “Great!” and “Surviving.”
I couldn’t have explained why my motherhood was unbearable, unsurvivable, addictive, for better or worse. I didn’t need to. Neither did they. We just got it. We’d all been drinking the same Kool-Aid for years now, and we’d kept each other afloat when survival wasn’t guaranteed.
At least for us, who can say whether we survived because of the wine or in spite of the wine? Who can say any of us did it right or wrong? Who can say they’d have done better than we did? I barely drink these days, but I’ll raise a glass to the women we were, and are, and are to each other. I’d raise a whole bottle, a case, an ocean to bless the union.
If you have questions or concerns about your own relationship with alcohol or other substances, give a call to the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s free, confidential, 24/7/365 hotline:
1-800-662-HELP.
TTY: 1-800-487-4889
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