last call.

on motherhood and alcohol.

I needed to stop drinking regularly.

It was a habit* I picked up a few years into parenthood, when day and night conflated under the weight of sagging diapers, under the cries that grew so insistent they stopped the baby’s breath, under the loss of the old life, where I’d only, just barely, managed to claw my way to independence.

When all of that was replaced with interdependence, when I had to give up the one-bedroom apartment I could barely afford with a newborn and my mother, who’d moved in to help, when all three of us had to burden my Nana and pile into her one extra room, when I was starving myself and staying up day and night and only finding work that covered a few of each month’s bills.

And when that state of barely-making it stretched from months to years.

When I had no control over the volume of a television at 11 o’clock at night or whether the lights in a room could be turned off at 2 a.m. When even the things I bought, paid for and managed myself felt like community property. Things like my car. Things like my debit card.

I picked up nightly red wine then.

It calmed my frayed nerves. It dulled the harsher edges of my reality. It kept the panic at bay.

I had rules for it. One glass a night, always after 9 or 10, always consumed when no one was looking. I’d swap wine out for beer in the summer. Wine warmed. Beer cooled.

Never liquor. Well, rarely liquor. Liquor could be consumed in a mixed drink and only in a social setting. Margaritas made it look like you were having fun. A lychee martini made you seem like a sophisticate.

But for sleep, for a sense of emotional regulation (however false), for a dampening of desperation and rage, a glass of wine would do. A bottle of beer sufficed.

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Alcohol got me through early motherhood. The sharp, insistent loneliness of it. The need to let each day of it go, when the days were without end. Consumption created a delineation between night and day, added routine where it was often lacking. It was the counterbalance to the caffeine I relied on every morning. And I ate so little between those two tentpole beverages that I could feel the effects of each as they hit my bloodstream.

It was a grounding exercise, when I felt I might float away.

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I could go for stretches without it. Weeks, months.

I seemed to be able to manage it. As I would with a prescribed medication, I kept to (roughly) the same dosage daily.

And it felt, for a long time, like a kind of self-medication. I have a depressive temperament, always have. Just a latent, baseline of sadness that makes me feel most like myself. Any long-term state of anxiety, excitement or irascibility makes me feel out of my element. Single mothering is nothing if not a long-term state of anxiety, excitement and irascibility. Single mothering around people who don’t think you’re doing a solid enough job of it is even more discomfiting.

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When I finally moved out on my own again after 8 years of multigenerational living, I kept to my routine of ending my nights with wine or beer. The only difference was that I wasn’t secretive about it. The only difference was that there was no elder looking over my shoulder, warning me of the horrors that may befall me if I continued to imbibe. No one branding me an alcoholic. No one telling me that, if I weren’t careful, someone would take my daughter away over that nightly glass of wine or beer.

Instead, that voice of disapproval came from a smaller source. My daughter, 9 by the time we moved and 14 now that we’ve lived on our own nearly 5 years, is also very much a prohibitionist, very much in favor of teetotaling, very opinionated about alcohol consumption.

At least, she was — for the first four or so years of our time living by ourselves. We used to discuss it on a granular level, on a regular basis.

She’d ask: What does it feel like when you drink?

I’d say: I just get warm and sleepy. And I think a little less.

She’d ask: How come you don’t act like the people on k-dramas when you drink?

I’d say: Because I don’t get drunk when I drink.

She’d ask: What’s the difference between drinking and getting drunk?

And I’d tell her that, for me, it’s in when you stop.

I’m not sure she would’ve noticed that I’d stopped if I hadn’t pointed it out to her. Every now and then, I continue to bring it to her attention, just to see if it still matters.

I say: Hey, I haven’t had alcohol in a week, two weeks, over a month… since before the holidays.

She says: Oh.

I say: But I think I might want a beer when we watch that movie next weekend. How would you feel about that?

She says: Sounds fine to me, I guess.

I ask: Can you tell the difference between me when I’m drinking and me when I’m not? Do I act any different?

She says: Sometimes.

She says: You never act… drunk. Just… different.

I ask: Bad different? Scary different?

She says: Just… different.

And I think about all the things that that might mean.

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I can’t say that anything in particular prompted it. Typically, I abstain when I visit the apartment where I picked up the nightly habit. I do that out of respect for the women who live there, neither of whom have ever been drinkers, one of whom once accused me of having a problem. I do it to prove to myself that I don’t have one, that I can stop on a dime, abruptly, cold turkey. That I can sustain that sobriety for the length of an emotionally taxing visit home. So I stopped drinking in mid-December, since I was spending the second half of the month with family.

But when I came back to our apartment after the holidays this year, I just kept… not drinking. It wasn’t a New Year’s Resolution. And I didn’t want to attribute it to Dry January. And I don’t call myself sober now, just like I didn’t call myself an alcoholic at the height of it. I don’t believe in extremes. I always opt, instead, for moderation.

So it was about two months of nothing. No alcohol. No caffeine, either. Two nights ago, I had a beer, just to see if I could without feeling the need to have more.

I could.

There are noticeable differences. I lost 10 pounds. Just… dropped them immediately, straight-up alcohol weight. My eyes are clearer. I sleep through the night, most nights. I don’t feel on edge after dark. My blood doesn’t tingle through the veins.

And I sit with the long hours between getting home from work and going to bed. I do not seek to dull them with a depressant. I don’t try to hasten them with hazy IPAs. I spend a little more time talking to my daughter. I see the tasks I need to accomplish more clearly. I tolerate my work life a little better.

My internal organs have grown a little quieter.

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In the end, I suppose I stopped drinking nightly for the same reason that I started. I am always trying to regulate myself.

Having a child at 30, after a decade of self-doubt, creative listlessness and a jarring breakup with the child’s father, who I’d been with since I was 21, shook the foundation of who I thought I was. I needed a little distance from the difference. A calming of the agitated nerves.

Raising a child on my own, after a decade of having my mother and grandmother’s help, an interstate move, an eccentric little pandemic relationship, a pandemic, three job changes in three years, one apartment and school district change in five, the onset of perimenopause, two year-long bouts of hair loss, the aforementioned weight gain and the need for a maturing of my perspective of parenting that would keep apace with my daughter’s maturation…

That was another shakeup. It’s the kind that requires more than a fermented beverage.

I don’t typically write about drinking or not drinking, because I’ve never wanted my perspective on either to be influential. I’m writing about it now because I consider it to be a significant change to my experience of home — and that’s what I write about here.

I do not court judgment, nor do I seek to be judgmental. And I don’t consider any decision I make to drink (or not) to be a moral choice.

It is merely a personal one. I think about the function in my mind and body. I think about the effect on my emotional state. On my daughter’s. And to a lesser degree, I think about the truth: that alcohol is a carcinogen and to consume it at all is to damage a bit of yourself.

I think about the degree to which I am comfortable damaging myself.

And I choose, day by day, accordingly.

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* To be clear, I started drinking well before I became a parent, but I wouldn’t say it was a habit until after I became one.