Mother Daughter Me (19 page)

Sam asks me a pointed yet obvious question: “Does she still drink?”

I don’t quite know how to answer Sam’s question. “Well, I’m not sure,” I say. “I think she drinks a little.” When we moved in together, I explain, I noticed that she had a stash of cheap wine in a cupboard in the laundry room downstairs—bottles of Two-Buck Chuck from Trader Joe’s and cartons of Franzia chardonnay from Safeway. My hunch is that she buys the wine in bulk much as she buys paper towels in bulk, not because she is storing up for a binge but for reasons of frugality. And I’m guessing that she has a glass or two at night, the purpose of which I believe is to help her sleep. Although I’ve thought about measuring the levels at regular intervals, I can’t bring myself to and have simply chosen not to worry. She doesn’t drink during the day, and at dinner she doesn’t drink wine unless it’s to take a small sip of something good I’ve opened, just to taste it. As I speak, I see a slight shift, a new look of curiosity in the eyes of both doctors.

“Oh!” says Sam, taking in the new information and running with it. “So she uses it as a sedative. That seems fine. But it’s very unusual for an alcoholic to be able to drink in moderation. It’s not unheard of, but it’s very, very unusual.” Louann, who writes bestselling books about how the brain works, nods in agreement. She explains something about the technical reasons that partial abstinence is so difficult. Her explanation involves dopamine pathways, pleasure receptors, and enzymes, most of which goes straight over my head.

Sam gives me his card. “If you want to talk more about this, give me a call.”

FOR MANY YEARS AFTER
my mother quit her heavy drinking, she still claimed that she had never been a true alcoholic. She would refer to her past out-of-control drinking as “whatever the problem was.” But Marty Mann, the first female member of A.A., once wrote that “an alcoholic is someone whose drinking causes a continuing problem in any department of his life.” My mother’s drinking eroded her professional career
and caused the loss of her children, to cite two of life’s more significant departments. I think she qualified. But, given the times, one might understand why she would have been in denial about it.

In the 1950s and 1960s, it was barely acknowledged that there
were
any women who had problems with alcohol. Even Alcoholics Anonymous, which came into being in the 1930s, at first opposed the admission of women out of the belief that “nice” women couldn’t be drunks. A.A. eventually changed its policy, and by the early 1970s, when it had nearly a million members, one in every three new members was a woman. Yet society as a whole was slower to recognize that gender was no barrier to alcoholism.

While my mother may not have been willing to call herself an alcoholic, she nonetheless tried A.A. several times over the years. The only requirement for membership in A.A. is “an honest desire to stop drinking,” and that was certainly a box my mother could check. But A.A. didn’t stick. My guess—and I’m only guessing, because this is an area my mother is still unwilling to discuss with me—is that she is one of the many people who give A.A. meetings a try but finally say, “That’s not me.” Although she lived in San Diego, my mother was still not entirely at home in the confessional California culture, which might have made it hard to find kindred spirits among those who attended A.A. She also had the unusual ability to go for long periods of time where she could take a drink without going on a bender, which runs counter to A.A.’s binary perspective—that you’re either wet or dry. There’s no in-between.

My mother’s wariness around A.A. could also have had something to do with its religious overtones. A.A.’s two basic texts are crammed with references to God. And that’s just the written material. At the end of many A.A. meetings, members join to recite the Serenity Prayer:

What are atheists like my mother supposed to do with that? While this has made many people skeptical of A.A., it’s also a way in which
A.A. has been misconstrued. A.A.’s culture encourages members to find not God per se but a power greater than themselves. In A.A., you connect first with yourself, then with another alcoholic, then with your higher power, whatever you decide that is.

A.A.’s insistence on a higher power might have been a problem for my mother, but the Serenity Prayer wasn’t. She once told me that she carries it with her “always.” Given her antipathy toward all things religious, I was sure she was joking, but she insisted she wasn’t. Whatever clash there might be between my mother’s staunch atheism and A.A.’s spiritual emphasis, she apparently gets comfort from that piece of paper, with the Serenity Prayer printed on one side and A.A.’s Twelve Traditions on the other.

The other thing that helped her stop the excessive drinking was finally being free of her own mother. It turned out that what my mother really needed—to be blunt—was for her mother to die, which happened in 1989, when my mother was fifty-eight. On the day that she heard my grandmother was dying, she lost the desire to escape. “It was as if a spigot had been turned off,” she has told me repeatedly over the years, her voice laced with a mix of bitterness, relief, and a little guilt. All it took was the news of her mother’s impending demise and she was freed from her ethanol-laden shackles. It’s almost as if
that
was my mother’s spiritual awakening.

THE FIRST TIME I
really learned anything about A.A. was in my thirties, when I read a book titled
Getting Better: Inside Alcoholics Anonymous
. I was intrigued by the author, Nan Robertson, a tough
New York Times
reporter I had long admired. Robertson broke ranks with A.A. anonymity hard-liners and wrote the book using her real name. At the end of the book, Robertson tells her own story, much as she told it at A.A. meetings through the years. After many years of heavy drinking, she finally broke down in 1975, while working overseas. On assignment in Portugal, after drinking heavily with other foreign correspondents, she cabled her editor in New York to expect a long descriptive story. She then sat down at her typewriter and was unable to compose a single sentence for the first time in three decades of reporting.
Unable to compose a single sentence.
When I read that, the reality of just how destructive alcohol can be—from the alcoholic’s perspective—sank in. Robertson immediately returned to New York. Recovery came later.

Robertson was a woman whose professional success I aspired to, who had lived through hell and emerged still a wonderful reporter. (She went on to win a Pulitzer.) If Nan Robertson could beat it, why couldn’t my mother?

Alcoholics Anonymous was one of the main reasons Robertson stayed sober. She wrote: “I discovered in A.A. that I would never be alone again—that I could get help and support within moments of stepping out of my front door or picking up a telephone. You cannot imagine the relief, the way the burdens roll off. There is no therapy more powerful than just sitting in a meeting and listening to the lives of other people who, you realize, have all the same problems you do—and then telling them about your own.”

I see the point of what Robertson says. And I could certainly have benefited from a similar kind of support, had I ever gone to Al-Anon, the A.A. spin-off for family members of alcoholics. After all, I’ve read the so-called “Laundry List” of personality traits commonly found among adult children of alcoholics, and I recognize many of them in me: We judge ourselves harshly. We have low self-esteem. After years of living in the midst of family soap operas, we become addicted to excitement. We tend to deny our feelings. Still, even with a mother and a sister who were alcoholics, even after reading Nan Robertson’s book, I decided that I had no use for the process. I’m sure it had something to do with thinking I had moved on, gotten over it, when nothing could have been further from the truth.

ONE AFTERNOON TWO WEEKS
after the holiday party, my mother is out of the house and I call Sam Barondes, who had offered to give me some further information about alcoholism, particularly as it pertains to my mother’s form. He tells me about the volumes of research that have been done on partial abstinence, explaining that there’s a slippery-slope phenomenon that occurs in the brain, making it extremely difficult for an alcoholic to have one or two drinks and not need more. Excessive
amounts of alcohol diminish the brain’s natural capacity for producing feelings of pleasure and calm, while increasing the dependence on artificial means of doing so. The general consensus is that addiction is best managed by total abstinence.

Alcoholics, drug addicts, and even smokers struggle with what Sam calls “triggers.” “You pick up the glass, and all kinds of stuff starts happening, all these conditioned associations with whatever you are addicted to,” he says. This has been studied a lot with cocaine. Just show cocaine addicts the paraphernalia—mirrors, razor blades, scales—and their likelihood of using the drug skyrockets. “It’s very seductive and very hard to extinguish,” he says.

For my own part, my body has always simply had a limit, an internal mechanism that says “enough,” usually after a second glass of wine. I’ve spent a lifetime watching how much others drink at meals. I’m judgmental, rigid, and scared. So painful are my associations that when I see someone pour a third glass of wine or order a second scotch and soda, I feel dread, and I withdraw. I know that alcoholics generally have no idea when or how to stop. And this is what makes partial abstinence so unusual.

Sam presses me on how much alcohol my mother keeps downstairs. With the phone in my hand, I descend to my mother’s place and notice, perhaps for the first time since we moved in, just how cold, dark, and cryptlike it is down there. The poor woman is living in a frigid tomb. I turn on the laundry room light, open the cupboard, and report what I find: two large cardboard containers of Franzia, both full, and a few other bottles of cheap white wine, all of them unopened.

While I’m standing there, staring into the cupboard, something tells me this is a ridiculous mission—and an inappropriate one. What I’m doing feels like a terrible violation of my mother’s privacy. I close the cupboard door.

“Does she get up at a reasonable hour in the morning?” Sam asks while I’m climbing up the stairs.

“Always.”

“Is she alert and active throughout the day?”

“Yes, a lot more alert and active than I am.” This is a woman who recently started taking courses at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning, which offers courses to seniors and holds its classes at the University
of San Francisco. My mother takes two different bus lines several times a week to attend classes in physics, game theory, and landmark Supreme Court decisions. In fact, she’s at one of her classes right now.

“Leave it alone,” Sam says. “She may be one of those people who has used a great deal of alcohol but never became addicted. That would fit with your observation that she’s now able to drink a little and not escalate to massive continuous drinking. The important point is that there’s no evidence that she’s getting drunk.” Case closed.

After we hang up, I’m seeing my mother in a new light. I think of the times since moving in with me that she has taken a small sip of the wine I’m serving with dinner, and that’s all she drinks—one small sip, just to taste it. She seems uninterested in drinking more. I’m relieved—and proud.

While I’m still in the kitchen, the doorbell rings. It’s a package delivery—a large, heavy box from Amazon.com, addressed to me. I open it and find a brand-new Cuisinart, an appliance I’ve always wanted but never allowed myself to buy. The note inside tells me it’s a late birthday present from my mother. I’m truly touched.

I’ve just extracted the heavy machine from the box when my mother walks in the door.

“Mom, what a gift!” I say when she enters the kitchen. “Thank you!”

Her eyes are bright. “You’re welcome, sweetie. It was something I thought you could use.” It’s been a while since she’s called me “sweetie.” Lately it’s been a frost-laden “Katie”—or nothing at all.

She’s in an exuberant mood, eager to tell me about her classes. While she talks, I fuss over my new gadget, trying out different blades, flipping through the recipe booklet, happily envisioning all the foods I can pulverize.

“That’s so impressive,” I say. “Will you get a degree?”

“In what? Old lady?”

I laugh.

After a while she goes downstairs and I hear her practicing on the Yamaha upright piano. She’s working on a Bach invention, and over the weeks she has slowly but unmistakably picked up speed and dexterity. She started by playing each hand’s part separately, and now she’s putting her hands together, letting one measure glide into the next, a sign
that she’s looking ahead in the music. Maybe it’s a metaphor for what she’s doing at this stage of her life.

My friend Carolyn has invited us to a Hanukkah dinner, and I throw together a salad. Zoë chooses to stay home. My mother and I set off. Carolyn lives on the other side of the city, at the top of a steep hill. I park about a block away and we both get out of the car. As we start to make our way up the formidable incline, I look over and see that my mother has stopped moving. Her head is down.

“Mom, what’s wrong?”

“I’m having trouble,” she says. “I should be able to do this, but my body isn’t cooperating.” I offer her my arm, but I’m carrying a large, bulky bowl, which makes it hard to support her. Worse, the steepness of the hill throws her off balance and I can see she’s visibly shaken. I think about getting her back in the car and driving her to Carolyn’s front door. But I decide to just stay with her, urging her on, as she inches her way up the sidewalk. She becomes uncharacteristically quiet as she takes in what is to become a watershed moment: the unhappy realization that her body can’t do something that it once—only yesterday, it seems—achieved with ease. After dinner, I pull the car around to the front of Carolyn’s house. But the rise from the house to the curb where I’m waiting is steep as well, and my mother’s steps are small and tentative as she makes her way toward me.