Dropped Threads 3 (14 page)

After my father and grandfather died, my mother started to tipple, though in moderation. It was rye whiskey that seduced her and she often poured herself a solitary nightcap. One night when I was in my teens, I came home and saw her bedroom light still on.
Why does she insist on waiting up for me?
I muttered to myself. When I entered the bedroom to confront her, I found her sound asleep, sitting up in bed, curlers in her hair and an unfinished drink of rye still clasped in her hands. When I touched the drink, her blue eyes flew open and she gripped the glass, daring me to take it away. It became a favourite story, told at family dinners. My mother was a “good” drinker; she became gregarious and was game for anything from poker to arm wrestling, only occasionally crossing that fine line between being the life of the party and the person someone had to see home safely.

I’d like to blame my genetic predisposition to alcoholism on my mother, but that wouldn’t be fair.

I have always loved alcohol, from the first cold beer I drank at a party when I was thirteen, to the vats of fine wine I drank in Tuscany and Provence when I became an adult. I loved the taste and I loved the effect. In university in the 1960s I discovered cheap, sweet wine and downed it while my contemporaries experimented with LSD and marijuana. The courtship that led to my first marriage was conducted in the bars of Edmonton, Alberta, while I was attending graduate school there. My betrothed was dead set against drugs, but he plied me with beer and I happily guzzled it down. After we married, we moved to London where I became a connoisseur of British beers. McEwan’s Export Ale was my favourite. He drank, she drank, we both drank.

Pregnancy and motherhood slowed me down temporarily, but photo albums from the days of my first marriage reveal a constant round of parties. We danced and sang our way through our twenties. Once I recall hosting a croquet party on the front lawn of our house in the west end of Winnipeg. My husband had to put me to bed, where I promptly threw up on the pillow. He gently cleaned me up with soft reassurances. “It’s just like when the baby spits up.”

His gentleness didn’t last long.

In the mid 1980s I was enrolled in the social work program at the University of Manitoba and elected to take a course in, of all things, deviancy! Our assignment was a research paper on anything we deemed deviant behaviour in Canadian society. I selected alcoholism in women. This was ten years before I qualified personally, but my subconscious must have suspected what lay ahead. There were entire libraries devoted to addictions, but only a handful of articles on women and alcoholism.

I interviewed the program director at a women’s treatment centre. “Most women don’t seek treatment on their own. They are brought in by the police or their husbands,” she told me.
Fix her up and call me when she’s sober. Then she can come home
. As we spoke, shadowy figures wafted by the open door. They were alcoholic women in a residential treatment facility. I sat there, the eager university student, asking my questions as an intellectual exercise. I imagined all the mad, drunken heiresses being pulled from their towers and thrown into cruiser cars or family sedans and deposited on the doorstep of the facility.

I got an A plus on my paper and within ten years, I had become an A plus alcoholic. By the time I graduated, I was in the middle of a divorce. My first husband was telling everyone who would listen that I had a drinking problem. Privately I felt hurt and humiliated, but publicly I chalked it up to the ranting of a jilted spouse. A decade of duty had left me exhausted, treading water instead of swimming with strong and sure strokes. I was sinking under the weight of my many roles: breadwinner, wife, mother, stepmother and dutiful daughter.

My second marriage followed a similar pattern. We both drank, but the difference between us was I liked to achieve unconsciousness and my husband knew when to quit. Like my first spouse, he responded by feeling embarrassed by my behaviour at social outings and getting angry when we came home. For the most part, however, he tolerated my drinking without talking about it. When he tried expressing his concern, I became angry and defensive and he fell silent again.

I carefully kept my drinking a secret from my close women friends. I would meet them for breakfast or lunch or line up activities that didn’t involve alcohol. If one of them was at a party where I got tipsy, I would wake up the next day
feeling uneasy and call her as soon as possible, to take the temperature of the situation. If I pretended my behaviour was okay, and she played along, I felt relieved. Everything was fine … until the next time.

That is, until my husband left town on a business trip and I drank the week away. With no one monitoring my intake, even I realized I was losing control. That’s when I joined a group called
WISE
—Women in Sobriety and Empowerment. They were hard to find, an underground, subversive little band of women who believed in the sixteen-step approach to recovery developed by Dr. Charlotte Davis Kasl, a savvy woman whose personal wrestle with addiction showed her that the AA twelve-step model, which was developed for men, was less effective for women. Recognizing the difference in women’s motives for drinking and in their need for support in quitting, she encouraged them to find their own way to recover from their addictions, by thinking for themselves, using a process of trial and error, not strict adherence to a rigid external model.

WISE
met in a church basement. I attended faithfully. Before I knew it, I was chairing the meetings. I was skilled at group facilitation. The only problem was I never stopped drinking.

You see, I became beautifully adept at hiding my habit. I held down a good job in the social services, where I was surrounded by doctors, nurses, psychologists and social workers. I either fooled them all or they just kept quiet.
Why speak up? It’s her business
. I ran a household, raised a son and stayed married. I made and kept friends, volunteered on boards and belonged to a service club. I was a model citizen. I kept my problem well hidden most of the time; after all, I am a white, middle-class girl who knows how to match the china teacups with the proper saucers. I appreciate the importance of a
thank-you note. I dressed in little business suits and went off to work every day to help others.

Then, regrettably, I took to falling down. I fell down staircases, off the front steps of friends’ houses after parties, into ditches and even off our boat. The last time I fell down, it was dark. We were navigating the steep path from dock to cottage, and I went head first into the juniper bushes.
Gin and tonic, anyone?
My brother, who was behind me, tried to help me to my feet, but I took him down with me. My husband slept in the spare room that night.

There it was—my final fall from grace. I quit the morning after the juniper bush incident. I felt I had no choice. I feared for my marriage and for my physical health. I had begun to notice an internal shift, from wanting a drink to needing one, waking up on days when the liquor outlets were closed and panicking if I thought there was nothing left in the house to drink, silently praying when we drove by a liquor store that my husband would turn in and not drive right past. Added to this interior drama were public humiliations like dropping the appetizer tray at a dinner party or passing out on the couch before my last guest said good night.

Alone, cloistered in a remote cottage in northwestern Ontario, I dug out my copy of
Many Roads, One Journey: Moving Beyond the 12 Steps
and reread it as I have never read before. I worked my way through Dr. Kasl’s sixteen steps, feverishly making journal entries, pouring out my pain, confusion, self-pity, anger and resentment onto the blank pages, one step at a time, one day at a time. I did yoga—religiously. There’s nothing like thirty minutes on a yoga mat to calm the nerves and feed the spirit. I meditated and listened to soothing music. I baked cookies and made tomato chutney. I cuddled the cat, using him as a breathing teddy bear. Slowly I began to feel better.

The memories of my
WISE
self-help group sustained me. I called up their faces, remembered their stories. Just knowing they were still out there, struggling, supported me. I conjured up the first meeting I attended. It was Valentine’s Day. I wore a flashy red sweater with two giant hearts embroidered on my breast. I arrived first. Into the dreary church basement they came, professional women with expensive haircuts and biker mamas wearing their leathers. Welfare moms sat beside the pillars of Winnipeg society. Sarah arrived, a beautiful blonde dripping with diamonds. There were cupids on her pants! We were misfits, one and all. No matter what our income or its source, each of use was a family disgrace because we drank. These women told their stories, one by one. We laughed. I had no idea recovery could be funny. Alone in my wooded prison, I felt encouraged by the remembrances of them.

•    •    •

There is a conspiracy of silence around women who drink. Like the mystery woman in Morris, we are kept hidden away. People whisper about us behind our backs but don’t confront us face to face. Even if they did, they would likely be met by denial or avoidance, for the sad truth about us mad heiresses trapped inside our addictions is that only we have the keys to unlock the doors of our private prison towers.

Unshackled at last, I left my sanctuary in the woods eager to share my transformation. I longed to travel back in time to the treatment centre on River Avenue, throw open the front door and invite the shadowy figures to step outside into the sunshine. I long now to reach out with my message of sobriety and hope.

To each woman imprisoned by her attraction to alcohol, I yearn to say: use the power of language to challenge the grip of addiction. Name your problem, whether it’s “addiction” or “compulsion” or “dependency;” adopt a statement like “I deserve a sober self” or “I don’t drink, no matter what.” Say this to yourself whenever you crave a drink. Bring the problem out of hiding by telling someone else, a confidante or counsellor, about your plight. Read about the struggles of women you admire who have kicked the habit, authors like Anne Lamott
(Travelling Mercies)
or Julia Cameron (
The Artist’s Way)
. Start a daily journal of your experiences with sobriety. Talk about it, read about it, write about it and then do something about it. Only you can break the silence and change “she drinks” to “she drank.” If I can quit, you can quit, we all can quit.

I was never
the popular one in school. There was always something I dreaded: failing a test I couldn’t focus on enough to study for, getting nailed in a game of dodge ball, or walking into homeroom on Monday morning after not being invited to the weekend sleepover birthday party. I was the girl who cut her own hair and looked like Ringo Starr. I was the one who got picked second to last to join the team, and I was the girl who stuffed her bra and got caught by the most popular boy.

I find it fascinating now as an adult woman to look back at that time and see how my instincts kicked in, how following them led me down the path I’ve been on since. You see, while I was struggling to survive the cold, cruel world of growing up, there was also something fortunate about my difference, even though, back then, I hadn’t learned to lean on it as my source of confidence and security. I was a singer and songwriter. I began playing melodies and performing for people when I was three years old; and in the preteen and teen years, I discovered that I felt safest when I was singing and playing piano. When I was immersed in my music I was able to shut down the outside world completely, without realizing I was doing it. I didn’t even know I wanted to—or actually needed to.

It will never be clear to me why those musical talents weren’t enough. I still never felt talented, pretty or intelligent;
I always thought of myself as average. My eyes are a plain blue. I have large hips. I have small shoulders. I have thick ankles. I wear my hair in a plain, safe style, and I hate my nose. I used to try to squeeze my nose in whenever I thought of it, hoping that it might shrink.

•    •    •

The place: Shoppers Drug Mart on King Street in Toronto, where I am standing in line with toothpaste all over my pimples. The event: being asked for my autograph for the very first time. I’m in the midst of shopping for the strongest zit cream possible. My first major tour across Canada is to begin in three days, and I have the worst breakout of acne since I was a teenager. All I’m concerned about is clearing up my face. While I’m waiting to pay a girl taps me on the shoulder and asks if I am Chantal from the video. I’m humiliated, trapped, thinking only of the Colgate caking my zits.
Of course, this would happen to me
. I feel as though I’m back in private school. The odd one out again, the one who can’t project the image that popularity rides on. Perfect faces on the covers of fashion magazines are staring at my blotched skin, customers are whispering, the unforgiving supermarket lighting exposes my flaws, and I honestly don’t know how to answer the question; I don’t know how to live up to that image of the video Chantal when I am beyond the camera lights and stage. My insecurity, the pimples, the old familiar feeling that I’m not good enough creates a force that pulls my stomach down into my toes before I answer a hesitant, “Yes.”