Last month, my 11-year-old daughter and I were playing Kadima on the beach in the Dominican Republic. It was early evening and we were waiting for my husband and youngest daughter to get ready for dinner.
“Let’s meet them at the bar,” I said. “You can get a mango smoothie and Mommy can get a Presidente.”
“Why do you keep ordering beer?” my daughter asked. “I thought you didn’t want to drink anymore?”
She was right. Sort of.
Almost two years ago, I quit drinking. There was no intervention, no DUI, no court-ordered rehab, no AA. I didn’t think I had a “problem.” Sure, I sometimes had one too many and was often the last one at the party, but it’s not like I carried a flask of in my bag or drank every day. I just liked to have fun. Then I turned 40 and the drinking became less fun. I had trouble remembering conversations after two drinks, yet I would keep refilling my glass. And my hangovers had become debilitating, sometimes lasting for two days.
Instead of feeling like the successful, accomplished professional who enjoyed a social drink once in a while, I felt like a pathetic, out-of-control, sloppy drunk.
My self-imposed abstinence began in April 2008. I was consulting for a fashion magazine and had been invited to a staff dinner at a Mexican restaurant. After two (or three? or four?) cucumber agave margaritas, I rallied some friends to meet me for a nightcap. I remember champagne, Grand Marnier and a plate of fries. I do not remember the cab ride home. I do not remember losing my phone. And I do not remember anything my friends and I talked about.
The next morning, I had an 8 AM breakfast meeting at Conde Nast with the magazine’s publisher and her management team. I slipped quietly into the executive dining room and kept my throbbing head lowered, trying to avoid making bloodshot eye contact with anyone. I hoped nobody would notice my trembling hands as I picked up a piece of plain toast and a cup of coffee, and prayed I wouldn’t have to speak since at any moment I could start projectile vomiting like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.
“Are you okay?” one of my colleagues asked after the meeting. “You looked like you were dying in there.”
I was dying. Instead of feeling like the successful, accomplished professional who enjoyed a social drink once in a while, I felt like a pathetic, out-of-control, sloppy drunk.
“I’m quitting drinking!” I announced that night at dinner with my husband and kids. Perhaps because I’d worked for so many magazines, I had a habit of making big, headline-style declarations of some new self-improvement campaign. They had heard me announce with great gusto…
“I’m getting organized!”
“I’m through with carbs!”
“I’m joining a gym!”
“I’m not coloring my hair!”
…only to see me come back from the salon with fresh highlights, eating a bagel while trying to find my gym membership card in my messy, disorganized purse.
But this time the stakes were higher than the number on the scale or the shade of my hair color. And I managed to stay off the sauce for a full year. My husband doesn’t drink much so my sobriety didn’t significantly alter our lifestyle. My friends assumed I was on another one of my self-help kicks so they just rolled their eyes as I brought my own Fresca to their dinner parties.
In April 2009, I celebrated my year of sobriety with a glass of Veuve Cliquot. Nothing bad happened. I didn’t get drunk. I remembered the conversations. So I decided I could start drinking again—but only in moderation and not in front of the kids (interestingly, I wasn’t ready to admit to them that I had caved in on one of my resolutions).
But the hiding was hard—I found myself lying all the time. I’d put beer in an opaque glass and say it was Fresca. I’d decline a glass of wine and then gulp down my husband’s when the kids weren’t looking. I got so drunk at a party that I fell down and broke a rib, but told the girls I’d tripped on a step. When I was bedridden with a hangover after my 44th birthday party—an event that began with mango margaritas and ended with belly dancing at some Middle Eastern restaurant—I pretended I had the flu. And when I ordered a Presidente in the Dominican Republic, I told them it was “grown-up soda.” But they knew it was beer.
“I’m on vacation,” I told my daughter as I tried to get her to leave the beach and go to the bar with me. “Mommy can have one drink.”
She stopped playing Kadima and looked me right in the eyes.
“You know what happens, Mom,” she said. “One drink leads to another, then to another, then to another. And before you know it you’re drunk.”
I was dumbstruck. How did she know what I didn’t yet know—that it’s the first drink that gets you drunk? How did she know what I was still unwilling to admit to myself—that I cannot drink?
So I didn’t. I didn’t order a beer that night. Or the next night. Or the next. I’m not making any promises or grand declarations. I’m just trying not to drink. One day at a time.
This piece originally appeared on Drinking Diaries, a blog about women and drinking. Betty Fontaine, a pseudonym, has worked for a variety of publications including Time Out New York, Jane, Lucky, Teen Vogue, PAPER and SPY. She lives in New York City with her husband and two daughters, and has been sober for 16 months.