Last week, I prepared to enter my mother’s walk-in closet. Over the past several months, I’ve been going to her house—my childhood home—a couple of times a week, sifting through piles of papers, plastic containers and desk drawers. Discarding trivial things, such as my school bus form from seventh grade and dried out pens, is a snap. Figuring out what to keep is not.

When I was growing up, my mom kept her closet locked and alarmed—the kind that would alert the police if someone tripped it. She showed me regularly where she kept the key and how to disarm the alarm (there was a small hidden switch in a different closet), meant to protect her precious jewelry inside. There were shelves too, with old Lord & Taylor boxes overflowing with piles of papers—newspaper and magazine articles, old theater Playbills, etc.—and lucite boxes holding an abundance of photo envelopes stacked from front to back. On the highest shelf, there was a row of large round hat boxes, housing those wide-brimmed beauties that my mom sported only at special events, like springtime weddings (mine) and bar mitzvahs (my brother’s).

Born in France, my mother was the epitome of chic. A business executive by day, she dressed for work in a tailored skirt or slacks, with long strands of pearls strewn over a blouse or sweater. She favored dresses for evenings out, particularly those with a plunging neckline to highlight her décolleté. She rarely emerged from the house without her preferred fashion accessory, a silk scarf tied around her neck or the strap of her handbag.

Her closet still contains all of these things—not to mention dozens of Charles Jourdan shoes—and being inside those four walls stirs up childhood souvenirs of my lying on her bed, watching her primp and prepare for a Saturday night on the town with my dad. She’d come out of her closet, looking like a movie star, and make her way to her vanity table to put on her maquillage. There was always red lipstick. And perfume.

Life was in rapid motion for her then—busy with kids, husband, work, a home, a dog, and aging parents. Those hectic and happy days are long gone, and now in her late 70s, my mom suffers from acute anxiety and depression. My father’s death in 2006 voided her of vitality, leaving her lost and sad, and I can’t get her back. My mother has tried therapy and medication, but a different sort of French accessory—wine—became her choice for self-soothing. Eventually it became vodka.

When my father was sick in the hospital, my mother used to lie beside him in his hospital bed. He would talk to me and occasionally rest his eyes; hers were closed too because she was passed out and drunk. During that time, I went to their house and into her closet to move her jewelry out and into a bank safe. When my arm touched the wall, I heard a clank. I reached over to the side of the safe, a beige metal box bolted to the floor, and felt a round piece of glass. It was an empty bottle. I reached back again, further this time, and pulled out a half dozen more. She hid the wine bottles in the safety of her closet, where I imagine she escaped to take a swig or ten, and left the empties behind.

It’s been seven years since I found those bottles. My mom now lives in an assisted living facility just ten minutes away from her house. She no longer has access to alcohol and instead takes a daily cocktail of meds, yet she still suffers from anxiety and depression.

In my effort to clean out her house and ready it for the real estate market, I knew I’d have to spend time in that closet. Fearful of how I may feel in there, even with the comforting presence of my shaggy goldendoodle, I decided to bring a glass of wine along with me. I knew it was bad to drive there with open wine in my car, but I did it anyway, saving those few ounces of liquid courage it for the hours I’d need to sift through her things while enduring the memories they would trigger. I realized the irony—here I was bringing wine into the tiny room where I found my mother’s empty bottles, once replete with the substance in which I was now seeking solace. But I did it anyway.

Cleaning out my mother’s house has been both painful and eye opening. Her photos, keepsakes, and written words remind me of the amazing woman she once was, and highlight the glaring contrast between her then and now. It won’t be much longer until her closet is clean, her clothes donated, her photos digitized. But the next time I go, I’ll leave the wine behind. Because no amount of alcohol can strip away the memories, not hers or mine.

–Caren Osten Gerszberg is a co-editor of Drinking Diaries. You can read a selection of her work at www.carenosten.com

By Jody Lamb

Jody Lamb is the author of Easter Ann Peters’ Operation Cool, a novel for tweens. Her experience in a family with alcoholics has made her a passionate advocate for children with alcoholic loved ones, a fan of life and a lady on a mission to change the world. By day, Jody is a corporate public relations manager. She earned a journalism degree from Michigan State University. Jody lives in metro Detroit in the beautiful Michigan mitten.

As a young girl, I thought my loved ones’ excessive, destructive drinking was a problem unique to our family. No one spoke of it, for it was a secret that once told, would surely shame us.

Finally, at 22, when my loved ones hit rock bottom in their struggles, I read everything I could find about alcoholism and its effects on families. When I discovered estimates that 10 to 25 percent of American kids live with at least one parent who abuses alcohol, I cried.

How can it remain such a family secret in the 21^st century? I looked for contemporary, relatable books for children on the subject, particularly for tweens. I found few. No wonder the cycle continues, I thought. That bothered me.

I found so many posts by tweens and teens on forums about loved ones’ drinking. They were desperate for answers and facts about addiction. What I read kept me up at night.

At age 26, with a pasted-on smile, I crashed into the waiting arms of depression. It was a bona-fide, serious quarter-life crisis. I longed for a sense of purpose and satisfaction in my robotic days.

One weekend, I read my childhood diaries. I cried recalling the grand plans and dreams little-kid me had for grownup me. The only thing I could think to do to make myself feel better was to write for fun, like I did as a girl. I enrolled in a creative writing course at my local community college.

Out quickly came a short story about a 12-year-old girl’s plan to make seventh grade awesome that’s derailed as she copes with and helps her depressed, alcoholic mother in a tiny lakeside town.

I realized I was meant to write for kids with alcoholic loved ones. On the weekends and at night, I wrote like crazy and was a sponge to everything that would help me create a better story. Before long, I had a whole novel manuscript. It is the story I would have been moved by as a child. Writing it was cathartic for me. My relationship with my alcoholic loved ones dramatically improved.

Over next two and a half years, I wrote three more whole drafts.

The novel was rejected 30 times by agents and editors. Then I met the founder of a small publishing company. She believed in the story and in me. Easter Ann Peters’ Operation Cool was released on November 6, 2012.

It’s the story of 12-year-old Easter Ann Peters who has a plan—Operation Cool—to make her seventh grade year awesome and erase years of being known only as a quiet, straight-A student who can’t think of a comeback to her bully. When the confident new girl, Wreni, becomes her long-needed best friend, Easter lets her personality shine. The coolest guy in school takes a sudden interest. But as tough times at school fade away, so does a happy life at home. Easter’s mother is drinking a lot, and Easter works double overtime to keep their secret in the tiny lakeside town. Operation Cool derails, fast, and Easter must discover a solution.

Here’s an excerpt from Easter Ann Peters’ Operation Cool:

At two thirty three a.m., my bedroom door creaks and opens halfway, sending a thick band of hallway light into my room.

I’m out of half-sleep land right away; I rub eyes so I can see in the light.

“Mom?” I whisper, even though I already know it’s her.

She takes a few steps forward, and from the way she moves—steady and gentle—I know she’s not drunk anymore.

Yoplait’s snoring stops and beside me, she flops her body over to confirm that it’s Mom and not some intruder like Drama Chihuahua or someone else not welcome here.

“Mmm hmm,” Mom says. It sounds like her. Nice Mom. The Mom I love.

I move my legs a bit so that there’s enough space for her to sit on my bed.

Mom runs her fingers over the spot and sits.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

After about ten seconds, she says, “Nothing, sweetheart.” Though she tries to make it convincing, the words feel empty and untrue. “Just making sure you’re warm enough. Temps went down tonight.”

She pulls my comforter up over my shoulders.

“I’m fine,” I say as upbeat as I can. “But I haven’t been able to sleep real well lately.”

“Sometimes,” she says, looking away from me now. “It’s difficult to tell your body what to do. Sometimes you lose control.”

I have no idea what that means, so I don’t say anything.

“I’ll sit here until you fall asleep,” she says.

It’s just like when I was little.

So I turn on my side and face Yoplait, who’s already back to sleep. I can tell because her tail is wagging—just a little. That means she’s dreaming of yogurt cups and running Chihuahuas out of town.

Mom leans forward and draws on my back, just like she always did.

Hearts. Trees. Butterflies. Flowers. Ice cream. Everything happy drawn gently on my t-shirt.

And I sleep.”

Right now, my first young adult novel is in progress. I’m also currently writing non-fiction books for kids related to coping when loved ones are addicted to alcohol or other drugs. I hope to find a way to provide these books to young people for free.

If a kid ever says to me, “Hey, thanks for this,” well, those four words alone will be infinitely more meaningful to me than fifty years of success in the business world.

For readers with alcoholics in their lives, I hope my books remind them that they are not alone and inspire hope. For readers who do not have alcoholics in their lives, I hope they’ll gain a more solid understanding of what alcoholism is, how it affects others and sensitivity to what their classmates, teammates and neighbors may be coping with at home.

***

Keep in touch with Jody through Facebook, Twitter, and her blog. Have a tween in your life or are you a tween at heart? Pick up a copy of Easter Ann Peters’ Operation Cool at Amazon or BN.com or in the Kindle store.

By Leah Odze Epstein

As the daughter of an alcoholic mother, I often wondered if there was anyone else out there in the world like me. None of my friends had alcoholic parents and I felt like a freak. I was the only girl not invited to a neighborhood friend’s birthday party because her mom worried that I came from a bad family. I knew this because my best friend tried to console me by telling me that the girl said it wasn’t her fault I wasn’t invited–it was her mother’s.

Eventually my mom got sober, went to Alcoholics Anonymous, and explained how she could never tell who else attended the meetings at the local church. It was a secret, but trust her, some of our neighbors were there. How would I ever find someone like me out in the real world when alcoholism was a big secret that everyone kept?

My solution was to read everything I could get my hands on, to see if I could find someone like me.  I devoured all the realistic fiction in the library–Freaky Friday, Harriet the Spy, From the Mixed Up Files, Bridge to Terabithia, The Brothers Lionheart. I loved that many of the adults and kids in these books were the opposite of  the sparkly, perky perfectly put-together TV people in shows like Father Knows Best and The Brady Bunch. Parents in books were inattentive, harsh, insensitive or otherwise flawed. Kids were complicated creatures whose problems were existential or monumental and couldn’t be solved in the literary equivalent of one episode.

I’m sure I read books with a drunk father or a town drunk (always a man) lurking in the background, but it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I first read Robin F. Brancato’s Something Left to Lose, a novel featuring the daughter of an alcoholic mother.

The book’s main character, Jane Ann, likes to play it safe, but she is drawn to the charismatic Rebbie, who has an alcoholic mother and a highly successful father who is never around.

Finally, here were girls just like me! Jane Ann’s mother disapproves of her daughter’s friendship with Rebbie, just like that neighborhood mom didn’t want her daughter to invite me to her birthday party. I, too, had a rebellious best friend who drew me into situations that thrilled and scared me.

A book doesn’t have to mirror your life exactly to change it. Unlike Rebbie, I never felt like I had nothing left to lose. My older sister had already taken that route.

I’d always pigeonholed myself into the role of the good, safe, responsible girl–the “Jane Ann”–but while reading Something Left to Lose, I found bits and pieces of myself in all the different characters: Rebbie, the confused rebel; Jane Ann, the artsy dreamer; and Lydia, the perfectionist peacekeeper.

Eighth grade, the year I read the book, marked the year I broke out of my shell. Previously, I had a habit of slumping down in my seat and shrugging my shoulders if anyone spoke to me. If the teacher called on me, I’d say, “Sorry,” before I spoke, and then when I answered the question, I’d turn bright red.

Something Left to Lose made me bolder, made me feel less ashamed because it gave me a model of a bad-ass girl who experienced the same thing as I did and instead of internalizing everything and shrinking inward, used her anger, disappointment and upset as fuel.

At the end of the book, Jane Ann’s family decides to move to another state, but she is forever changed by her friends.

She carries some of Rebbie’s boldness inside her. “How’s your mother?” she asks Rebbie. When Rebbie answers, “O.K.,” Jane Ann presses on. “Is she drinking?”

Brancato writes: “[Jane Ann] is surprised by how easily the question came out–no substitute word–just the question, pure and simple.”

Jane Ann dares to ask Rebbie about her mom’s drinking. It is no longer a secret.

As long as we continue to hide the dark parts of our lives and present a one-sided story to the outside world, there will be girls and boys like I was, aching to find characters that show them all the different ways of dealing with life’s actual problems.

Here are some additional books for daughters of alcoholic mothers:

My Mama’s Waltz: A Book For Daughters of Alcoholic Mothers (nonfiction)

A Door Near Here, by Heather Quarles (young adult fiction)

Once Was Lost by Sara Zarr (young adult fiction)

Teens Talk About Alcohol and Alcoholism (nonfiction)

I’d welcome any additional book suggestions. Was there a book that saved your life when you were a kid?

Leah Odze Epstein is the co-editor of Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up (Seal Press). Her essay in the book is about growing us as the daughter of an alcoholic.

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Mom–you might want to put down that glass of chardonnay! In case you didn’t already feel guilty enough about the damages you’re unwittingly inflicting on your kids–helicopter mom? Tiger mom? Cocktail mom? Slacker mom? Nature versus nurture?–along comes a new study from Demos, a think tank in England, which concludes that when it comes to their adult drinking lives, your kids can blame (or thank) their mom.

No, you might not think that your chardonnay is harming your child (after all, you’re the one drinking it), but as Jonathan Birdwell, head of Demos’ Citizens Programme, said to The Telegraph: “What we found really interesting was this delayed effect; the impact of what teenagers perceived about their mothers’ drinking habits doesn’t show an impact at the time, but decades later.”

Great. Thanks.

And in case you didn’t already think women’s drinking was loaded–according to this study, if you think your mom drank a lot, then you’ll eventually drink a lot (note the use of the word “think”). So what about dad? According to this research, he could have been a falling down drunk and it wouldn’t effect your adult drinking.

For the study, 18,000 people born in 1970 were asked about their drinking habits at the age of 16, and then again at 34. They were also asked if their parents drank never, sometimes, often or always.

It should come as no surprise that the drinking habits of 16-year-olds were largely influenced by their peers. But the 34-year-olds were a different story. The more they thought their mothers drank on the never, sometimes, often or always scale, the more they themselves drank as adults. In other words, according to The Telegraph, “with each step that mothers rose on the four-point scale, the chance that their adult children were drinking above the Government recommended limits rose 1.3 times.”

So why don’t dads’ drinking habits matter?

The researchers speculated that fathers are more likely to drink outside the home (in pubs–remember, the study was in England), while moms drink at home, in front of their ever-vigilant kids.

Also, the guys at the Demos think tank said that since men’s drinking is more culturally “acceptable,” it doesn’t imprint itself on their kids the way mom’s drinking does.

But here’s the problem I have with studies. The nuances are left behind. Let’s take a case study of a real person: me. If a researcher had asked me at 16, how often do you drink, I would have answered (truthfully): Never. To the question, how often does your mother drink, I would have answered: Never. At that point, she was a recovered alcoholic, so she abstained from drinking. Would my answer tell the whole story? No.

At age 34, the researcher would ask me again. How often do you drink? My answer would have been: Sometimes. You see, at that age, I was in the throes of child-rearing, and often too sleep-deprived to even want to indulge in a glass of wine. How often did your mother drink, the researchers would have asked me, and I would have said–it depends. When I was zero to 9, she drank always (as I said, she was an alcoholic). Starting when I was 9,  she drank never. If they asked me, at 16, how much my mother drank, I would have answered (correctly): Never.

The researchers would never have gotten the nuanced answers from me by asking these cut-and-dry questions.

At 16, I was an adamant non-drinker, in large part as a reaction to my wild-child older sister and my alcoholic mother. My peers had no influence on me, as this study suggests they do at age 16. They drank–I didn’t. I was immune to peer pressure, at that point, precisely because of the negative associations I had as a result of my mother’s drinking.

If they asked me at 34 how much I drank (sometimes), which I could apparently attribute to my mother’s drinking when I was 16 (Never), the researchers would miss out on all those years that came before and after. During college and into my twenties, I often binge drank (A result of my mother’s alcoholic influence?) But what about now, when I drink in moderation, and responsibly? Can they really discount the influence of my moderate-drinking father? I think not.

Next time you’re tempted to beat yourself up over the latest findings–Drinking is good! Drinking is bad! Mothers are God! Fathers don’t matter!–look to your own story instead, to the actual details of a real person’s life, which can’t be reduced to numbers and statistics.

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Recently, Caren & I were interviewed by Paula Derrow for Self Magazine online. In the interview, Paula asked us the insightful question—How has  editing the book (Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up) and doing the blog changed your own drinking habits?

As the daughter of a recovered alcoholic, I will always be vigilant when it comes to my own drinking—that’s just the way it is. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), I will never have the carefree attitude towards alcohol that some of my friends and acquaintances have—one where they feel comfortable sipping a glass of wine while they’re cooking dinner every night, and then maybe having another glass with dinner.

So here’s how I answered Paula’s question:

“I’ve learned that you have to create a conscious drinking life. In my head, I have a contract with myself when it comes to drinking. Because I’m the daughter of an alcoholic, I don’t feel comfortable drinking alone during the week, say, while I’m making dinner. I also don’t do hard liquor. But I love to have a glass of wine when I’m out with friends or have people over to dinner. I had to set those boundaries for myself.”

Caren, on the other hand, comes from a different background, so her (unwritten) contract is entirely different from mine (and has involved alcohol-free Mondays, which she wrote about for this blog).

None of this is written in stone, or is written down at all. It is subject to change, although it seems to work well for me, so why would I change it?

Something I’ve learned working on this blog and on the book is that everyone has to navigate their own relationship with alcohol–it’s personal. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

We’d love to hear from you, dear readers: Do you have a drinking contract, written or unwritten, spoken or unspoken? What is it, and why did you make one?

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In honor of Children of Alcoholics Week, we have a guest post from  Rita Malie, as well as an excerpt from her book, Supreme Sacrifice. A passionate advocate for children of alcoholics, she is also the award-winning author of Goodbye America. She lives with her family in Florida.

by Rita Malie

Denial is the greatest ally of an alcoholic, and the biggest enemy that circumvents healing in the family. As Dr. Phil McGraw repeats over and over on his daytime television show, ”You can’t change what you don’t acknowledge.”

As long as families attach every label to alcoholism, instead of dealing with it as it is, change and healing can never occur. In my situation growing up with an alcoholic father, we were told “Daddy’s tired” or “Daddy’s sick.” It’s easier to pretend and not face the truth—it hurts too much. But what are the consequences when the secret is never revealed?

Janet Geringer Woititz, author of Adult Children of Alcoholics says, “Do not protect your children from knowing the ravages of alcoholism. To protect your children is to make them weak and confused.”

As an adult child of an alcoholic, I couldn’t agree more. The energy we spend denying the truth comes at a cost. It sucks time and energy away from spending time dealing with the problem, and giving the family the opportunity to begin the road to recovery.

Supreme Sacrifice is a story inspired by true events, a “semi-autobiography” of sorts. It’s my story, a journey from hopelessness and darkness to healing and self-discovery. It is told through the character of April Straka, a young woman brought to the depths of despair first by a father’s alcoholism, and then by his tragic and mysterious death.

The story begins in the 1960’s, when programs like AA, AlaNon, AlaTeen, ACOA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) and EAP (Employee Assistance Programs) were in their infancy. Children like me had no one to turn to except for family. We couldn’t turn to our friends, because we didn’t want them to know. Alcoholism was our secret and our shame. However, as I learned, in order to heal the secrets must be exposed.

Alcoholism tends to run in families and children of alcoholics run a higher risk of developing alcoholism. They also tend to marry alcoholics themselves. These children need guidance and support to escape the cycle.

During Children of Alcoholics Week, I hope to deliver a message of support to families suffering from the effects of alcoholism. You are not alone, and you don’t have to hide. There are so many resources, support groups and “safe places” to share your story. Alcoholism doesn’t have to be a secret anymore.

From Supreme Sacrifice: 

“Mom had a habit of challenging dad at his worst moments when he was drinking and impatient. Then they’d argue and he’d attack. The family worked hard at keeping his drinking a secret from the neighbors. The flowered wallpaper in the archway leading into the hall from the kitchen revealed an indelible dried bloodstain that was left untouched for years collecting dust. Daddy hit her on the head with a salt shaker. With blood running down her face, she ran to the neighbor’s for help. April heard her mother’s screams and the door slamming shut. The neighbors drove her mother to the hospital. April was upstairs bathing Junior. The police arrived when she was putting him to bed. They arrested her dad. He slept it off in jail and was released the next day. That bloodstain on the wall served to be a milestone in the Straka household. It symbolized the end of the family secret about Josef’s drinking that before this violent tirade was sacrosanct.”

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Today we offer you an excerpt from prize-winning author Lily King’s new novel, which spans three decades of a volatile relationship between a frighteningly charismatic, alcoholic father and the daughter who cannot help but love him. Beginning in 1974 and ending in 2008, Father of the Rain traces the lives and loves of a family wrenched apart by one man’s drinking. Enjoy…

It’s all done with such precision: the ice into the monogrammed glass, the snap of the paper across the cap of a new bottle of Smirnoff’s, the splash of vermouth, the tiny onions jiggled out so carefully. Then the pause, and then the sip, his eyes pulled shut by pleasure. I’ve never noticed what an act of love it all is…

My father is watching the news in the den. It’s strange to see him back in that room with his ashtray and his drink, as if he never left it for the sunroom and all those years with Catherine. A couch has replaced the recliners that replaced the couch my mother took to Water Street. The room looks almost back to normal, though the slipcovers are made of a nubby wool, something my mother wouldn’t have chosen. He bends his head down to watch the television, his eyes straining up just beneath their hoods. A woman is discussing affirmative action on some courthouse steps. She speaks articulately, quickly, trying to get the most words into her few seconds of time on national TV.

“Why are black people always talking about black people?” my father says in his disgusting version of an African American accent, though the woman speaking has the regionless accent of a newscaster. “Have you noticed that?”

“Because in this country they are defined by their skin color, and they’ve had to fight for every basic right that we get automatically by being born white.”

“Fighting for their rights? This woman is fighting for inequality. This woman wants a black C student to be chosen over a straight A-student. She’s fighting for their right to cheat.”

My retort constructs itself swiftly. I’ve got a lot of ammo now on this question, yet none of my knowledge will help me win a fight with my father. He will cling to his position even when all reason fails him; he will cling to it as if it’s his life and not his opinion that is in peril. He will get vicious and personal, and every negative thing he ever felt about me will pour out of his mouth. Ridding my father of his racist and anti-Semitic rhetoric would take a long time. It would be a whole reeducation. His prejudices are a stew of self-hatred, ignorance, and fear. If those feelings could be rooted out and examined somehow, maybe he wouldn’t have to drink so much to squelch the pain of them.

“You don’t have much of an answer to that, do you?”

Would Jonathan be horrified at my cowardice? Would he understand that to argue would be futile, would wound me deeply and do nothing to change him.

“I’m going to get dinner started.” I can hear my mother in my tone with him. “Do you want me to call you when I’m ready to make the hollandaise?”

“The what?” Then he remembers. “Okay. Sure.”

But when it’s time, he slouches against the counter with his hands in his pockets, staring but unseeing as I whisk the egg yolks in a saucepan and add cubes of butter, one at a time.

“It’s so easy, Dad. The only trick is to get the flame as low as possible and keep stirring. It’ll curdle if it gets too hot. Here, you take the whisk.” He takes it and, in a fairly good imitation of me, flicks the wire bulb through the thickening sauce. Hope swells in my chest. I have this idea that if he can make his own hollandaise he’ll be okay. And if he can learn to make both hollandaise and wash his clothes, he won’t need a wife at all.

At the table, A-1 sauce slathered over his rib eye, hollandaise over his asparagus, he is grateful. And very drunk. “You’re a goddamn good cook, you know that?

Lily King is the author of three novels. The Pleasing Hour (1999) won the Barnes and Noble Discover Award and was a New York Times Notable Book and an alternate for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her second, The English Teacher, was a Publishers Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year, a Chicago Tribune Best Book of the Year, and the winner of the Maine Fiction Award. Father of the Rain, her third novel, was published in July, 2010. Lily is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Award. Her short fiction has appeared in literary magazines including Ploughshares and Glimmer Train, as well as in several anthologies. Her website is lilykingbooks.com. Read more about King in her recent Drinking Diaries interview.

How many novels can you name that have a sympathetic recovering alcoholic mother at the helm? For me, nothing comes immediately to mind except Anne Lamott’s Rosie trilogy: ROSIE, CROOKED LITTLE HEART, and now, IMPERFECT BIRDS.

Elizabeth Ferguson, Rosie’s mother, is one of my favorite characters to come around in a long, long time–maybe ever. She’s flawed, yet completely lovable–a widow who mourns for her lost husband, but finds a great guy to love, a bookworm who can’t seem to figure out what she’d like to do with herself in the real world, other than read and hang out with her family, a doting mother who has a hard time with the discipline part of parenting. And–a woman who struggles to stay sober.

I’m reading IMPERFECT BIRDS right now, and you can see the legacy of addictive behaviors from mother to daughter, and how Elizabeth is ripped apart with worry for her beautiful daughter Rosie, who is getting deeper and deeper into alcohol and drug use.

Throughout, there are priceless quotes about AA, mothering, alcoholism and life in general. Here’s one, from the point of view of teenage Rosie: “He told her stuff about the meetings….such as that people there said that AA was for problem drinkers, and Al-Anon for problem thinkers, spouses and parents of alcoholics, who hid out in their rooms, secretly thinking alone, having good ideas on how to rescue and fix the drinker. She pretended to listen.”

Recently, there has been a spate of novels, short stories, memoirs and non-fiction books published that touch on the topic of women and alcohol–Here is just a sampling:

MOMMY DOESN’T DRINK HERE ANYMORE by Rachel Brownell (memoir)

IT’S NOT ME, IT’S YOU by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (personal essays written before the popular blogger/memoirist announced she was quitting drinking)

BLAME by Michelle Huneven (novel)

LIT by Mary Karr (memoir, see excerpt in Drinking Diaries)

“Intervention” a short story in Jill McCorkle’s collection GOING AWAY SHOES

TROUBLE by Kate Christensen (novel w/ lots of unapologetic drinking)

ONCE WAS LOST by Sara Zarr (young adult novel with alcoholic mother)

And for those of you interested in poetry, there’s FLAWED LIGHT: American Women Poets and Alcohol, a non-fiction book about women poets and alcohol.

Some of my personal, perennial favorites:

SMASHED by Koren Zailckas (memoir)

ROSIE by Anne Lamott (novel, featuring a woman struggling with her relationship to alcohol)

AT HOME IN THE WORLD by Joyce Maynard (memoir, & she’s the daughter of an alcoholic)

What are your favorite books that touch on the subject of women and alcohol? Favorite movies? Poems? Please share!

by Leah Odze Epstein

The problem with Al-Anon meetings is they’re not fun. In fact, they’re so depressing, they could drive a person to drink. Okay, so maybe I’ve only ever been to two meetings in my life, and I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but still…

As the daughter of an alcoholic, I sometimes need to vent, and it’s better to vent to people who’ve been in the same position. But couldn’t we  lighten up the mood a little bit? Couldn’t we change up the location so we’re not sitting in the basement of a fluorescent-lit church, on a hard chair, drinking bad coffee?

Were the two Al-Anon meetings I went to eye-opening? Yes. Paradigm-shifting? Yes. But they kind of left me spooked.

One day when I was in my late twenties and living on the Upper West Side of  Manhattan and very few things in my life worked, I felt compelled to drag myself to my first Al-Anon meeting. I was used to fixing things by myself, but the nightly bottle or two of red wine I shared with my best friend just wasn’t working anymore. I was waking up flushed and hung over.

On my way to the meeting, I was riddled with the fear that I’d run into somebody I knew, or worse—that they would ask, “Where are you going?”

Irrational? Well, this is the kind of secrecy and shame I learned as the daughter of an alcoholic. My lifelong code: Don’t let them see you crack. It may have been hard at home, but no one had to know. That would only make them criticize my mother, and by extension, me.

That code made it kind of hard to want to go to a Meeting. In public. But I suppose that’s part of the battle: getting to the meeting to break that feeling of public shame.

As a teenager and young adult, I wore the façade of an untroubled free spirit, so when I walked into the Al-Anon meeting on that crisp Fall evening, it jarred me to look around at my fellow attendees. Like me, most people at the meeting were in their twenties. Unlike me, most of these people exposed their trauma right there for all to see. They were like live wires, with their unlit cigarettes and shaking hands clutching coffee cups. The room buzzed with energy.

I cringed as the guy beside me told of his alcoholic parents locking him in the basement–torturing him. I heard about incest. Evil stepmothers. Runaways. I was nothing like these people. What I’d suffered was long ago. Minimal, compared.

My memories of my mother’s drinking were as fuzzy as a drunk’s vision. I was nine when she stopped drinking. The stories I remembered seemed minor. And yet I carried them around inside of me, like my driver’s license in my wallet with its unflattering photo, slightly out of focus.

The people at the Al-Anon meeting told their stories willingly. I remember thinking they must be so messed up they had no choice but to tell. Then a girl—a beautiful folksinger with long, wavy blonde hair and faded jeans—stood up and spoke. She was an artist, a true free spirit; the girl I was pretending to be. I sat there, listening, my body trembling, as I tried not to cry. Not one single outward detail of her life story resembled mine, yet the emotions rang true.

There, in that room, I finally found people who got it–who felt like me, alone and alienated most of the time, except there, in that room, when they told their stories. I felt those people could help me, if I let them. But I couldn’t bring myself to go back to that depressing room.

Nearly a decade later, plagued by some of the same issues that seem to haunt adult children of alcoholics (control issues? Check. Accept nothing less than perfection? Check. Alienated? Yup), I went to another Al-Anon meeting in the suburbs. Again with the dimly lit room. Again with the hard chairs. Again with the basement. Were we trying to re-create our childhood suffering through the setting? I didn’t get it.

There were only eight of us sitting in a circle, and I was the youngest. No one smoked or drank coffee. The energy in the room was flat. I couldn’t breathe. But I sat there and listened to the forty-something woman with the twisted hands talk about her crippling rheumatoid arthritis and her nightmare mother. I listened to the nearly 300 pound man talk about his bad mother, too. And the woman whose lips barely moved when she, too, spoke of her evil mother.

I never went back to Al-Anon after that. I’m not saying it’s not a lifesaver for many people. I’m sure it is. Still…

Sometimes, I fantasize about the kind of meeting I might like to attend. First off, I wouldn’t call it a meeting. Maybe a Girl’s Night Out. There would be women my age, maybe a bit younger, some a bit older. The women would be smart and funny. Some would have battle scars, but they’d talk about them with humor. Maybe we’d laugh until we cried, sharing our stories, and how we turned out after all that craziness. I picture sitting in a warm cozy place, maybe on a red velvet couch–My fantasy Al-Anon meeting takes place in a restaurant, or a bar.

I shake my head to wake up from my dream–we’re supposed to be scarred by alcohol, bruised. But in my opinion, we’re the lucky ones, the ones who escaped, the ones who didn’t qualify for AA. That calls for celebration: bright lights, a nice glass of wine and a comfortable chair. Or at the very least, a latte.

Leah Odze Epstein is co-editor of Drinking Diaries. You can follow her on Twitter at @Leaheps and you can become a fan of drinking diaries on facebook.

by Caren Osten Gerszberg

I don’t know about you, but my Thanksgiving came with a mixed blessing.

Surrounded by a large number—18 to be exact—of family and close friends, I revel in the togetherness of this day. It is with great joy and appreciation that we fill our family’s table with people we love and consider as family, even if we are not of blood relation. I cook for days, mostly alone, and without stress or anxiety develop a menu including an array of dishes that I know most at our table—kids included—will enjoy. With abandon, I sauté and carmelize, roast and bake and love practically every minute of it. With my husband, I select wines we will drink throughout the afternoon and evening, and make sure all beverages are in check.

Yesterday arrived, and although I wondered if my 24-pound turkey, who I’d named Matilda, would ever actually be done (she took about 6 hours), my hopes were high for a lovely day. My husband and kids played basketball out front in our driveway, and my dog trailed me, sensing when I was going to use the turkey baster and hoping she’d get to lick a drip of anything meat-related. Following an urge to blast some loud music, I decided to be a bit zen and put on Mozart instead of Dave Matthews. The day was going without a hitch.

And then, my mother arrived. At 75, she looks good physically, and I was glad to see her. But the predictable was only moments away.

“Can I please have a glass of wine?” she asked.

“You can have one glass, with dinner, so just wait until then,” I answered.

My mother, a French native who has always loved wine, grew to love it too much about ten years ago, and her love morphed into an addiction which continues to plague me at every event—both big and small, mundane and celebratory.

Moments later, a friend was chasing me around the kitchen, clutching a glass and obviously uncomfortable as my mother anxiously followed her.

“Here, Caren,” she said. “This belongs to your cousin but your mother was drinking it when he got up to go to the restroom. I thought you may want to know.”

I looked at my mother-turned-child, and like the stern authority I needed to be—lest she get drunk, slur her words, and become an embarrassment to her grandchildren—I told her: “NO! You can have some wine with dinner and you need to wait.”

We sat down at the table. She drank a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and without hesitation, asked for more. This continued throughout the meal. And dessert. While we talked Thanksgiving trivia and my son told Thanksgiving jokes, friends were moving the bottles to the other end of the table, trying to make the temptation a little less for my mom. She followed me into the kitchen, asking again and again, until finally, I picked up the phone.

“I need a taxi. How long will it take?” I inquired, trying to breathe deeply and keep calm.

Ten minutes later, I ushered her into a taxi. She complained but I stood firm. I was just trying to cut my losses before it got worse for both of us.

Once she was gone, I could finally relax, but not without feeling brokenhearted. I wanted my mother to be here, to share in a tradition to which she exposed me. For years, she had seamlessly hosted a house full of people, where being grateful went along with a table laden with scrumptious food.

But she’s not the mother I knew. I miss my mother. But I still love Thanksgiving.

Today, one of our favorite social websites, SHE WRITES, is encouraging everyone to buy at least one book written by a woman in 2009. Why? Well, to support women writers, but also in protest of Publishers Weekly’s Top Ten Books of 2009–which featured NOT ONE book by a woman. So, with our hats off to SHE WRITES, here is our pick for a Great Book Written by a Woman in 2009–Mary Karr’s LIT:

We are thrilled to bring you an excerpt from this amazing memoir (reprinted with permission from her publisher, HarperCollins). In this passage, Ms. Karr explores how she bonded with her father through drinking. Something to think about: How has drinking (or not drinking) bonded you with people, or separated you from them?

From LIT:

For the first time in front of me, he drew a pint bottle from under his seat. He put the upended lid in the ashtray, and before he handed the bottle over, he drew out a corner of his shirttail to wipe the top with, saying, Want a swig?

As a kid sitting on the bar, I’d sipped beer through the salted tri- angle of his aluminum can, but Daddy had so long and adamantly denied drinking every day that Mother had long since stopped asking. And he’d sure as hell never handed me any hard liquor.

Daddy’s wink echoed our old conspiracy: me and him against Mother and Lecia, whose tightly guarded collusions were traded in whispers and giggles that he and I were meant to stay deaf to.

The bottle gleamed in the air between us. I took the whiskey, planning a courtesy sip. But the aroma stopped me just as my tongue touched the glass mouth. The warm silk flowered in my mouth and down my gullet, after which a little blue flame of pleasure roared back up my spine. A poof of sequins went sparkling through my middle.

As he went to screw the lid back on, my hand swung out of its own accord, and I said, Can I have another taste?

That taste started me seeking out more hard liquor once I was back at school, though drugs were still easier to come by even than beer. I did okay at old Lackluster College—in no way a star, but neither the abject flop I’d figured on. Daddy carried my grade reports in his ancient wallet.

But it’s a truism, I think, that drunks like to run off. Every reality, no matter how pressing—save maybe death row—has an escape route or rabbit hole. Some drinkers go inward into a sullen spiral, and my daddy was one of these; others favor the geographic cure. My mother taught me to seek external agents of transformation—pick a new town or man or job.

That’s why I left college at the end of my sophomore year: I just got this urge to run off, maybe because friends in a band were heading for Austin. Or all the rich kids were going abroad. Or maybe the course work was getting too hard, and I couldn’t face losing my scholarships and reentering the hairnet. I floundered and skipped classes that winter till, shortly before finals that spring, I just stopped showing up. LIT. Copyright © 2009 by Mary Karr.

Mary Karr is an award-winning poet and best-selling memoirist. Her memoir Lit, which is excerpted above, is the long-awaited sequel to her critically acclaimed and New York Times bestselling memoirs The Liars’ Club and Cherry. To find out more about Mary Karr, or to order a copy of LIT, go to www.harpercollins.com

By Erin St. John Kelly

Late in the afternoon of Easter Sunday, my mother arrived at my house for dinner holding on hard to my stepfather’s arm, sporting a fresh, scabby shiner. She’d managed to fall up the stairs, slamming into the baluster of her staircase the night before. I nudged her towards a chair in my little kitchen as efficiently and subtly as I could, hoping to minimize her mobility and the possibility of another accident.

My mother sat at the head of the table, having a slur of a rant to no one in particular. Among my assembled friends and family, one of my sisters and her daughter sat quietly leaking tears at their places. My eldest daughter left the table after a short while and the rest of the children followed her. Their grandmother was scaring them during the appetizer and they opted for crackers and cheese in the next room instead. She was impenetrable, only vaguely resembling the person they’d known as their grandmother.

My brother James had died earlier that year. It was sudden, out of the blue, and far, far away from my mother’s bucolic college town. She hadn’t been able to say goodbye. She hadn’t seen his body. After he died she lamented that she never should have let him go. As if he’d asked, and as if he would have obeyed. She couldn’t relate to the distant place he’d died except through the story of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” because they too had died in Tupiza, Bolivia. James wasn’t robbing banks and he didn’t die in a shoot-out. He and his wife were backpacking around the world, doing good works, before they would settle down to raise a family. He died of altitude sickness in an Andean emergency room that had no oxygen mask. He came home as a box of ashes.

My mother was raised on an apple farm in Southern Quebec, the middle child of seven girls. She was the first ever in her family to go to college. She survived a bout with breast cancer, a stint in women’s prison for civil disobedience, and Woodstock in the rain, but it was her despair from James’ death that triggered her descent into raging alcoholism.

My mother was so drunk she smelled. She wore the same sweatpants and sweatshirt day in and day out. She had once loved a martini – we called them garbage-tinis because she’d pretend it was good for her by adorning it with limp, brown vegetables culled from the drawers of the fridge, creating a stinky salad in a fancy glass. Now she was pared right down to gin, in a coffee mug, while lying in bed.

My mother has read all of Proust.  She has probably spent more time immersed in the matters of Congress, albeit via C-SPAN, than have most actual Members. As a matter of course, three televisions and at least one radio were on at all times, and two or three daily newspapers were ingested. When we were growing up she took us to rock concerts, peace rallies and hitchhiking through the Yukon.

Then, a cacophonous slide into nothing. The televisions were all on but she didn’t care about what was happening on them. She didn’t know what time of day it was– it was irrelevant. She was either in a rage, or on the verge of one.  She complained that she didn’t hear from us, her children, enough. We did call, but she didn’t remember having spoken to us. One winter my eight-year-old daughter realized that my mother was surprised to see her every time she walked past.  She said to me, “Mom, I am worried about Granny’s memory.”  Mom had provided me a tremendous opportunity to explain the nexus of martinis, mourning and memory.

My five remaining siblings and I felt helpless for more than a year to address her drinking, except among each other.  His death brought the revelation that the family had depended on James, the middle child, to be our emotional and cultural center. Now we had lost him, and it. He was so steadfast, earnest and good. He signed off all his emails from abroad with this Mark Twain quote: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.”

James was also a worry-wort. Be it concern for the global state of humanity or trying to eat healthier, he was on it. No one hated my mother’s drinking like James had.

I hadn’t planned to confront Mom for everyone’s Easter dinner.  I had planned to serve a specially ordered ham instead. I had been rolling around the need to deal with her in my mind, but hadn’t been able to form a real plan of how and when to do it. Turns out, there’s no good time for an intervention with your mother.

It started by accident. I sat next to her and suggested she eat something every now and again, maybe even drink a glass of water. I offered to get her one. She mumbled that she couldn’t, that I just didn’t understand how it felt to be her. She dropped the sickening bomb I knew she had, but didn’t think I had it in me to withstand. She didn’t save it up. It came out fast. “You haven’t lost a child,” she moaned. And everything froze.  All the chopping, washing, table-setting and chat ceased.

My voice shook and I paused. Then I continued, motivated by the eternal regret and sorrow that I’d experience if I let her die without trying to make her stop, just once.

“You haven’t lost a child.” It was what I feared she would say. I felt almost guilty for not having a dead child myself. That without one, I had no understanding and therefore no grounds to complain. “No, I haven’t,” I said. Then it came to me why I could confront her. “But I have lost a brother. And now I am losing my mother. And my children are losing their grandmother.” There was more that just tumbled out, but I can no longer remember what else I said. My mother sat quietly waiting for me to finish. “Well, dear, Mommy loves you very much, but now she has to go,” she said, as she put her hand on my shoulder to raise herself up from the table.

I know that it is completely irrational to feel like James’ death was a personal failure of mine, but there it is. I did. As the oldest child I had always felt a conflicted mix of power and responsibility. I fixed things. I adjudicated. I felt I had failed everyone by not bringing him back from Bolivia alive. At the funeral home in La Paz, I saw him for the last time through the glass window of a little blue coffin.  His shoulders were cramped against the wooden walls of a box built for a small Andean native – the biggest coffin his wife was able to find. I am haunted by his face with his lips pursed in the way they looked before he was going to say something that mattered to him. I couldn’t be so weak as to fail him and the family again, by letting Mom die a drunk.

At my desk on Monday, I wrote my mother an email to restate in print what I’d said at Easter dinner – I was afraid that my spoken words wouldn’t stick. I didn’t know how else to try to get through. I hoped that she would be able to process it, staring at the screen in her own time. In my email I begged her to stop, to take some pity on us – the survivors – her children and her grandchildren. Must we watch her kill herself? And then I typed what I had been unable to say: was the death of one of us worth more than the other five of us alive?

I sent a copy of my email to my siblings right after sending it to my mother. I wanted them to be aware of what I’d done, the possible horrors I’d unleashed. I waited with a panicky, shiny sense of dread for reaction – from them and from her.

Two days later, I was sitting at my desk when an email gently floated across my computer screen that simply said, “You’re right. I quit.” Oh my God, it’s a suicide note I thought, and I dialed the phone, to see if I could stop her or if it was too late. There she was on the other end of the phone. I was at work so I couldn’t say much except, “Really? What can I do to help?”

I thought rehab. “Let me try it my way,” my mother said. “If that doesn’t work then I promise to do it your way,” she said. She and my stepfather joined AA.

It’s been more than a year. She showers. She drinks seltzer and fruit juice spritzers in wine glasses. She goes to weekly AA meetings. A former reporter, she listens intently to other people’s tales of horror and redemption. And she thanks me all the time for writing the note. “I want to be sober until the day that I die,” she announced last summer. I believe her. My mother is nothing if not a zealous participator, a whole-hearted committer to things. She’s recommenced being her old quirky self, protesting for peace in front of the post office, glutting herself on news and stuffing her grandchildren full of snacks.

And now, even her sense of humor is reviving. On Mother’s Day this year she took me and two of my sisters out for dinner. She explained it was to make up for whatever she’d done wrong during our entire lives. She was practicing an AA step, and we had about an hour. We sipped delicious, unembellished tap water and I asked her what the secret element to her resolve was. “Maternal instinct,” she said. “I don’t want to worry the children. It’s not the way it’s supposed be.”

Erin St. John Kelly is the eldest of the eight children from her parents’ many marriages. She and her husband have two daughters. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York for almost 20 years. The writing she is most proud of has appeared in The New York Times, Gourmet Magazine, Brain Child Magazine and on WBFO, the Buffalo NPR station. This essay originally appeared in “Knowing Pains,” an anthology that is a fundraiser for a breast cancer non-profit (http://www.knowingpains.com/about.html“)

By Becky Sherrick Harks

I am an adult child of two alcoholics, and although there are nifty acronyms used to refer to us, I prefer my real name: Becky. The Internet knows me as Aunt Becky and I blog over at a seemingly incongruently named site: “Mommy Wants Vodka.” Perhaps you have heard of me, mixed into articles about Diane Schuler, the lady who killed her kids, bashing me for being a Cocktail Mom.

My blog was named as a tongue-in-cheek joke, which is easily lost in the negativity swirling about the tragedy. Perhaps on paper (or computer screen) this is how I sound: like a lousy drunk who is unfortunately a mother. When, you know, I can sober up enough to actually, you know, parent my children. I hate to shatter expectations to those looking for a quick target to let their anger at alcoholics out on, but I am not a drunk. Humor–tasteless to you, perhaps–is the way that I cope.

In reading up on the other issues facing my cohorts, my fellow children of alcoholics–who also, presumably, have names–I think that in spite of the flack that I get, humor is the far healthier way to handle it. I’ve somehow, by the grace of God, perhaps, been able to avoid many of the nastier lasting effects of my childhood. I am not shy, I do not suffer from low self esteem, and I don’t obsessively hoard china cat figurines.

I do have anxiety and guilt, and I frequently blame myself for things that never had anything to do with me. I cannot trust even my husband with certain things, not because he wouldn’t be unfailingly kind, but because it is ingrained in me to not trust other people.

For all of the controversy surrounding me on The Internet, on the sites that bash me, nothing–NOTHING–can compare to what swirls within me. Every day, every single day that I wake up, I wonder if today will be the day that it hits. We adult children of alcoholics are four times more likely than the general population to develop issues with substance abuse. FOUR TIMES.

For someone like me, who has not one, but two alcoholic parents, this number must be infinitesimally higher. So I wait. Somewhat impatiently, I wait for the day when I will feel the need to become staggeringly drunk and fall down the stairs. Or take to my bed, weeping at what has become of me.

It’s exhausting, this waiting for the other shoe to drop.

But I don’t think that drinking is Of The Devil, no matter how much I hate the smell of scotch and the scent memories that live on, well beyond their lifespan. While I do not recall the last time I had a drink, I have had one and I will continue to have them now and again. The liquor cabinet is well-stocked at my house, and always has been. I’ve not felt the urge to drink myself to obliteration in at least five years and I don’t longingly wait for a cocktail at the end of a long day. Frankly, for as uncool as I will no doubt paint myself now, forever banned from the tattoo-biker moms, I’d be horrified to drink at a playdate.

So I sit and I wait, and while I do this, I build a life for myself: I’m a mother, a writer, a wife and a friend. A daughter. A sister. A niece and a cousin.

My name is Becky, and I am not an alcoholic.

Becky Sherrick Harks is an overachieving nurse who retired from the profession after an admirable 3 months. She stays home now, writing, raising kids and making mischief. She blogs at Mommy Wants Vodka (http://www.mommywantsvodka.com) pretty much every day that ends in “day.”

I’m Leah Odze Epstein, and I am a blogger. Actually, I’m co-editor of Drinking Diaries, and this is my first official off-the-cuff blog post, spurred on by a reader who threw down the gauntlet and said, “Why don’t these bloggers just BLOG?” Hmmm. Good question.

Last night, when I couldn’t sleep (probably because of an overloaded back-to-school schedule, as the mother of three kids), I was thinking about how my mom, a recovered alcoholic who has been sober for over 30 years, explained to me that alcoholism was a disease, and alcohol was not the only cause. It is a disease of the emotions as well as a chemical disease (involving blood sugar issues, the body’s ability to metabolize alcoholic, etc.). She always said to me, “You don’t have the personality for it,” which somehow made me feel better.

Over the years, I’ve debated many people on the disease front–people who don’t believe alcoholism is as much a disease, but a failure of will or a lifestyle choice. It’s confusing, because so-called high functioning alcoholics throw a wrench in the works–can’t everyone just cut down? Isn’t it just a question of moderation and self-control?

For alcoholics, it’s not that easy. My mother had to go through detox–and after that, she was told she should never drink again because she is allergic to alcohol, and she hasn’t.

I would argue that my mother’s definition is true: an alcoholic is someone who is allergic to alcohol, and should never drink again. Just as my husband and daughter have celiac disease, and their bodies cannot tolerate wheat or gluten-containing products, some people have an allergy to alcohol. I think a distinction needs to be made between alcoholics and heavy drinkers, and that the label high-functioning alcoholic can be misleading. Most alcoholics eventually hit rock bottom. Many people can benefit from moderation management, I am sure, but they are probably not alcoholics.

I’m not saying that alcoholics should not make amends to the people they hurt, using their “disease” as an excuse. I’m just arguing for  increased understanding of the distinction between heavy drinking, a drinking problem and the disease of alcoholism.

What do you think, readers? What is your definition of an alcoholic?