by Caren Osten Gerszberg

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s everything cozy—autumn’s chunky sweaters, deep red wine and warm cider, hearty food, a roaring fire and most of all, close family and friends—jammed into one wonderful day.

I cook for days, mostly alone, and with little stress develop a fairly traditional menu, including an array of dishes that I know most at our table—foreign, health-conscious and kids included—will enjoy. With abandon, I sauté and carmelize, roast and bake and love practically every minute of it. Just like my mother once did.

This year, however, Thanksgiving will be different–a sort of unfortunate transition–as it’ll be the first one without either of my parents present. My father passed away six years ago, and my mother, who is still alive, is not invited. It’s not to say that I don’t want her here, because I do. But I’m choosing not to have her join because her acute anxiety, depression, and alcohol problem have reached such an intense level that I don’t feel like subjecting myself, my family and our friends to her behavior. It may sound cold, but truthfully, I am full of sadness about it and not sure if it’ll feel like a relief or a gaping hole come next Thursday.

This year, I will celebrate a version of Thanksgiving with my mother—one day early. My husband, kids and I will go to the assisted living community where she lives and celebrate with her on Wednesday. I’m not sure that she’ll notice or care that she’s not with us on the actual day. But all I’ll have to do is remember the difficulty of a previous thanksgiving to remind myself that I’m doing the right thing.

This is how it went previously.

Thanksgiving arrived, and although I wondered if my 24-pound turkey, which 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 77, she looked 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 chased me through the kitchen, clutching a glass and obviously uncomfortable as my mother followed closely behind her.

“Here, Caren,” she said. “This belongs to your cousin but your mother was drinking it when he got up to go to the bathroom. 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 kicked back a glass of Sauvignon Blanc, and without hesitation, asked for more. Her request for more wine was relentless and continued throughout the meal. And dessert. While we talked Thanksgiving trivia and my son told some turkey jokes, friends began passing 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 that she didn’t want to leave, 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 beautiful family tradition that we’d always shared–despite her not being born in this country. 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 adoring mother I knew. I miss that mother. But I still love Thanksgiving.

Caren Osten Gerszberg, a freelance journalist, is co-editor of Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up, just named one of the “Best Bathroom Books 2012“ by The New York Times.

Each week, we post short interviews with interesting people about their thoughts and feelings on women and drinking. There is such a wide array of perspectives about this topic, and we are excited to gain insight into as many as possible and to share them with you. 

Chloe Caldwell is the author of the essay collection, Legs Get Led Astray. Her non-fiction has appeared in The Rumpus, Nylon Magazine, The Nervous Breakdown, Chronogram, The Frisky, The Sun Magazine, SMITH Magazine, Jewcy, Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood, Vol 1. Brooklyn, Freerange Nonfiction and The Faster Times.She is the founder and curator of the Hudson River Loft Reading Series and has taught Creative Writing workshops at Omega Teen Camp, The Hudson Opera House, and Crow Arts Manor. Chloe splits her time living in upstate New York and Portland, Oregon.

Chloe Caldwell: I tried sips of my dad’s beer as a kid, I’m pretty sure. Maybe around age nine. When I was twelve-ish, I had a bunch of girlfriends sleep over and we snuck into the pantry and drank some disgusting expired spirits. Or maybe we were just drinking balsamic vinegar.

How did/does your family treat drinking?

My parents both drink, but we never had an alcoholism problem in our family. Sometimes my dad will drink a beer with dinner, sometimes he won’t. My mom likes her red wine and nothing else. There’s always a decent amount of alcohol at family gatherings.

How do you approach alcohol in your every day life?

I try to be smart. I’ll ask myself if I really feel like drinking. This is new for me. I used to just drink more than I should. My eyes were bigger than my stomach. I’m trying to be more mindful in everything I do–drinking and eating, especially.

Have you ever had a phase in your life when you drank more or less?

I drank the most when I was twenty-one through twenty-three. It’s when I was living in New York City, and I was drinking something of a disgusting amount of mixed drinks most days and nights.

What’s your drink of choice? Why?

Red wine. It relaxes me. Holy shit, I sound exactly like my mom.

Can you tell us about the best time you ever had drinking?

I’ve had lots of good times drinking. But in truth, I think the best time drinking I’ve ever had was in high school. My senior class was really tight and on Friday and Saturday nights we’d always go to a  boy named Lars’s barn, to hang out. The barn was empty except for a large mirror covering one wall. We danced for hours to Kanye West and Eminem and R.Kelly and drank Budweiser and Coors Lite.

What about the worst time?

Any time I cry in public or act like an aggressive douche-bag.

Do you have a favorite book, song, or movie about drinking?

I would like to read Are You There Vodka? It’s me Chelsea. I like when Elliott Smith sings, “With an open container from Seven Eleven…” and when Connor Oberst sings, “Cause there’s this switch that gets hit and it all stops making sense and in the middle of drinks maybe the fifth or sixth, I’m completely alone at a table of friends…I feel nothing for them, I feel nothing, nothing.” And Hush Arbors have a song where they sing, “There’s whiskey in that bottle and blood on the floor..”

What do you like most about drinking?

That it changes me.

Why do, or don’t you, choose to drink?

I think any time we use a substance, be it coffee, alcohol, or drugs, it’s to escape ourselves a little bit. Like in The Lemonheads song “Drug Buddy” he sings, “I’m too much with myself, I wanna be someone else.”

Question: Is it okay to serve Coq Au Vin–or other alcohol-soaked dishes–to someone in recovery?

Answer: Not necessarily.

Holiday season is houseguest season, which means cooking for a crowd, which means knowing your guests’ food allergies, aversions and issues.

While most of us understand that it’s important to have a selection of nonalcoholic beverages for those who don’t, or can’t, drink, many of us wouldn’t think twice about serving alcohol-soaked dishes to those same people. “The alcohol’s cooked in!” we say. But is it really?

In a recent post for the Diner’s Journal blog on the New York Times website, Tara Parker-Pope explored the issue. When she asked Dr. Harry Haroutunian, physician director of the Betty Ford Center, he said, “Alcohol’s boiling point is lower than that of water, and many cooks assume that little or none of its potency remains after cooking…that is simply not true and quite dangerous thinking for anyone in recovery.” Cooked food, according to Dr. Haroutunian, can retain from 5 to 85 percent of the original alcohol, depending on the cooking method and how much alcohol was used in the preparation.

You can read Parker-Pope’s entire discussion here.

What has your experience been—have you served dishes prepared with alcohol to people in recovery? Why or why not? If so, what was their reaction?

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By J.L. Scott

I love you more than anything right now. I love you even when you’re shitty beer, or at the bottom of somebody’s abandoned cocktail glass left on a sticky bar or when I drink an entire bottle of wine before a first date, then head to the bar, already knowing I’ll probably do something I regret. I love you more than the four iPhones, two friendships, and one pair of shoes I’ve lost or broken while drunk.

It wasn’t a straightforward romance. I knew I was looking for something, but I didn’t know it would be you. After all, bulimia and I were flirting pretty hard and heavy when I was introduced to you, a month after I turned 16. I met you via tequila shots in my friend Viv’s basement after a homecoming game. My hands were chapped from the cold of walking the mile from the football field to her house without gloves, and I hated the way my cracked skin tasted as I licked the salt that lay above the knuckle on my thumb. I hated the way the tequila burned down my throat. But I did four shots anyway. Afterwards I felt alive, funny, enervated. The world seemed a lot less scary and cold.

Still, for a long time, we maintained a pretty tepid affair. My main concern was the calories. I desired to be skinny more than anything else, and I didn’t know how to reconcile the amount of booze it would take to get a buzz, with the endless minutes on the treadmill or the effort it took to find an empty bathroom stall and stick my finger down my throat. Maybe I would have tried coke, but by then, I was attending a rural woman’s college, and the idea of trying find it seemed far too daunting. Besides, I was an annoyingly good girl—one of those people who never missed a lecture, who always had her hand raised, who felt guilty if I skipped a workout.

But I was also hungry—for carbs, always, but also for adventure, for breaking the rules, for the dark corners of my mind I was afraid to explore. And so even though I didn’t drink a ton, I still went out a lot, felt the rush of excitement when my roommate and I went to a neighboring school’s frat parties and I let a guy’s hands touch me everywhere, allowed his fingers to flutter against the waistband of my jeans and knew that was code for heading to a barely-used meeting room upstairs. And so although I wasn’t drunk when I lost my virginity—a frat boy on top of me, me still wearing my pink faux vintage t-shirt that read Wildcat in glittery script—I might as well have been. And that night, coming back to my own dorm room, after terrible sex, was when it clicked: Alcohol made things happen. It was a conduit to excitement, a conduit to being someone I wasn’t. Being someone extraordinary.

So the seed was planted. But I was still coy with you—I remember, I had leftover beers in my dorm room when I was packing up after freshman year. I tossed them in the free box without a second thought. “You actually have leftover alcohol?” a sophomore asked incredulously, popping the cap with her dorm key. “That’s incredible.”

I shrugged. I felt superior to her. I had better things to do than drink beer at 2 P.M. on a Saturday afternoon.

And then came sophomore year and a transfer to a college in New York City and endless amaretto sours and cosmos all over Manhattan. My roommate and I always got drinks for free, because we were pretty-ish and we ordered ridiculous technicolor drinks, and it seemed the drunker we were, the more boys and bartenders would pay attention to us. We drank like it was our job, and we were very, very good at it. I loved the fact that five drinks could slide a Saturday night into a night of adventure, into so many firsts: First time making out in the back of a cab, first time having sex outside, first time staying up all night and watching the sun rise while drinking wine from the night before.

And then there were the bad firsts: First time blacking out (shitty complimentary boxed white wine at the Chinese restaurant that didn’t card), first time having no clue whether or not I had sex (a flurry of text message exchanges the next day confirmed that I had), first time throwing up all over myself (at a black tie affair where I was supposed to be a volunteer.)

But ultimately, it didn’t much matter, because I was in love. And once I graduated from college and began working an entry-level job at a magazine, it seemed the feeling was mutual. My salary wasn’t glamorous, but the perks—endless parties, open bars, plenty of three-course lunches with literary idols and an office where champagne was often uncorked as a reward for getting through late nights—were amazing. Drinking served as the common ground I had with my seemingly way more sophisticated colleagues, and the drunker I got, the more comfortable I felt in my skin. Each drink was bringing me closer to becoming the sexy, smart girl I desperately wanted to be.

“What do you like more, drinking or sex?” I was 23, and the question—ridiculous, implausible—was asked by the guy I was sleeping with. At one time, we had been on track to actually date, but that had been before I’d called his number 12 times in a row, before I showed up at his door, bleeding and crying, before he told me one night that I was too drunk to sleep with and put me to bed on his couch.

I paused, silence hanging between us. The answer was so obvious. Sex was awkward, embarrassing. It was the opposite of drinking.

“I know,” he sighed and rolled away: A jealous lover. “You love your booze.”

By that point, it was so obvious. I loved drinking, at happy hours, at work events, alone in my apartment. For the past five years, it’s been a one-sided love affair, and the stakes have only gotten higher and higher. I’m older. Fewer of my friends think that an open-bar invite has the same appeal that it did when we were in our early twenties. It’s not cute anymore. And I don’t seem to have the same handle on drinking as I did. I’ve had five blackouts in the past two months. I know that’s not okay. What’s even worse is the endless effort and energy it takes to parse together the events of the previous evening, and then, once the pieces are put together, to try as hard as humanly possible to forget them—usually by drinking again.

Snapshot: In bed with my ex-boyfriend, making myself throw up into his wastepaper basket next to his night table, so proud that I still remembered the exact right touch on the back of my throat that would make myself heave. I’d come to his place directly from girls’ happy hour. As soon as I came in, he was worried I had alcohol poisoning, and was about to bring me to the hospital. I thought vomiting in front of him on purpose would prove that I was okay.

Snapshot: In a cab with my boss, who was nice enough to take me home from a party, and me totally forgetting my address until she walked up and down the street with me until I finally recognized my building.

“Feeling okay today?” She asked the next morning, avoiding eye contact.

“I should have eaten last night,” I said ruefully, staring at a spot on the floor.

“Lesson learned?” She asked, half-grimacing.

I knew I was supposed to say something else: That I was sorry, that it would never happen again, that it was completely inappropriate and I really appreciated her trying to gloss over everything. But I didn’t. Because saying all that would be an admission that the night before had really happened.

I stayed at the office extra-late that night, chugging coffee, attempting to seem responsible and in control.

Snapshot: Waking up on my couch, surrounded by empty bottles and half-eaten plates of food. It had been my housewarming party, and I only remembered the first ten minutes.

Snapshot: Waking up next to my cracked phone in the hazy light of five A.M. I’m in my bed, but there’s a huge purple bruise that extends from the top of my shoulder to my elbow that takes my breath away. A trail of dried blood sticks on my forehead and in my hair, all coming from a scratch on my temple. Did I fall? Did I get into a fight? Was I attacked? I text the last friend I remember seeing that night, and she says she put me in a cab. That day at work, I kept shrugging my shoulder out of my cardigan, in awe of the purple-ish bruise spreading down my arm.

But after the embarrassments subside and the bruises disappear, I can smooth over each incident and make it sound like no more than a kind of cringe-worthy mishap. But I’m so terribly afraid that my luck is going to run out, that I’m going to lose what I’ve still managed to hang on to. My job, my friends, my life.

So I’m going to try so hard to quit. But right now, I love you so much that I can’t imagine how I’m going to live the rest of my life without you. There’s so much I still don’t know about you: I still don’t know the difference between Malbec and Merlot, I never got around to drinking Scotch straight up, I’ll never have you in my hands during my wedding.

If I even get married.

Because that’s the thing: In every possible way, I’m worried you’ve ruined me for anyone. You’ve turned my life into a series of mishaps and mistakes and awful nights and even worse mornings after, but I still keep going back to you. And you’re always there.

Which is why even though I’m scared and angry and confused as all hell, I’m going to bow out of happy hours. Pour out the vodka in my freezer. Head to A.A. I’m going to try to walk away from the twisted life we’ve created together. But I’m keeping the wine glasses in my cabinet. Just in case.

This piece originally appeared on The Fix, a website about addiction and recovery. J.L. Scott is the pseudonym for a prominent magazine writer who lives in New York.

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I don’t know about you, but I drank like a fish in college. Part of the reason was that alcohol was everywhere: free and cheap. The “campus pub” across the commons from my dorm (yes, the drinking age was lower then) offered one dollar kamikaze shots in little plastic shot glasses, so we’d line em up on the bar. Fraternity parties lured unsuspecting freshmen girls with free beer (even if it did taste like water).

So–does free and cheap booze lead to binge drinking? Which came first–the chicken (in this case, the eager freshmen) or the egg?

The UK is dealing with this problem in a big way, especially since the statistics about rising alcohol use are sobering. According to the Economist: “In the past 50 years Britons’ consumption of alcohol has more than doubled, though it remains somewhat lower than it was at the start of the 20th century. British livers are feeling the strain: cases of cirrhosis are on the increase, just as they are declining elsewhere in Europe. The national binge has at least in part been caused by low prices: although booze has got more expensive in real terms over the past 30 years, it has become a lot cheaper relative to earnings, and is about 70% more affordable now than it was in 1980.”

In some supermarkets in Great Britain (Sainsbury’s and Tesco, for example), beer is cheaper than bottled water. At Sainsbury’s, a two litre plastic bottle of alcoholic “cider” costs the equivalent of $1.94, according to the Economist. Also on the shelves: an even stronger variety of cider, with the incentive that the more you buy, the deeper the discount will be.

Does dirt-cheap alcohol cause people to drink more than they normally would? Supporters of a growing temperance movement in the UK, along with health experts, are saying it does, and they are seeking to end the sale of cheap booze. A compelling parliamentary report released in December detailed Britain’s growing alcohol problems, but the government has yet to approve minimum pricing laws.

Instead, on Tuesday, according to the Huffington Post, the government said it would ban “irresponsible promotions and boozy contests such as the “dentist’s chair”–where alcohol is poured directly into customers’ mouths – in an effort to tackle Britain’s binge-drinking problem.”

Some feel that it’s unfair to take away cheap booze during a recession, and they argue that if minimum pricing is enforced, responsible drinkers will be unfairly penalized. I say: As much as I love my ice cream and my wine, those are luxuries, so I don’t mind if they’re priced a bit higher. And I don’t really need a stockpile of cheap ice cream or wine in my fridge to tempt me.

So what do you think? Do you think cheap booze encourages drinking? Do you mind paying a bit more for your luxuries?  Can you imagine if stores did 2 for 1′s and promos on fresh fruits and vegetables instead of junk food and cheap liquor? I’m just saying..