by RhoRho

I’ve always said that I don’t trust people who don’t drink (yes, even out loud), so it’s only fitting that I’m married to someone who shares my affection for the booze.  We’re married with children, a dog, a mortgage and a ton of bills, and we do what most parents we know do to take the edge off at the end of the day: we drink. We don’t take any prescription or street drugs, we don’t smoke cigarettes or gamble away the family’s money on slot machines. We drink.

Sometimes my husband, who typically drinks quite responsibly, can get off his game. A few times a year, he gets around an old buddy, starts mixing it all up like a kid in a candy store, and gets good and shit-faced. He starts with vodka and Red Bulls, then goes to beer, then maybe some of my wine. He loses any shred of common sense. But me, I’m too fuzzy myself in those situations to notice, and sometimes, he doesn’t even appear to be all that drunk. But the next morning, he awakens, throws his arm across his forehead, lifts one knee up toward the ceiling, and coughs a little bit. This is when I know. The Hangover.

Now, normal people like me awaken, acknowledge the Hangover, moan a little bit, and get on with it. We have kids to feed, duties to perform, coffee to make. Not my husband. He is famous for the all-day hangover, and when he “pulls one,” as I have come to call it, he is either in the bed or hugging the toilet until about seven o’clock at night, when he suddenly pops up, takes a hot bath, and starts cleaning the house or something crazy like that.  He may not drink for a week or two after a really bad one, and I get lonely for my drinking buddy. If I do suffer from overindulging, I am out of commission (meaning wine) for one, two days, tops. What if I pulled an all-dayer, I ask?

When I see the first sign – the arm flinging over the forehead, I get furious. And I don’t mean furious on the inside, I mean steaming mad and threatening him with his life.  It’s not like, at the time, he has much control over his body, but my point is that, by God, he should’ve used his head last night and stuck to Michelob Ultra. I can’t be the booze police and have my own fun too! He has to be in fresh air to even try to recover, so on the last one, he got his ass up and out of the bed and into the yard, where he chopped wood in the rain… as he puked. What must the neighbors have thought? “That bitch runs a tight ship,” that’s what they thought.

At this point, yes, the booze is our stress relief, but when we think about the thousands of dollars that could be sitting cozily in the bank, we do question ourselves. And those dozens of hours lost on all those Saturdays, while the kids are asking, “Mommy what’s wrong with Daddy?” are irreplaceable, and he lost them to something as ridiculous as bingeing like a frat boy.

I do get nervous before a night out, and start threatening him before he even thinks about mixing. He doesn’t want The Hangover any more than I do. And me, I want a husband I can take places. But to his credit, it has dwindled down to only a few times a year.

We don’t really see ourselves ever giving it up totally, and we question what we would do if there were ever an ultimatum. Spouse or alcohol? Could the former even cope with the other if not for the latter? Make sense? So for now, we’re trying to be responsible drinkers, take taxis so the DHS doesn’t come get our kids, and enjoy it rather than depend on it. We’re trying, I said. Our own little Days of Wine and Roses.

RhoRho is a mother of two, wife, freelance writer, blogger, kid taxi service, budget traveler and wine enthusiast, among other things. She has been freelance writing here and there for several years, with writing for a magazine like National Geographic Traveler being one of her many ultimate goals. Rhonda lives with her husband, two kids, a Welsh Corgie and a Dwarf bunny, and travels whenever possible. Her blogs are: Momwhodrinksandcusses and Wine4poorishfolk

by Helene Stapinski

My husband and I have a drinking problem.

It’s not your typical “drinking too much” problem. It has to do with something most people don’t think twice about when consuming their beverages. Particularly their alcoholic beverages. But with us, it’s a real problem. An issue, I would say.

The problem is ice.

Wendell, my husband, loves ice. He loves to make ice and is obsessed with having buckets of his homemade ice available at all times. Until I married him, I never even thought about ice. It was one of those things, like air or water, which was always just there, sort of, on the periphery. Something I took for granted and didn’t care much about. He likes to say I am ice challenged. But I like to think I’m simply normal. He, I think, is the one with the problem.

Like all drinking problems, this one originates with our families. Wendell is from an upper middle class family of WASPs, the kind who have a civilized cocktail in the parlor at 6 before dinner – a neatly shaken gin martini perhaps, with an olive and the thinnest chards of ice floating on top. Or they’ll have a scotch on the rocks. Or vodka on the rocks. Whatever it is, it’s usually on the rocks.

My family never really had any alcohol in the house, which is not to say we were a family of teetotalers. Hardly. We lived above a tavern, so my father’s “parlor” was downstairs at the Majestic, where he sat after work at 5 o’clock each night with his buddies, guzzling a beer and a shot in a tiny glass. Maybe two or three. No ice.

He arrived home for dinner at 6 lightly toasted. Whenever we had company, or whenever my mother was feeling especially wild, she pulled out the jug of screw-cap Manischewicz wine that my uncle got for free from working at the local Manischewicz factory in Jersey City. It was red and sweet and awful and served at room temperature, as red wine should be – although this stuff was barely wine. More like fortified grape juice.

Whenever anyone asked for ice, my mother would take it from the freezer and place it in a bowl and put it, uncovered, on the kitchen table. There was no ice bucket. Twenty minutes later, we had a big bowl of cold water.

It wasn’t until I was a grown up and traveled to the village that my mother’s family came from in Italy that I learned why my family was ice challenged. There was no ice in Southern Italy. You were lucky to even have water.

When I was a kid, if one of us wanted a sip of that Manischewicz wine from the table, the grownups allowed it. “Why not?” they would say. “All the children drink wine in Italy.” But the only reason the children drank wine was that it was safer than the water. There was no water. No clean water anyway.

Hence, no ice.

Wendell’s family, on the other hand, are descendants from the Mayflower pioneers and have had centuries here in America to develop their fondness for the finer things in life – especially ice. His father likes to tell the story about how he and Wendell’s mom had a party once and – horror of horrors – ran out of ice a half hour in. The man has lived in fear of running out of ice ever since. I wouldn’t be surprised if he discussed this with his therapist. (In my family there was no ice, and of course, no therapist).

Whenever we’re planning a party, my husband calls me every few hours to remind me to empty the ice trays into the ice holder in the freezer and then implores me to MAKE MORE ICE! I say okay, then get distracted and forget, because ice is not a priority for me. It is not a way of life.

“Why can’t we just get bags of ice from the supermarket before the party?” I ask, shrugging.

He shakes his head at me and acts as if I’m a heretic. “It’s not the same,” he says. “You need to make your own.”
Whenever we go out for drinks, he orders an extra glass on the side midway through, filled with fresh, new ice cubes to fill his drink with. It’s one of those weird little marriage ticks that I have accepted and find charming now.

Because I love him so much, I bought Wendell special ice trays on e-bay last year for our wedding anniversary. They’re the old fashioned kind, the metal ones that your wet fingers will fuse to if you don’t dry them well enough. The kind you have to pull up on with the metal lever to get the ice loose. The cubes are big and impressive and sit in my Friday evening cocktail, the one I have at 6 o’clock in the parlor.

Helene Stapinski is the author of the bestselling memoir Five-Finger Discount: A Crooked Family History, and Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music.  She has written articles for The New York Times, New York magazine, Food & Wine, Travel & Leisure and Salon. Find out more about Helene at http://www.randomhouse.com