Mommies Who Drink Read online

  The names of some of the persons in this work have been changed or are presented in composite form, some of the places and incidents described in this work are the product of the author’s imagination, and some incidental references to celebrities are ficticious.

  Copyright © 2006 by Brett Paesel

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books

  Hachette Book Group USA

  237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017

  Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com

  First eBook Edition: August 2006

  ISBN: 978-0-446-50621-2

  Contents

  Friday

  Prenatal Guru to the Stars

  Busted

  Friday

  Ordinary Madness

  Mommy Groups and Me

  Friday

  Lost and Found

  Ass

  Friday

  Orange Alert

  What to Expect

  Friday

  Slow to Warm

  Secret Society

  Friday

  Witness

  Purse Party

  Friday

  Red Hurt

  Becoming the Woman of My Dreams

  Friday

  It Takes a Gay Village

  Finding My Religion

  Friday

  Lana and the Reverse

  How Much Is that Baby in the Window?

  Friday

  Porn and Magic

  The Standoff

  Friday

  Mom Country

  On Purpose

  Friday

  Blood

  Heroics

  Friday

  Free Bird

  Two?

  Friday

  Faking It

  Kindergarten Fever

  Friday

  Christmas in Mooresville

  Friday

  Murphy’s Eye

  Acknowledgments

  For my guys

  Pat, Spence, and Murph

  Just once in my life—oh, when have I ever wanted anything just once in my life?

  Amy Hempel, “Memoir”

  Friday

  What we’ll do is rent a limo. We’ll do the cocaine at my house, then take the limo to a couple of clubs,” says Lana.

  “Great,” I say, even though it’s not great. I can’t imagine doing cocaine since giving it up twelve years ago, but I don’t want to be left out. I don’t want to be thought a forty-four-year-old mom who is too tired to have a wild night out and too chicken to engage in a little illegal high jinks. Which is, at this point, exactly what I am. And what Lana is, though she’s less likely than me to say it.

  Lana takes a sip from her tall vodka tonic and looks out at the clientele gathering at the bar.

  It’s Friday cocktail hour at Bird’s, a local pub, peopled by trendy Hollywood types. Thin girls with enhanced white smiles, and boys who look like they just woke up from a two-day nap. Some older rocker dudes who probably belonged to the same hair band, twenty years ago.

  Lana, Michelle, Katherine, and I have been meeting here almost every Friday for the last four years. But today it’s just Lana and me. Michelle isn’t here because she’s getting her daughter Faith’s astrological chart done. I know nothing of charts but am curious about how you do an accurate reading for an adopted Chinese kid who was abandoned on a dirt road. Michelle says you work backward, eliminating traits, until you find a likely rising sign (she’s pretty sure Faith was born in December). Katherine’s at the dentist with her son, Jake.

  Lana’s cell phone rings. She dumps the contents of her purse onto the bar and finds the phone.

  “Yes,” she says. “Uh-huh. Just ask them for a cake with The Little Mermaid on it. Or anything with princesses.”

  She pauses while her ex, Tony, presumably absorbs the instructions for ordering their daughter’s birthday cake.

  “Not Sleeping Beauty.”

  She pauses, listens, and takes another sip.

  “Then ask them for anything Disney,” she says, and hangs up, returning to the cocaine conversation. “So it’s just you, me, and Katherine. Michelle said she won’t do blow because it would be her first time, and she thinks she’d be too freaked-out. And my guess is she would be.”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, remembering the one and only time Michelle went over her two-beer limit at happy hour and had a panic attack in the bathroom while the rest of us comforted her from the other side of the door. She finally brought herself down by repeating incantations from The Tibetan Book of the Dead.

  “The thing is, where do we get it?” Lana asks, looking at me like I would know. Because we’ve known each other since I would have known where to get it. Back when I would have had a dozen connections. Most notably an Iranian high roller who I had to call from a pay phone using the code words “atomic action.”

  “Uh-hmmmm,” I say. “I don’t know anymore. I could maybe ask my ant man.”

  “What’s an ‘ant man’?”

  “The guy who comes in and takes care of my ant problem.”

  “You’re going to ask your ant man for cocaine? Why would he know?”

  “Looks like the type.”

  “You can’t ask your ant man for an eight ball. He’ll think you’re out of your mind.”

  “Look,” I say, “you asked me. Why don’t you ask the transgender guy at your gym?”

  “I barely know her.”

  “And another thing, if we do this Sunday, I’ve got to be in bed by at least three in the morning. Spence wakes up at seven for preschool, and I need some downtime.”

  “There’s no getting to bed by three when you’re doing blow.”

  “Okay. So let’s do it the Saturday after this. Then we can sleep in a bit that Sunday morning.”

  Lana grabs her daybook and flips through it. “That’s Saturday the . . . nope. Can’t. Daisy and I are going to a theme birthday party that morning. All the kids have to dress like the Hulk, and all the food is going to be green. I’m not facing that without a full night’s sleep.”

  We pick through the best evenings to have our wild night, rejecting many because of the demands of the next morning. Lana takes two more phone calls. One from Tony, who says that he couldn’t get a princess cake so he had to go with a sea creatures cake, and one from a mommy who wants to switch a play date to two weeks from Sunday.

  Lana snaps her phone closed. “That knocks out that Saturday night too. Frankly, her daughter’s a bad seed. I can’t watch her on a massive coke hangover. I’ll have to get up early that Sunday morning to hide all the matches and knives.”

  It becomes clear over the next hour of happy hour that we are not going to have our big night. Neither one of us says it. The notion simply dilutes and mutates into an afternoon of facials and eyebrow waxing.

  The light fades as we ask for the check. It is close to six o’clock and we are leaving as more hipsters push through the swinging door into the bar. Before Lana lays down her cash she sends a drink over to Jon Anderson, lead singer of Yes. She nods to the long-haired, middle-aged rock god. He raises a glass to her.

  As I watch their exchange, I am filled with nostalgia for the girls Lana and I once were. The girls we were before we had children.

  I walk home from the bar having promised to watch Daisy on Tuesday so that Lana can go to a movie by herself. I walk slowly because I want to think. I want to think about how I started out being that girl who would have easily spent an evening doing half a gram of coke in the back of a limo with her girlfriends, and ended up being this woman making slow progress home to read stories to her two children (before curling up on a couch to read her own book while her husband watches Celebrity Poker on Bravo).

  I think about the hazy, lonely mon
ths that followed my first son’s birth four years ago. I remember being desperate for relief and looking for answers in books. Books with titles like Surviving the First Year, The Girlfriend’s Guide to the First Year, What to Expect the First Year, So It’s Your Baby’s First Year, The Natural Mother’s Guide to the First Year, The Dummy’s Guide to the First Year, First Year—Best Year, and When Bad Things Happen to Good People.

  Months of shapeless afternoons fuzzed into each other while Spence slept or ate or cried. Sometimes, as he screamed, I’d put him on his back on the living room floor and go into my room to lie on my bed. The bed would become a floating raft. I’d close my eyes—Spence’s dissonant aria stereophonically blaring from a distant shore—and drift, the books hidden in the folds of musty blankets. Eventually, I’d pick one up and turn to the index to look up “Crying.” When I’d flip to the indicated page, I’d find a paragraph that told me to burp my baby, walk him around, check to see if something was poking him, feed him. Of course, I’d done these things. Then I’d flip to the index to look up “Nonstop, nonspecific, hostile crying.” No listing.

  None of the books had chapters on what seemed immediately relevant to me. I’d imagine chapters like:

  STOP YOUR BABY FROM CRYING—FOREVER. Six foolproof and safe ways to make your home a crying-free zone.

  And:

  EASY, TWO-WEEK PROGRAM FOR GETTING YOUR PERSONALITY BACK. This program concentrates on exercises that remind you of the woman you used to be. Exercises include making lists of things that used to interest you and looking at old picture albums to remind yourself of what you looked like before someone’s life depended on you.

  And:

  YOU ARE NOT YOUR BABY’S BIOLOGY. Invaluable suggestions for ways to keep a stimulating conversation going while nursing or changing a diaper. Beginning with the admonishment to steer away from openers like “Sam did the cutest thing” and “Should I be concerned about mustard-colored bowel movements?”

  And I dreamed of chapters like:

  SMOKING: THE ROAD BACK TO SANITY AND A GOOD FIGURE.

  And:

  YES, SOME BABIES HAVE DIED WHEN LEFT ALONE IN THE BATHTUB—BUT HERE ARE MANY WHO SURVIVED AND THRIVED.

  And:

  TAKE A VACATION. Studies debunk the “first five years are the most important” theory in favor of research that shows that most successful and happy children’s personalities were formed when parents were away in Europe.

  And, of course:

  WHAT PARENTING EXPERTS DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT THE SECRET BENEFITS OF COCAINE.

  I began to realize that no book was going to tell me what I wanted to hear, which was that I would be the same person after the baby as I was before the baby.

  I spent the days mourning the loss of my past self with as much intensity as I would the death of a lover. I raged against the limitations mommyhood placed on me. I rebelled against what seemed like an American groupthink about what mommies should be: dull, doughy, desexualized, and almost pathologically interested in all children and all things having to do with children. Parenting magazines showed me how to make jiggly lollipops out of Jell-O, how to have fun with felt, and how to make little forests out of broccoli in order to interest my child in eating it. When what I really wanted was a stranger to fuck me blind in a parking lot after loading me up on margaritas and Thai stick. Or at least the strictures of my Lilliputian life make me think that’s what I wanted.

  Those first few months that I spent listening to Spence’s crying started to form a shaky bridge to a new country. I felt the slowness of the days. I felt the weight of his dependence. I looked back with vague longing and could not look forward, because the terrain was wholly different and unfamiliar.

  It was terrain I would begin to explore with others of my kind.

  Prenatal Guru to the Stars

  I sit with the phone in my hand, my pregnant belly pressing against the rim of the dining room table. Boredom dulls my brain like Novocain.

  Who should I call next? I’ve already called my mother, a friend in Philadelphia, Office Depot, and a closet organizing company. I’ve ordered two sets of sheets for the crib and canceled a pedicure.

  I look down at my taut tummy, swollen to accommodate the size of a seven-month-old fetus. The fetus is Spence, but I don’t know that yet.

  I imagine my tummy splitting down the middle, everything inside me spilling out.

  What a thought.

  I call my husband, Pat, on his cell phone. He’s on the set of Friends, playing the part of a smart-ass maître d’ who hassles Joey for not wearing a jacket.

  “Honey, I’ve only got a minute,” he says.

  In the background I hear the assistant director calling everyone to the stage.

  “I’m thinking of calling Dr. Sammy and having him do a C-section this afternoon,” I say. “The books all say that the baby is basically done by now.”

  “Honey,” says Pat, “I read those books too. And they say that the baby still needs to make kidneys for itself.”

  Pat throws this logical horseshit around when I least need it.

  “Never mind,” I say, and hang up.

  I look out the window and consider taking a walk or a nap. Both of which would require me leaving this chair.

  I dial Lana.

  “You feel like the man who had to be buried in the piano crate. Right?” she says.

  “Mmmm . . .”

  “You know you’ve got to keep moving.”

  “I don’t want to move.”

  “Look, you’ve got to get up and move around. Do something. Go take that prenatal yoga class with Rananda. Remember when I went?”

  “You hated her.”

  “I did not.”

  “You said that you thought she might be a man.”

  “I was hormonal. Look,” says Lana. “Pick up a Redbook. There’s an interview with Cindy Crawford. Rananda coached her through her pregnancy.”

  “You’re reading Redbook?”

  “I was in a doctor’s office.”

  I’m not convinced. I think that maybe all the shifts and swings of having given birth turned Lana into a closet Redbook subscriber. I’m tempted to confront her, but there are places you don’t go, even with your best friend.

  At Los Angeles Life Works—Center for Yoga, I sit in a little waiting area watching the other pregnant women around me. Most of them are gorgeous actresses, their little round bellies poking out of loosely tied sweatpants. I recognize some of them as women I’ve competed with for two-line parts on marginal sitcoms.

  A fresh-faced girl sets down a big clay pot of yogi tea and a plate of graham crackers. The women help themselves to tea and nibble on the edges of their crackers. I take four crackers. I eat one, put one aside, and stash two in my purse for later.

  “Well, of course, I’m having a home birth,” someone says. “But I haven’t settled on a doula yet.”

  “What’s a doula?” I ask.

  She flashes a gorgeous Meg Ryan smile at me. “A doula helps you through your birth. She keeps you focused and helps you when you feel like you’re going to get weak and ask for pain medication.”

  I find this information useless and uninteresting, as I’ve been thinking of asking my doctor if I can start getting epidurals now. I want to ask if Rananda has cures for the bad smell I’ve started to emanate, but decide to sit back and not tip my hand. Maybe no one can smell me but me.

  Another woman says, “I had a friend whose doula had her on her feet and washing the blood out of her sheets only two hours after she gave birth.”

  I start to wonder what kind of sick trip these women are on, when a bell rings and they all rise to go into the classroom. I grab another graham cracker and pull myself to standing by grabbing onto a statue of Vishnu.

  About forty pregnant women sit on yoga mats facing a stage draped with Oriental carpets. Swooping gauze creates a canopy over a huge gong, an ornate pillow, and an elaborate sound system. The women speak in hushed tones.

 
Expectation hangs in the air.

  After a few minutes there’s some rustling and a breeze, then the tinkle of a bell. At this, all murmuring stops as the women hold a collective breath. They turn toward a door, which opens noiselessly. A small woman enters. I guess, by the shifting of the crowd, that this is Rananda. She’s dressed in filmy white and she smiles like she’s canonized. She walks onto the stage and turns toward us as she adjusts a head mic around her turban. She pauses for a moment, looking out over our heads, then picks up a huge padded stick and bangs the gong.

  “Welcome,” she says, her voice amplified. “As you know, there are three kinds of people in the world. There are men, women, and pregnant women.” An approving rumble moves through the crowd.

  I don’t know what this means. But it looks like I’m in the in crowd, and that’s always a good feeling. I want to pull a cracker out of my purse but resist.

  “I was talking to Cindy the other day,” she says, “and Cindy said that her home birth was magical and that she was becoming her animal self. She is spending this time in bed with her child, nursing and rocking.”

  She lets this land with a long pause.

  “Now,” she says, “we will introduce ourselves. Give your name, your doctor’s name, and tell us where you are having your baby.”

  The women start introducing themselves. Most of them are having their babies in hospitals. But a few say, “My name is whatever, and my doctor is whozits, my doula is Hari something, and I’m having a home birth.”

  When a woman says she’s having a home birth, the group turns toward her en masse and beams, while Rananda mutters approvingly, “Home birth.”

  Near the end of the introductions a woman says that she’s two weeks overdue with her fourth baby and she’s going to have a home birth with a Hari doula.

  Rananda looks like she could die now and her work would be done.

  “This is Anna,” she says in well-modulated tones. “She is having her fourth baby at home. Stand up, Anna.”

  The effort required for Anna to do this makes it look like this might be her last act. She rolls onto her knees, then straightens her legs. Her butt wavers in the air a bit as she walks her hands as close to her feet as her belly will allow. When she gets to standing, she rocks back and forth on her feet, until she manages to turn herself around to face us. She’s six feet tall and looks like a Helga painting. Her gray sweatshirt stretches around her belly, which is big as a planet. I can’t take my eyes off her belly. It’s the biggest live thing I’ve ever seen. It puts me in mind of a giant mushroom a friend of mine had growing under his bed in a pot of water—organic and freakish.