About five years ago, I had a serious drinking problem. On the evening Chloe was born, I staggered from the hospital bed, holding my fresh cesarean together, high on morphine, and went outside the San Francisco hospital, met up with my friend Robbie, and we split drinks of Jack Daniels and Coke. The Coke made the whiskey much more tolerant. I had never had whiskey before, but that night started a binge drinking that lasted for six months. I was in a horrible place, mentally, having been raped just twenty one days before the binging started, and no one believed me. Women who aren’t virgins can’t be raped. Men you have previously had consensual sex with cannot rape you. Pregnant women aren’t sexually desirable, so they cannot be raped. I fear that doctor is still practicing in the state of Louisiana.

Today, I had my first bottle of whiskey-Jack Daniels-since November of 2005. I drank it straight. I even bought a small bottle of Coke, poured the Coke out and filled the bottle with whiskey. Then just drank it. Straight whiskey. It made my liver recoil in horror. At this point, I didn’t care. I was in almost the same place I was in when I started drinking before: Something awful had happened to me, and I needed something to compensate. Ease the pain. I hadn’t been raped, not today, but something inside of me just told me it was a bad idea to go get Chloe from school. I don’t know why that was.

My insurance has been pushed back another week. They have been showing their ass since my dentist wrote a statement that I needed nearly $10,000 worth of work done on my teeth; whether he can save them or not. My insurance company is waiting to see if I pay for all of this out of my own pockets. They keep pushing the date back further and further. None of my kids have medical insurance because of this. In the long run, I felt like a failure. I felt like I have failed myself and my children. The sad part is they all look up to me so much. I am their hero. I am the one they all want to be like when they grow up. A morphine addicted, raging alcoholic? That’s a good role model there!

While I was out, I wandered to a bowling alley. Which was interesting because I’d never saw it before. I crashed inside, watching the bowlers, taking huge swigs from my coke bottle, making trips to the bathroom to refill it. No one questioned me. Until a woman made a gutter ball, and I commented, “Good thing that landed in the gutter! It was so slow it was going backwards!” She spun around with a silly grin on her face and offered me a ball. “Can you do better?” she asked. “I could do better drunk!” I replied, finished the last of the Jack Daniels in the bottle (I had guzzled the entire bottle of whiskey in about five to ten minutes), took the ball from her, swung it at the lanes, and some how it skipped over a few lanes, pushed another ball out of the way, and made a strike. Five lanes away. “How’s that for a good bowler?” I asked. The woman and the other people on her team actually cheered for me! I finished the game with them, scoring three strikes (once I figured out what lane we were supposed to be playing in), and on the way home, I fell asleep. I woke up in my own bed, wearing some weird saddle shoes that weren’t mine.

My husband had the day off, and he was pissed that I did not bring Chloe home. It was about 7pm, and the school called and told him no one had been there to pick her up.We’re going to have to talk, so I ave to sign off. Yep, before 11pm.

See everyone in the morning