How Many Wine Corks?

When Lauren was little, we were in a store and there were some of those clever, kitchen wreaths made of corks hanging on display – several hundred corks in each wreath. She said quite loudly, “I’ll bet you could get enough corks for a wreath in a week, Mommy.”

Out of the mouths of babes. I remember thinking she was cheeky, and laughing embarrassedly, but now it occurs to me I was drinking heavily twenty years ago, even when the kids were small. I mostly drank when they were in bed, but obviously from Lauren’s comment, she had seen me drinking enough to wax sarcastic in a crowded gift store. I am sitting here wondering how many corks I would have accumulated if I had saved them over all those years (by my calculations a mountain – enough to make 73 wreaths…)

I was tipsy a lot when the children were young. Every Easter egg hunt at the Marsh Landing Country Club, every Halloween, every birthday party… I wrecked every car I ever drove. The kids remember the many times they helped me with my “auto repair kit” – nail polish remover, a hammer and a black Sharpie – to fix some scratch or dent on my car before Jonathan got home. I was always driving on people’s lawns, popping off mailboxes with my rearview mirror and backing into posts and parked cars.

I remember I was hungover most mornings. Gathering the kids for elementary school early in the morning – hair bows and snack packs and  backpacks, feeling headachy and out of sorts (“Get in the car now!). I was so hungover at Jon Jon’s kindergarten meet-and-greet at Country Day, I spent most of the time in the teacher’s lounge bathroom throwing up. Something my furious husband noted, hissing, “You smell like a brewery,” although it was more like a wine cask… It’s a miracle Jon Jon got into that school anyway, even if he didn’t have a drunk mother. At his “interview” the teacher held up a huge “C” on a piece of cardboard and asked him what it was. He looked up from the train he was playing with and said disinterestedly, “I don’t know. A letter?”

Worry not. My children got fabulous educations and neither of them is a problem drinker and they both love me. Our relationships are solid. But I wonder what the impact of a mother under the influence during their formative years has had on them: will have on them.

What’s done is done. And I’m sober now, so to use another platitude, “All’s well that ends well.” Claudio sent me a joke the other day, and I think it’s funny (drunk or sober). Like all the great things people send me for inspiration, it made me laugh. And then it made me think…