Alcohol Education

These lessons are in my blood

“Be careful with drinking,” my mother always told me. “Alcoholism runs in the family.”

I did what most teenage girls tend to do with their mothers’ advice: I ignored it.

I started drinking in 2005, the summer after I graduated from high school. I wasn’t cool enough before then to get invited to parties with alcohol, and even if I had been, I wouldn’t have partaken. I was laser-focused on getting good grades in my AP classes, editing the student newsmagazine, mentoring an elementary school girl through Big Brothers Big Sisters of America—doing all the necessary things to earn college scholarships.

Without scholarships, I couldn’t afford to go to a four-year school. My college fund was nonexistent. My parents divorced when I was 16, and during the proceedings they didn’t divide their assets; they split their debt.

Once I was bound for the University of Washington with nearly a full ride in scholarships, I could finally exhale. My high-achieving friends and I gathered at the home of whoever’s parents were out of town to sip sickly sweet bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and take slugs of Southern Comfort. I learned poetry: “Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you’re in the clear.” And still, because we were smart enough to get into college but too dumb for most everything else, my throat burns at the memory of 100-proof shots going down and stomach acid accompanying them back up.

In August, I used my new .edu email address to create a profile on The Facebook, a social site exclusively for college students that dropped the “The” later that month. I scrolled through the list of Washington '09 students and sent friend requests to all the cute boys, many of whom accepted and struck up private chats with me. It was my first foray into online dating.

I registered for a UW freshman interest group (FIG), which qualified me for early arrival on campus, and moved into my dorm as soon as possible to get the lay of land. I was assigned to Mercer Hall—a low, red-brick building built in 1971 that was the oldest, farthest from campus, and least desirable of all the dorms. I felt isolated there, with a foreign exchange student who spoke little English (to me, at least) for a roommate and only hunchbacked, dumpster-diving raccoons the size of labradors to keep me company otherwise. My mission was to get out and about until more students moved in and classes began.

One of my Facebook friends (who became my first college boyfriend—thanks, Zuck!) invited me to hang out with his FIG friends at a nicer dorm in the heart of campus. We packed ourselves into a cramped double room like it was a clown car—boys and girls lined up hip-to-hip on the beds, piled two-high on desk chairs, sprawled in every available spot on the floor—laughing, blasting music, and passing around a plastic handle of vodka. We hadn’t yet learned how to drink in the dorms (quietly, and with plenty of Diet Coke mixed in to mask the smell of liquor). We also didn’t realize resident advisors were already on patrol. As they swung open the door, they shook their heads, disappointed we hadn’t even tried to hide the alcohol.

In just a few months, I’d gone from a teetotaling goody two-shoes to getting popped for underage drinking on campus before classes even started.

For my crime, I was later interviewed by the resident director, who asked me how many drinks I’d had and in what period of time. “I don’t know,” I replied, figuring it was better to plead ignorance rather than give the real answers, which were, “Way too many,” and, “Not very long.” She was alarmed and handed me a blood-alcohol chart that showed the impact of up to 10 drinks based on my sex and weight, imploring me to keep careful track in the future.

I was also sentenced to several weeks of alcohol education classes, which simply introduced me to more kids who liked to drink. Talk about a freshman interest group.

Once the other students doomed to Mercer Hall moved in, my roommate asked me to swap rooms with another foreign student she’d become close with in her exchange program, and I gladly obliged. My new roommate, a blond from California, was also eager to enjoy the college experience. Together with a few more girls, we took full advantage of frat parties and covert dorm drinking.

I remember red Solo cups and sticky floors. Boys ladling jungle juice of undetermined origin from 20-gallon plastic garbage cans. Drinking games like Kings, flip cup, beer pong and its evil cousin Champong, played with bottom-shelf bottles of Cook’s sparkling wine. Edward Fortyhands. Century Club. Coors Light, Natty Ice, and Miller High Life (for special occasions). Jäger bombs. Kamikaze shots. Beer bongs. Regular bongs.

I never got caught again. I never got arrested or assaulted or grievously injured, which is a miracle since alcohol-induced blackouts were not uncommon. But I never needed to have my stomach pumped (a low bar, I know), so maybe I retained some guidance from that blood-alcohol chart after all.

I partied hard on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights—often well into the next morning—but I also worked hard. I got into UW’s competitive journalism program and earned a 4.0 in those classes. Because I did well in school, I felt like there was nothing wrong with my partying. And most of the time, I had so much fun.

But I was my very worst self while drunk. I cheated on two boyfriends who didn’t deserve it. (I stayed faithful to the ones who did deserve it; it turned out they were cheating on me.) I puked and pissed my pants, though not at the same time… I think? I made a fool of myself in too many ways to count. I was far from the only one.

We chalked it up to typical college craziness. “Enjoy it now,” we said, “because once we graduate, it’s just alcoholism.”

Enjoying a lemon drop in my early twenties.

And by 22, four years into my drinking career, alcohol was old news anyway. Binge drinking felt like an easy thing to leave behind when I tossed my cap at graduation. I was finally an adult, ready to take on the real world. I didn’t anticipate the real world would feel like such a slog.

2009 was a heck of a year to try to get a job. We were knee-deep in the Great Recession, and the baby boomers who would normally be telling us our futures were limitless had just lost their homes and life savings. “Good luck,” they’d say with a bitter scoff.

I spent my final quarter of school as an intern on the The Seattle Times opinion desk and was a finalist for a job on the Times’ digital team. When they gave it to someone else, I looked around at the newsroom’s empty desks after the latest round of layoffs and saw a sinking ship. Panicked, I took the first writing job I could find with a company that billed itself as an “SEO marketing firm.” It turned out to be a content farm that more or less scammed small business owners.

But I was deep in credit-card debt and desperate for a paycheck. And I had no clue how interest worked, so I made only the minimum payments and never chipped away at the principal balance. I hated my nine-to-five, yet felt powerless to leave and uncertain I could find anything better. A lifetime of being stuck in a shitty job and beholden to credit-card companies loomed before me.

I was living at my mother’s house. She’d turned my bedroom into a sewing room, so we shifted a bookcase in the sunroom to create a semi-private nook for my bed. I kept a bottle of Grey Goose in the freezer and a box of Franzia in the fridge. I’d come home from my soul-sucking job, mix up a vodka-soda with lime, then fill and refill a mug with wine until I fell asleep. The danger of a box is it’s hard to keep track of how much you’ve had.

One night, I tried to go sleep without drinking and couldn’t relax; I’d become dependent on alcohol. Another night, I had my first panic attack. My heart raced, my breathing felt shallow, and I thought I was going to die. My body sent me so many warning signals that I was heading down a dangerous path.

On New Year’s Eve, I went to a party with my then-boyfriend, got drunk, and spent the first few hours of 2010 puking and sobbing into a toilet: “I’m never happy.” That was rock bottom (round one).

I’ve told the story on other blogs about how I turned my life around. I got a better job. My mother helped me create a plan to pay off all my debt. We started running together, which gave me exciting goals to work toward outside of the office. I moderated my drinking. I saved up enough money to not only move out of my mother’s house, but to quit my job and travel the world.

I’ve been debt-free (other than our mortgage) and invested in my health and fitness since 2010. And I drank socially without incident until the past few years, when my grief over slowly losing my mother translated into drinking too much at times. Even before that, I noticed a minimal amount of alcohol—a beer with friends, a glass or two of wine while watching The Bachelor—made me feel groggy and inflamed the next day. It just wasn’t worth it anymore. Now I’m proud to be alcohol-free for more than a year.

As I dove into learning more about my mother’s life for my book, I thought about her warning: “Alcoholism runs in the family.” She was never much of a drinker. Her signature move was to sip half a bottle of Samuel Adams after dinner every once in a while and fall asleep sitting on the couch with her head tipped back, mouth agape.

I knew she was referring to her sister, Laura, who quite literally drank herself to death in 2002, and her brother, Bernie Jr., who drank so heavily that my parents didn’t serve alcohol at their 1981 wedding reception for fear he’d get too drunk and ruin it. He suffered from throat problems all his life, which alcohol only exacerbated, and he was diagnosed with stage four throat cancer shortly before he died in 2012.

I wanted to find out who my aunt and uncle inherited their alcoholism from. And if it was so prevalent in our family, why didn’t it affect my mother? Why, despite doing my damndest to become an alcoholic, was I able to pivot to enjoying a fairly innocuous relationship with drinking, then easily quit when I chose to?

I talked to my mother’s surviving siblings, my uncles Dave and Mike, and neither of them could point to any signs of alcoholism in their parents or grandparents. So what caused it in two of their siblings? I wondered. Was there neglect? Abuse? No, they both told me. Their parents were wonderful. Quiet and reserved, but very kind.

All five children went to Catholic school and were involved in the church, so part of me was nervous to uncover something to do with predatory priests. I didn’t hear any mention of that, but Uncle Dave, who served in Vietnam, told me quite seriously that the nuns who taught them were meaner than drill sergeants in the Army and would hit children who stepped out of line.

“It was dead quiet in the classroom,” he said. “They didn’t allow any noise at all unless it had something to do with school.”

I suspect silence was at the root my aunt’s and uncle’s alcohol abuse. My mother’s family was not the type to discuss their problems with each other or anyone else. Any mistakes they made or impure thoughts they had—all very normal things that made them human—were sins to be whispered through a confessional screen to a priest who would tell them how to repent.

I imagine being made to carry guilt and shame in secrecy weighs heavily on a person. I know it impacted my mother her entire life.

I’ve found great relief in speaking and writing about my darkest feelings, sharing them with a friend or therapist or a couple hundred Substack subscribers, getting them out of my body. When there is nowhere for pain to go, it tends to linger and fester within people. They’re forced to find a way to live with it. Sometimes, in an attempt to drown that pain, they end up drowning themselves.

I also suspect Aunt Laura was gay. In all her 50 years, she never had a romantic relationship her family knew about, but she was close with a woman named Kathy—so close that Kathy earned a spot in my childhood prayers, along with her little terriers, Peppy and Peaches. They lived a thousand miles away in Southern California, but were present enough during our visits to find their way into the list of names I rattled off to God each night.

When I floated that theory to several family members and friends, there was always a long pause, and then, “Maybe,” said with a shrug, as if you can hear that kind of thing over the phone. No one knew for sure, but no one ruled it out.

I’ve tried to contact Kathy, but haven’t been able to connect via the phone numbers I found associated with her name, so this may remain a theory forever. Maybe, because of her strict Catholic upbringing, Laura was never able to live and love as her true self. Maybe not.

Either way, Laura remained in her childhood home with her parents for her entire life. At 38, she planned to move into a home with Kathy—my grandfather wrote letters to my mother updating her on the renovations to “their house”—but she never did. She was laid off from her electronic assembly job, and my grandfather needed her help to care for my grandmother, who suffered a stroke in 1989 that paralyzed her entire right side and left her wheelchair-bound. It didn’t seem Laura was much help, though. His letters became increasingly depressing throughout 1990, detailing the difficulties of caregiving and often noting, “Laura isn’t up yet,” adding that he was writing in the late afternoon.

“She didn’t have any goals in life, nothing to work toward,” my father told me. “She’d grab some beer, go to her room, turn on the TV, sit in the easy chair, and just drink.” She never found another job. I’m not sure whether anyone tried to intervene and get Laura help for her depression and alcohol abuse, but given how passive most of the family was, I suspect not. Everything was swept right under the rug.

After my grandmother died in 1991 and my grandfather died in 2001, Laura inherited their house. She was found dead there eight months later, surrounded by empty bottles.

I think back to living at my mother’s house in 2009, drinking to fall asleep, feeling stuck. I might have stayed there forever if my mother hadn’t helped me get out of debt, encouraged me to start running, given me goals to chase. I might have felt overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy and hopelessness if I hadn’t had friends to confide in, hadn’t used writing as an outlet. In another life, under slightly different circumstances, I might have ended up like Laura.

Her story is an extreme example of a failure to launch. She stayed rooted in the desiccated Anaheim rambler where she grew up, where her mother died, where she would eventually die herself. She never got what she needed to flourish.

Meanwhile, my mother launched herself as far as possible to raise her children in the verdant Pacific Northwest, dewy and rich with possibility, a world away from the stagnant heat and constant threat of drought in her hometown. She rewrote our story.

Ever since my mother was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, which has a stronger genetic component to it than the kind diagnosed after age 65, I’ve often wondered what in my life is predetermined and what I have control over. I like to believe I have the free will to influence most things. The alternative is to surrender to a destiny that may or may not exist, but that I’d doom myself to anyway by simply giving up and letting it unfold.

My stepdad, Don, and I both quit drinking last year after we ripped through four bottles of pinot grigio at a concert (rock bottom, round two). Recently, we were laughing about how drunk we got when my nine-year-old daughter tuned into the conversation and asked what “drunk” meant.

“I won’t ever get drunk,” she said firmly after I explained it to her. A better mother might have replied, “Great!”

But I’m a realist, and I remember ignoring my mother’s advice at her age and nearly every age after that. Instead, I said, “Oh, you probably will, and that’s okay. When you’re older, you can decide how much alcohol you want to drink and whether you want to drink at all.”

I won’t put my mistakes on my daughter’s shoulders. I want to give her the freedom to make her own and learn from them. I won’t try to scare her away from drinking by saying “alcoholism runs in the family” without also sharing that our family members who struggled with alcohol did so in part because they grew up in a very different environment—one that enforced silence, turned a blind eye to major issues, and didn’t offer them better ways to cope with their pain.

I feel good about my daughter growing up in an alcohol-free home and seeing her parents have sober fun at parties and on vacations, but I want her to write her own story. I want her to play beer pong, if she chooses, because if she’s anything like me, she’ll have lots of fun and be damn good at it. I believe she has control over her future and isn’t destined to repeat these tragic twists in our bloodline.

When she’s older, I’ll certainly give her some practical guidance about alcohol safety. I might even show her a blood-alcohol chart with the hope she retains more of it than I did. Still, I know most of her alcohol education will happen far from my watchful eyes.

I’ll always make sure she has the things that some of my family members were missing, the things that saved me from a much darker fate: plenty of loving support, hope for the future, and a safe place to put her pain.