When Baby Hits the Bottle, So Does Daddy
I always believed that I would stop drinking once I had children. I didn’t want my kid to end up in some church basement explaining how he could always remember the floral notes of Pinot Noir on Daddy’s breath. My home would be like my parents’ home where the sight of a Bud in our refrigerator would prompt a call to Poison Control. Then I had three kids under the age of two. Now there is more Stella in our fridge than Similac.
Happy hour starts at 7 p.m. If the gastrointestinal gods have heeded our prayers, our two-year-old is babbling blissfully in his crib and our identical twin girls are either crying-it-out or developing certain neurological impairment in one of the baby swings that litters our apartment like outlet covers. I don’t have to ask my wife for her order: wine, red and fast. There was a time before children when we scoffed at boxed wine. Now Black Box has become Mommy and Daddy’s favorite formula. We need the volume.
While we care about our kids’ development and happiness, our days have assumed a singular and all-encompassing purpose: getting to 7 o’clock. By this time we are tired, soiled in all matter of bodily fluids, and doubtful of our parental abilities. We have spent the better part of the last twelve hours feeding, burping, swaddling, unswaddling, changing, scolding, and hushing two infant girls (and a toddler) who no doubt will express their appreciation by enrolling in a twin study at the local university and use the money for breast implants. There is a perpetual splotch of spit-up on my shirt because I am too tired and indifferent to use a burp cloth. I have stubbed my little toe on the base of a bouncer fifteen times. My wife’s once-tight curly hair has exploded into a giant ball of frizz. She looks absolutely insane and quite possibly is. There is a good chance I contracted conjunctivitis after my son crapped in the bathtub and proceeded to have a splash party. Between the day-old vomit on our rug and dirty diapers, our apartment has more health code violations than a Mumbai slum.
Consequently, we have taken to the bottle. With a restorative slug of alcohol the world, for a moment, makes sense. We can laugh at our parental inadequacies, our daughters’ smiles, and the fact that our son believes, not so erroneously, that the phrase “thank you” should be used as frequently as possible regardless of the situation. With alcohol, sex becomes a distant possibility. Coffee gets us through the day; alcohol gives us the fortitude to do it again.
I may not get closing-time-drunk anymore, but every day ends with Butt Paste in my hair and a drink in my hand. Like a domesticated Don Draper, I’ll imbibe anything fermented — beer, wine, scotch, Listerine. My wife and I nearly divorced after she used my last remaining drops of Macallan’s for a Rosh Hashanah cake. On weekend afternoons, I stick to beer when I futilely attempt to watch sporting events. Often my son lunges for my bottle sensing its sacred sauce. “NO!” I say, in my best impersonation of the Great Santini. I call all adult beverages “coffee” as in “No: this is Daddy’s coffee.” This way when my son runs around the playground shrieking “Daddy’s coffee! Daddy’s coffee!” the other parents think Daddy is just another sleep-deprived sap instead of a total lush.
My alcohol dependence reached Betty Ford levels when one of our twins spent the better part of a month in the hospital getting two separate open-heart surgeries to correct a congenital heart defect. I coped with this ordeal by Googling medical terms, fuming at doctors who patronized us with platitudes, buying smoke detectors for every room in our apartment (don’t ask), and drinking like Amanda Bynes at a Nickelodeon reunion party. On my nights at the hospital, I would sneak out to the Dominican bodega across the street for a forty-ounce of Negro Modelo. I smuggled it into the hospital and sipped it from a paper bag hoping the nurses didn’t call Child Services.
The biggest danger of drinking with kids is not, as you might think, getting so hammered that you pee in the bottle warmer. Rather, it’s getting hungover. A glass of wine or two may give you an emotional lift at the end of a long day but the morning after several scotches will drive you to request an informational pamphlet on vasectomies. Because at 6 a.m. my kids are getting up no matter how hard my head is pounding. They will begin a relentless course of high-decibel noise-making that will challenge my antipathy towards corporal punishment and China’s one child policy. It will require everything I learned about Zen meditation in my sophomore year of college to get to 7 p.m. — because it’s days like this when Daddy really needs his coffee.
