I Know Why My Mother Drank

Digital art collage by Stella Kalaw

The night before I married my first husband, fifty years ago in Dublin, I told my parents that if they drank at the wedding reception, I would never speak to them again.

I stood in the doorway of our 1950s kitchen, with its blue linoleum floor and white Formica table. I was wearing rollers in my hair, and some sort of gunk plastered on my face that I hoped would result in a glowing complexion on the big day.

We were forced to eat in shifts in that small kitchen because there were nine of us living in the house. We did all manage to cram in there for important announcements: Granddad Harrison dying of lung cancer at sixty; our mother in hospital being treated for depression; our nineteen-year-old brother Terry having to marry his pregnant girlfriend. We were warned not to talk about any of this outside the house.

It was also the place where, when they had been drinking, arguments between my parents would suddenly erupt.

I was their eldest child, and the first one to escape by marrying someone willing and able to take me away. Hannah, my only sister, would make the same mistake years later. She was the kind one, the one who insisted that we should love and respect our mother, Josephine. “She’s doing her best,” she often said.

In the evenings when we gathered in the sitting room to watch the BBC, Josephine would place beside her armchair a wicker basket of the kind she kept her knitting in. This basket would contain no yarn but several bottles of Carlsberg Special Brew, a tall glass, and a bottle opener.

She would begin in fine form, but would slowly become incoherent as the basket emptied. I remember the irritation, bordering on contempt, that would rise in me like bile. The worst of the hangovers would keep her in bed for days.

The images are shadowy now of that night in the kitchen where I stood with my righteous, ghostly face, determined to lay down the law. Ever glamorous, my mother would most likely have been at the sink, wearing red lipstick, a flowered apron, and Cuban heels. She would have been scrubbing a potato pot or a frying pan.

That night, my father Murray would have been sitting at the kitchen table, his tie loosened, a pot of tea by his side, the Irish Times open before him. He would have looked up from his paper as I made my pronouncement. He would have been relieved to hear that it was only about the drink. Then, when my words had sunk in, both would have been angry. Who was I to speak to them with such disrespect? How dare I suggest they would embarrass me at the wedding? The hurt and shame would have hit them later.

My no-booze admonition was mainly directed at my mother. At that time in Ireland, an inebriated man would have been a member in good standing of the fraternity of drinkers, particularly if his favourite tipple was a frothy-headed pint of Guinness, sucked back with the lads in his local pub.

A publicly intoxicated woman, on the other hand, would be considered a disgrace to her family and to Catholic womankind in general. She’d be spoken of in knowing whispers.

My mother took her first drink when she was in her late 30s, after she had had her children. It took another five years or so for the drinking to become a serious problem and some twenty years before she found her way out of the trap, reducing her intake to the occasional glass of wine with dinner. In that sad mid-point of her life, she used whisky and strong beer, sometimes mixed with sleeping pills, to deaden the pain of having too many children, never enough money, and knock-down fights with my father, the love of her life.

Later, when Hannah and I had our own children, we would ask ourselves how in God’s name our mother had survived the bearing of seven babies in ten years with birth control outlawed by the Catholic Church.

What just barely saved her sanity, we agreed, was that she was an intelligent woman who read widely and grew hybrid tea roses. Those who knew her in her youth say she was a strong enough sea swimmer to have swum the English Channel. She was a canny poker player too. Who knows, she might have become a professional gambler. Or maybe a poet. She once shyly showed me a verse she had written that was printed in a national newspaper. Her brother Kevin, a doctor, used to say that Josephine would have done well in medical school. She was that smart.

I was in my own kitchen in Toronto when Joe called to say our mother had died, suddenly of a stroke. She was just shy of her 70th birthday which was coming up on Mother’s Day that May, in 1997. My immediate image of her was not with a beer in her hand but her singing along to the radio as she made a mountain of crepes on Pancake Tuesday, wearing heels, of course.

The relationship between trauma and addiction was not well understood fifty years ago. Drinking to excess was seen as self-indulgent, a moral failing. I’m grateful that time and distance have combined to change my perspective. I now understand my mother drank not because of a weak character, but to cope with a body wearing out before its time from unremitting pregnancy and as a way to swallow her anger and disappointment. It was also a way to mourn a loss of self.

On the day of my wedding, some ninety guests gathered for the reception in a Dublin hotel. Most every adult in the room, including me, had had plenty to drink even before the champagne was rolled out. When Josephine and Murray stood to toast the bride, they raised glasses of sparkling water. My mother smiled at me across the table. Hannah gave me a cold-eyed stare as she and Joe walked around the table and invited my parents to dance. I remember drinking the dregs of champagne in my glass and being suddenly heart-scalded by regret.