Looking back to the beginning of the pandemic, I recall hand sanitizer, sourdough starter, and “Beers with Beshear.” Where to find the first, how to grow the second, and that convivial-if-virtual drink while watching Gov. Andy Beshear’s daily press conferences.
Anybody who could stay home stayed home. We are all in this together! Cheers! The coronavirus would go away with the heat. We would be free about mid-summer, right?
Wrong. Summer came and went. Fall arrived with virtual school. We said goodbye to Thanksgiving and Christmas, and hello to the isolation of an icy winter. Eventually, we found enough hand sanitizer, and, somewhere along the way, we figured out sourdough starter or gave up (I gave up), but we kept on drinking.
Boredom and Anxiety
“Pandemic-related boredom has caused nearly one-third of Kentucky residents to set aside the beer and wine and start breaking out the liquor,” journalist Jeremy Chisenhall wrote in the Lexington Herald-Leader on Nov. 18, 2020.
Boredom and an avalanche of anxiety
“Anxiety and substance use disorder are familiar bedfellows, especially in women,” writes Jessica Lahey in her new book, The Addiction Inoculation: Raising Healthy Kids in a Culture of Dependence. “Women are more likely to have anxiety disorder as men, and women with anxiety disorders are more likely to use alcohol to self-medicate their symptoms.”
As I read Lahey’s book, I recognized myself. I am 55. My husband and I live in rural Anderson County, and our kids are grown and gone. Pre-pandemic, it was normal for me to have a glass or two of wine while making dinner. But after the world shifted on its March 11 axis, I was not only cooking every night; I was frantically wiping down groceries on the tailgate of my truck. My dad and I had just called a detente after three years of not speaking over politics, and now I could not see him. I was worried sick about my stepmother and her terminal lung disease.
Weeks, then months, disappeared from the calendar, and before I knew it, I was waking up with too many hangovers and checking the recycling bin. “Wow,” I would think, “did I drink that whole bottle? I’m not drinking tonight.”
And then dinnertime would roll around, and there I’d be in my kitchen, each day bleeding into the next—Is it Tuesday? Is it Friday? Does it matter?—glass of wine in hand.
A 40-year-old friend, teacher, and mother of two boys, ages 9 and 4, put it this way: “For the first month or so, I would drink a glass of wine around 4:30 or 5 p.m. I did this, in part, to mark the end of the workday, which for me had begun at 5 a.m. It felt really good, even celebratory, to have that drink. Was I adequately supporting my students? Dealing with my mother, who had suddenly become our childcare provider? What if we all get COVID and I still have to teach? I was unwinding a lot of stress and anxiety.”
Kentucky Moms Speak Out
Based on my own ramped-up drinking and what I was hearing from friends, I reached out to Kentucky moms on social media. Here are a few of those moms, in their own words.
“Ann” is 55 with two daughters in high school. “We’ve always been weekend drinkers but saw a change during those early months. I hosted a 5 o’clock ‘Beers with Beshear’ Facebook watch party. At one point, I had 30 people watching, and we all had beers or cocktails. I was never a weekday drinker, but these were unprecedented times, and it was more about camaraderie with others than anything else. We felt like we were all doing our part to flatten the curve. Things tapered off once Andy moved to 4 o’clock. Too early.”
“Barb” is 47. “My kids turned 13 and 16 during this mess. I was drinking more each day, earlier each day. It was like I needed to have a drink to switch from work to home mode in the same physical space. I tried to cut back daily; I tried to only drink on the weekends. I tried to quit for a week. I woke up nearly every morning at 3 a.m. feeling like s***. How could a successful professional with two great kids and so much privilege during a time of loss be such a mess? I knew I wasn’t being there for my struggling kids because I could barely remember the night before. I’d vow to quit or cut back, but by 6 p.m., l would convince myself a drink or two would relieve my stress and anxiety. I’m 52 days alcohol-free after recognizing my drinking had taken a dangerous turn.”
“Cathy” is 37 with a 10-year-old daughter. “Pre-COVID, I would drink a glass of wine two or three times a week, but when COVID hit and all these articles came out about the psychological damage and substance abuse this could cause, I made a decision to not exactly go sober but not drink as much. But my friends who are mothers are definitely drinking more. I try to listen and be supportive, but in the back of my mind, I’m worried for them.”
Substance Abuse Begins at Home
In The Addiction Inoculation, Lahey writes, “Every substance abuse story begins at home,” but since the book was written pre-pandemic, I contacted the author to ask if she had additional advice.
“I think it’s going to take a while to fully figure out what impact this past year has had on our kids,” she began. “It’s been really tough. The drinking is definitely up, and, of course, everyone has gained weight, too, because we’ve been self-soothing with food.”
Following are Lahey’s responses to my questions.
What do you mean, exactly, by modeling healthy habits at home?
“None of this is about how you must have no alcohol in the house to lower the risk to kids. Not at all. There is a big difference, though, between, ‘I’m going to have a drink with dinner,’ and ‘I deserve this drink at the end of the day because today has been so difficult.’ Our kids are listening, and with the latter they will start to understand that part of dealing with stress or anxiety as a grownup involves self-medicating with alcohol or drugs at the end of the day.”
I certainly drank more during the pandemic, and I’m hearing from girlfriends worried they’re drinking more, too, to deal with the additional stress.
“I worry about how we talk about drugs and alcohol, normalizing things like, ‘The only way I can cope with being a mom is to have mommy-juice time with my mommy friends,’ or ‘I have my mommy juice at the end of the day.’ We like to think our kids aren’t paying attention, aren’t listening to us, but the research is clear that, in homes where there is an adult with a substance abuse issue, kids as young as 4 can tell the difference between alcoholic and nonalcoholic beverages.
“Kids are paying attention. Kids are listening to why we drink, why we use substances and how we use them, and they are going to mirror what we do, not what we say.”
You write about how books like Outlander and movies gave you a romantic view of drinking. I loved that series, too, and I hear you on the romance. Wine feels so romantic to me.
“I still miss sitting around with friends, having a glass of wine, and the one I miss the most is the glass of wine I wish I could have before I go to an outing to calm my anxiety so I don’t feel like, ‘Who am I to talk with these accomplished people?’ I miss the glass of wine that gives me the liquid courage to feel like I’m enough.
“In terms of kids, the thrust of the entire prevention thing is: How do we get kids to feel like they are enough so they don’t take that first drink? While I was drinking, I never had to deal with why I felt anxious or like an imposter. I want our kids to get to the place where they can name their emotions and deal with them instead of masking them with alcohol.”
Unmasking Our Emotions
I see now how focusing on hand sanitizer, sourdough starter, and “Beers with Beshear” were, in retrospect, innocuous distractions from the horrors that were to come—more than a half-million Americans dead from coronavirus, unprecedented stress on medical personnel and teachers, the inability to comfort loved ones as they died, the lack of proper funerals, the brutal and shocking deaths of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of police, the constant drama of the presidential election, battles over wearing masks, parents trying to work at home alongside their kids in virtual school, Zoom, Zoom and more Zoom.
In July, I missed the birth of my grandson. When my beloved stepmother died in December, I had not seen her in a year. I did not go to her funeral. I still have not seen my dad. This list feels endless. How many times this last year I’ve felt like a pencil worn down to the nub.
What I did not expect in reading a book about preventing addiction in kids was how much Lahey’s story and research would force me to reflect on my new drinking habits. The first section that grabbed me was about sleep.
“I’d fall into a nice, relaxing boozy slumber at ten,” she writes, “but at three, I’d emerge from a sound sleep and begin the laborious and stressful process of piecing together the scattered fragments of the night before. By the end of my drinking, I was blacking out often and had to work hard to hide my memory lapses. What did we talk about? Is there anything I have to remember for tomorrow? Did I do anything stupid? Did I call anyone?”
And in my case, what will I find in the recycling bin?
This past year, I often found myself wide awake at 2 or 3 in morning, watching a favorite movie for the 1,000th time or scrolling social media to see who else was up. I assumed it was the unrelenting anxiety of pandemic life but, reading The Addiction Inoculation, I realized it was the wine I’d drunk to—irony alert—tamp down the anxiety.
As we get our vaccines and merge back into the traffic and noise of the outside world, I am consciously searching for more peaceful, healthier habits. Taking more walks, kayaking, calling (not texting) friends and having truthful conversations, reading more, turning off TV news, limiting social media and, yes, drinking less.
Considering Why I Drink at All
I grew up in a family of strong Southern women who kept a semi-truckload of secrets, and I suspect that, as we come out of our pandemic year joking about safe topics like having to wear bras and real pants again, we will be afraid to talk about embarrassing topics like how much we drank. And we need to talk about it.
The governor was right: We are all in this together. And our kids and grandkids are watching.