Battenkilled

186 days. 

As of today, that's how long it's been since I've had a drink. And right now I can't see myself ever going back there again. Drinking was another place; very quiet, very dark, very secretive. I made my own island in the evening, the girls' asleep in their beds, A out for the night, mindless television made much more interesting by the vodka swimming around in my veins. And it had such control over me. In the early evening, while sitting with the girls while they ate dinner, I would look out the window to West Street and watch people spilling out of the buildings, crossing the street to what I always imagined was a wonderful bar, or to their house in the suburbs where a drink would be waiting to be enjoyed out on a patio overlooking the lawn. The evening was a bad time for me. Everything I saw brought my mind to drinking. The simple act of the sun disappearing from the skyline would send me into a tailspin: You shouldn't drink tonight. You drank too much last night. If you aren't able to stay away from the vodka in the freezer, you know you have a problem. Then: It was such a stressful day. You deserve a cocktail. So many other people have a drink after work - why can't you? And of course, I would have that drink, then a second, then a third. 

Today, I am once again familiar to myself. Today I'm that person that I used to know. 

I didn't really start drinking until I was in my early twenties. Before that, I was an athlete, running up to 40 miles a week, playing softball, competing in horse shows. I never thought of drinking then. Without my knowing it, all these things were my medicine, what protected me from depression, from hopelessness. As soon as I stopped pushing my body in sport the downward slide began, a slide that only began to slow when as a 45 year-old mother of two I began to figure out the connection between endurance sports and contentedness, something that would come as no surprise to a lot of people, but only occurred to me less than a year ago. 

Which leads to what the title of this post is about. The Tour of the Battenkill. Battenkill is part of the Spring Classics for cyclists that's held in Cambridge, New York. This year they started a granfondo on the same course - 65 miles of sharp, steep climbs on gravel roads and asphalt. This was my friend S's idea. Her husband was racing on the Saturday in a category 4 race, and S and I would do the granfondo the next day. We looked at this as training for the 100 mile New York GranFondo we're doing in May, but neither of us expected it to be as hard as it was. 

The day started out cold and windy, and everyone, including S, went out really fast. I kept looking at my Garmin to see that my heart rate was way too high that early on, but I wanted to keep up, so I pretty much ignored it. Then the rain started. Then the sleet. There was a bit of mud in certain sections that sucked every bit of speed out of the bike. The first really hard hill (after a steep son of a bitch that I had to get out of the saddle to finish) I walked up at the half way point. S was at the top, waiting for me. This was very early on, around mile 15 I think. I knew that I had to change my strategy, and when the hills got too hard I would get off the bike, stand there for about 30 seconds while my heart rate went down, then get back on and finish the hill. This worked for all but the last major hill, where my legs began to feel achy and jelly-like, a profoundly unpleasant feeling that I've had only a few times, and usually within 20 minutes of finishing a hard ride. But this time I was only at mile 45. I have to say that I got scared. I got scared of the wagon, two miles back. Scared because I didn't know what was ahead. There were a scattering of riders around, men, and I passed most of them on the hills, which felt good, but I honestly didn't know if my legs had enough left to finish the ride. 

I don't remember much of the last 15 miles. My legs turned the cranks, my shoulders screamed, I fought gusting headwinds then rode out the tailwind - but at that point even the downhills didn't feel very good. I went as fast as I could, slogging down dirt lanes, then blustery roads busy with cars, weaving through farmland. I ate a ton of gels, chews, mini snickers, a banana, but I think part of the problem was that I didn't hydrate enough, and the food stops were very far apart, the first one 30 miles in. It was lonely. I questioned my sanity. Families jumped up and down at the end of their driveways, ringing cowbells at the top of the worst climbs, and as much as I would want to stop I couldn't - I couldn't get off the bike and walk past them. Instead I grimaced, breath catching in my throat, legs burning, arms pulling at the bars. Each hill I climbed made me think that there was no way I could do another, but then I did, again and again and again. More men fell off behind me. I kept thinking of the wagon, I kept going. 

Then the signs started to appear - 10 kilometers to go, 6, 5, then down to feet. Only a few people were left standing at the finish line, but it didn't matter. S was waiting at the side - she had finished 4 minutes ahead of me, and told me that someone told her that the wagon got me, and that she was so proud of me for finishing. Five and a half hours on the bike. A marathon of suffering. We quickly rode to the parking area, S complaining about her shoulders, her knees, her neck. My legs felt awful. Like my bones had been removed. Spinning a small gear felt awful. I was supposed to drive home right after the race, a four hour drive, but I could barely get my bike in the car, could barely take my shoes off. I called A and told her I'd be staying another night at the Marriott in Saratoga Springs. I drove back, following S and her husband, my head buzzing with adrenaline. 

It never felt so good to feel so, so bad. 

Atta' girl

This has been a cold, cold week in New York City. With the wind chill it's been averaging about 5 degrees. But over the holidays my oh so lovely partner A bought me a new bike for winter (a steel Ritchey Swiss Cross that I had built for me at my local bike shop, Echelon Cycles in the West Village, shout out to Pablo), and of course when you have a new bike you have to ride it. No matter what.

So, on Tuesday I headed out, no idea what the cold was going to feel like, with a goal of doing just one loop of Central Park. Getting dressed for cycling in the cold is a process. Pearl Izumi AmFib tights, another pair of Izumi shorts on top, wool base layer, short sleeve jersey, Giordana FormaRed Carbon jacket, Gore beanie under helmet, lobster gloves, SmartWool socks, Sidi boots, Gore shoe covers, wool neck gaiter. 

Within 5 minutes my thumbs were frozen, then my fingers. Then strangely, they got warm. The exposed skin on my face that wasn't covered by wool or sunglasses stung. But I made it to the park, only to realize that the outside of the gaiter was encrusted with ice. I have to admit that I was nervous about what I was doing to my body riding in weather that cold, but I felt okay, even though I knew I couldn't stop because my body temperature would plummet and I would freeze. 

There were no other cyclists in the park, only a few runners and tourists, until I neared the hill and saw a woman riding a hybrid with ski pants, ski jacket, wool cap and sneakers. Here I am wearing a thousand dollars worth of cold weather kit and she's pedaling away in whatever she could find in her closet. 

It's a pretty great day when the only badasses up to facing a New York City cold snap are two women.  


When I got home I was frozen, and had to sit in a hot bath for 20 minutes just to get my temperature back to normal. But it felt good knowing that if I really want to ride, no matter what the temperature happens to be, I can do it. 

Other people

A. and I are friends with a couple who drink a lot. Who have a standing order at Union Square Wines, delight in finding new forms of booze from faraway places that you can't get your hands on unless pulling a variety of strings, and who have an eight-year-old daughter whom our girls enjoy playing with. 

We had brunch with this couple on Sunday at a neighborhood restaurant. Now as much as I would drink in the evenings, I can count on one hand the amount of drinks consumed in the afternoon. I am more of a drink, eat sleep kind of alcoholic.  Anyway, this couple drank a couple of glasses of white wine, a few bloody Mary's. Neither seemed particularly intoxicated, but when the natives (our kids) started to get restless and we decided it was time to leave, S, who had the wine, volunteered to take one of my daughters into the bathroom so she could pee (always a good idea with 4-year-olds - drain them before leaving any location). When C came out of the stall, she looked at me with worried eyes and said she was wet on her bottom. I lifted up her shirt to see that the back of her pants were soaked with pee. Now I don't know if it's because S was drinking too much, but she didn't pull C's pants down all the way when she put her on the toilet. I am standing there, wondering what the hell to do with pee pants when the temp outside is around 35 degrees and we have a 15 minute walk home. Meanwhile, my other daughter is in the stall now with S, and God knows what I'm going to have to deal with when the door opens. 

Long story short - remove pants, take off underwear, wrap in paper towel, try to dry pants in Dyson hand dryer, S is laughing, no big deal, I'm silently unhappy, C wants to go to the shoe store despite sodden pee pants. E has emerged from stall unscathed. 

This all got me thinking. How many times have I done stupid shit like this while drinking? And I'm not even talking about being completely pickled, just a little buzzed. Given that I haven't really had the opportunity, given that the girls were usually asleep when I was at my worse, there have been times at parties when we were with the girls where the defenses  would drop, I start feeling a little too relaxed, and I would depend more on A to make sure we all made it home in one piece. I remember those moments, I remember that little thought in the back of my head: You shouldn't be drinking right now. Not with the girls around. Because this isn't you - even if you are being kind and loving, this is not you. And the memories that you want your children to have are of one Mother - one personality - yelling or patient, sad or happy, because this is the kind of Mother who is present, warts and all. 

Being me in New York City

I always tell people that I should have been an organic farmer. This is how far removed my personality is from the kind that can thrive in a city as loud and fast as New York. 

I've had issues around noise, odors, crowds and heat for as long as I can remember. I never played any team sports where the likelihood of a sticky arm touching mine was better than average. So no basketball for me. I grew up with a pool but I found the coldness of the water jarring. Getting splashed wasn't high on my list, either. I never really liked the beach as much as other kids, hating the sand in my bathing suit. So then I move to a city where I constantly hear other people and their appliances as I try to sleep. I can hear them sneezing, coughing next door. I find this absolutely appalling. I go to restaurants where conversations are impossible because of the din. Ambulances scream down the street. People yell into their cellphones about how so and so owes them forty dollars and that mother fucker better pay. Or they're looking down and texting right before they walk right into you. You walk outside your door on a nice spring day and there it is - a street fair - taking up three blocks of Eighth Avenue. A street fair that fills the air with the smell of burned meat, overflows onto the sidewalk with garbage, and is selling what always seems to be socks, t-shirts and corn on a stick. Now your Saturday has begun with the obnoxious hum of generators and hundreds of gawking, slow-moving morons making fast work of greasy mystery meat and funnel cake. It was on a day such as this that I finally lost my shit with the city - when A. and I were walking out of our building and some little bastard threw a firecracker at my feet. It was as if the city wanted to see just how far it could push me, and it knew exactly what it would take to make it happen.

We ended up around the corner from the apartment with me sobbing by a particularly sad tree. I begged A. to let us rent a house in the country for the weekends. I was starting my first of several IVF's at the time, and truly felt like I was going mad. We lived in an apartment above a gay sports bar (the space was empty when we moved in, and had been for several years, and the landlord assured us that he would not rent to a bar or restaurant. Yeah, right.) that played music until three in the morning every night, where people smoked out back and the smell wafted into our bedroom. Our upstairs neighbor was nuts (what else is new), and so were the floorboards in her apartment, which sounded as if ten preschoolers were bowling when in fact it was only the crazy lady walking around in slippers. 

I feel like I earned my bones. We now live in a beautiful, quiet apartment in TriBeca, which whatever anyone says about the lack of diversity, the gated community aspect, the banker/nanny-riddled sidewalks, the stick-thin trophy wives jumping out of their black cars and into SoulCycle - I like it here. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. I like that I don't start and end my day seething. That I don't envision dropping bags full of warm urine on smoking gay guys at four in the morning off my fire escape. I don't have revenge fantasies anymore - the kind where I kill someone temporarily, and they wake up from my murdering them to realize that wow, I must have done something really bad and gee, I'll never do that again. 

Yes, I was that white woman with two children in the double stroller taking up the sidewalk. Now I am that white woman heading out for a 25-mile bike ride while her little darlings gently play in their over-priced Montessori pre-school. 

Yes, I am that woman with one of those trash cans with a sensor that opens and closes the lid so that I never have to manually open with (god forbid) my foot. I am that woman whose kitchen drawers silently close with a gentle push, so (god forbid) I never have to take a second to push it securely closed.

I am that woman that while I will never ask you where you summer, I have been asked that question more than once, and can't help looking a bit dazed when I realize that yes, my family does "summer", and often in the Hamptons or Connecticut. 

I am that woman who has help, who has a wonderful partner, amazing children, and who still struggles with the complications and contradictions of living the kind of life I live. Who is trying to embrace what I am, what I have, and what I'm trying to overcome. I live in a constant state of guilt and happiness, worry and contentedness. But I feel that all the things that used to eat at me, all that noise, figuratively and literally, have been silenced by having money, so now I am free to focus on the real issues, like my drinking, my anger, my relationships. I know that most people aren't so lucky. That they have to fight the city alongside the fight to fix whatever they feel is flawed and imperfect in themselves. I don't know if I could have made it, and I have to admit, I think about this all the time. I think about where I would have ended up, if I would have stayed here and suffered or fled to a quieter place. I think about all the turns, right or wrong, that have brought me here.  And I feel extraordinarily lucky that I don't regret any of them. 

The why's

I anticipate people asking me why I don't drink. And one of the reasons, maybe a small one that helps create a bit of levity and steer the conversation to a place where no one, particularly me, feels uncomfortable, is that I really had no desire to become a drunken mommy blogger. One who makes merry of tipsy play dates, that necessary half bottle of wine when the kids go down, only to repent when coming to the conclusion that our happy drinking mommy is now a source of misery to not only her family, but to herself.

Jokes about drinking are rife around my girls' school, and I was a big contributor. Last year, in an email conversation with my friend G, we were talking about a small gathering for the parents in our kids' classroom, kind of a getting to know everyone thing. I kidded that I was going to get soooo wasted, as I heard wine was on the agenda. I thought this was funny, the idea of staggering around the various Montessori-style play areas, screeching about tuition costs and passing out in the cozy nook, goat cheese crostini in hand. On a recent excursion to the Staten Island Ferry that I helped chaperone, I asked if there would be gin. Everyone always laughs. They laugh with what I see is relief, a sense of parenting-in-this-crazy-city comradery. 

I don't make booze joke anymore, for the obvious reasons, but there was a recent cocktail night that I decided against attending, and the emails lobbying back and forth about the (desperate) need for a drink, to be with grown-ups (because this is what grown-ups do, what grown-ups look forward to when escaping the jammy hands of our children for a night) made me feel very much alone for a moment - like flying without a net. It was fleeting, but it was there. 

I'm proud of myself that I've quit drinking, but at the same time, I know what normal drinkers think about AA goers like me. I want to say that I wasn't that bad, that you probably wouldn't even have noticed that I had a problem. I want to redeem myself in their imaginary eyes. As to why I don't drink, I want to be able to give the short answer, the one that will put people at ease and get myself off the hook, but I know that with most things in life, the important things at least, it's never that simple. 

History repeating

When I was in college, I would come home on weekends, drink with my parents until an argument of some kind started, then sit in my Dad's Lazyboy with an enormous vodka and cranberry and watch movies until four in the morning. This was back when there was a late late movie, and you could see films like "The Friends of Eddie Coyle," "Bad Ronald", and "Trilogy of Terror." Movies that would stay with me despite the alcohol and exhaustion. My Dad's business went bankrupt during that time, and we all took to self-medicating, and my Dad, with his weak stomach, would spend the end of the evening vomiting behind a large pine tree next to the pool. My mother drank champagne, several splits, and her slurring was legendary. I didn't touch alcohol until I was 19 years old, but I was quick to catch up, as the melancholy in our once warm, happy home had taken over as there was no more wood for the fire, the cars were re-possessed and my mother's desk became littered with unpaid bills. We were, all three of us, drinking ourselves down the drain.

I used to drive them home from restaurants. I wasn't the designated driver - I drank just as much as they did, but for some reason I would end up behind the wheel of my Dad's white Mercedes. As if they were trying to stick to some paradigm of parental responsibility, as if I, their daughter, couldn't possibly be as intoxicated as them. On one particular night, we endured a tense, gruesome meal that we couldn't afford, where my Father cried all during dinner that my life will amount to nothing because his business amounted to nothing, and with a degree in painting, how on earth would I be able to survive without his money? After time spent in the bar after our uneaten dinner, we ended up winding along the backroads of Pennsylvania horse county, going much too fast, the drinks my parents consumed converting their tears to hysterical laughter. They slid around the backseat (why bother with seat belts?), arms tangled with legs, and I remember being acutely aware as we sped through the cold, dark countryside that everything I knew, everything I loved and depended on was making its own quick departure, and it would remain this way for a very long time. 

A first

I rode with a group for the first time this morning in Central Park. Well, it wasn't actually a group, it was two women, one of whom I briefly met last month when I was tagging behind her and her husband on an unusually beautiful fall day. I managed to keep up with them, and the woman, S, gave me her card and asked if I would be interested in their weekday rides - at 5:30 in the morning. I think I visibly blanched, then I explained that I live in TriBeca, and that it takes me close to 45 minutes just to get to the park. But today I met up with her, her husband and a woman named C. who is a trainer and does triathlons.

It's strange riding with other people. I always looked at exercise as solitary experiences, which is what I naturally prefer. But it was really nice being with people who are just as crazy about bikes as I am, and maybe more so. They all have backgrounds in competing and being trainers, and I feel more like a newbie than ever. But I kept up, riding alongside them over three and a half loops of the park, and back on the West Side bike path to fight relentless headwinds. A three hour ride.

I've never been a joiner, rarely ventured outside my own, solitary comfort zone. But I feel like this is going to make me a better rider, and possibly, a more well-rounded, happy person.