Drinking Diaries

We were sitting nearby in the kitchen, simply sharing a late dinner with a glass of wine. But our kids, successfully indoctrinated by their fifth-grade Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program, now believe that all drinking is bad.

Thanks to the DARE program, Sofie and Luca are well informed about alcohol, as well as drug pushers and peer pressure. They are prepared to deal with cyberbullies, smokers, and strangers, not to mention classmates who bring vodka to lunch. (This actually happened in my daughter’s middle school. Her reaction: “Didn’t that girl go to DARE? I thought drinking was bad.”)

I am grateful to the DARE program for teaching them frankly about subjects that are so fraught. But I am not grateful that the wine my husband and I enjoy with dinner now feels like a crime. How did this happen? DARE notwithstanding, I had always intended to raise my kids with a moderate attitude that would culminate in the whole family’s enjoying some wine at the dinner table, even if all members were not quite twenty-one.

Maybe this was magical thinking. I didn’t know how kids’ brains worked when I made that plan; I wouldn’t find out until I was in the thick of the Drinking Issue. I’d forgotten my own teen years, when I interpreted the no-drinking rule to mean “Don’t get caught.” I heeded the “This is your brain on drugs” message and stayed off drugs, but I didn’t internalize any public health warnings about drinking. There were drunk-driving accidents and other terrible consequences in my own school community, but like so many teenagers, I felt immortal and craved the exciting and the forbidden. It wasn’t until I was in college, on a junior semester in Spain, that my relationship with alcohol progressed at all.

I don’t know what the Spanish drinking age was—if there was one—but I do know that the college cafeteria sold beer and wine, which students and teachers casually sipped with their meals. It was a twilight zone in which the tension of illicit underage drinking was absent. Some of my fellow American students panicked in their new freedom and, much to the amusement or disdain of our Spanish peers, ordered two or three beers at a time.

I, meanwhile, lounged with a glass of red wine and a volume of Nabokov, trying to impress a brooding Spanish intellectual without revealing my halting Spanish-class Spanish. I soon discovered that, just as a martini contains a juicy and alcoholic olive, a glass of vino tinto contains a pearl of Spanish fluency. A glass of red wine diminished my verb conjugation anxiety and allowed me into the conversation. And conversation, connection, and discovery were what drinking with Spaniards was all about.

I continued to travel postcollege with my husband, Jaime, and saw again and again how drinking was able to leap cultural divides and produce wonderful moments of synchronicity. It’s been over twenty years, but I still remember discussing World Cup soccer with German tourists at the next table. I recall sampling sherry with a proud Andalusian waiter and mulled wine with a comical Austrian bartender.

I also remember seeing families dining out with a bottle of wine on the table. Before we had children, Jaime and I noted this practice often as we stopped for a beer in a plaza or a glass of wine in a café. I can still picture a multigenerational family sitting around a shaded table crowded with food and bottles. A boy at the table gripped his water glass with two hands, while two other kids fluttered nearby. A gray-haired man wearing a sports jacket gestured grandly, his diminutive wineglass making his hand seem large. I sensed a calm, congenial, normalcy that suggested to me, This is European family life. It was one family on one day, but I went ahead and made that part stand for the whole.

It may be a fantasy of sweeping simplification, but while I was traveling around Europe and eventually living there, I developed an impression of European life. It embraces more than a few stereotypes: Europeans enjoy life’s pleasures where Americans ascribe danger. Europeans take what they please from life where Americans are black-and-white, not to mention judgmental. Europeans don’t have positions like “I don’t eat meat” or “I don’t drink” and can sip the occasional aperitif without having an identity crisis about it. It’s a question of moderation, of practicality; it’s the question “What’s the big deal?”

Drinking was a very big deal to my first obstetrician, in New York City. She was bossy and prescribed bossy books. One of her rules was No Drinking. Also No Sweets. At All. So I was grimly, dutifully, self-righteously abstaining. I missed the cocktails and cookies, but I admit I found the unconditional rule easy to follow and gratifying.

When I was six months pregnant, Jaime and I moved from New York to London for his job. I was glad to explore someplace new, though disappointed to forgo a pint in a pub to enhance the experience. My new English doctor, Mrs. L. (yes, in England she was referred to as Mrs. instead of Dr.), was amused at this notion of complete abstention and immediately recognized the “all or nothing” attitude as American. I hadn’t thought of myself that way—hadn’t I always admired those relaxed Europeans?—but I turned out to be a product of my country. Mrs. L., so reasonable and realistic, said, “An occasional glass of wine won’t be a problem.” And she said I could have a piece of cake. And she sent me to a prenatal class, where her lesson in European moderation was reinforced: The English ladies all agreed with our instructor that a glass of wine was fine. The other Americans in the class exchanged glances. I kept my head down, like Switzerland, and hid my smile.

When Sofie was born, the London hospital served Jaime and me a champagne dinner, but I couldn’t drink. It tasted wrong, and I had shifted my worry from prenatal development to postnatal alcohol poisoning. A nurse recommended drinking the occasional pint of Guinness to promote my breast milk. “It’s the yeast,” she said knowingly. It sounded like an old wives’ tale, appealing and probable, like brandy cures colds. But I didn’t do it; I was afraid of tainting Sofie.

After a few months, Mrs. L. encouraged me to find a sitter. She agreed with my nurse about the health benefits of Guinness, and, more important, she was certain that regaining my adult social life and a sense of balance would prevent my suffocating under the weight of new motherhood. She convinced me that Sofie would not suffer from the trace amounts of alcohol spiking my breast milk from a glass of wine.

A prenatal-class friend, Sarah, invited Jaime and me to lunch and to dinner, introducing us to London social drinking customs: Sunday roast lunch with the family needs a glass of wine. Seven in the evening needs a glass of champagne. A pub lunch needs a beer while the kids play in the garden-cum-playground out back. I marveled at this setup and also at the fact that, although the drinking age is eighteen, parents can order a beer for their sixteen- or seventeen-year-old if it is with a meal.

Sarah also found us a mother-and-baby group that met at a member’s house for lunch. Wine was sometimes offered, and no one raised an eyebrow if I did or did not drink. No one cared. It was more shocking to my English friends if I refused a cup of tea in the afternoon. While we bonded over our new-mother concerns, I always felt like a foreigner. Until one night at the pub, when once again drinking was a force for good.

The mothers took me to the Ladbroke Arms. I was about to order that pint of Guinness but was told it was too manly, too serious—they didn’t care if it was good for my breast milk. They explained their drink of choice that evening: the shandy. Lager and lemonade. Yes, my American stomach clenched at that recipe, but “lemonade” in England is lemon soda, so it became less disgusting and more funny. I enjoyed the drink but could stomach only one, because it didn’t really taste that good. I remember the faces of my girlfriends: mocking my ignorance, laughing at my reaction, confident in my approval, and, finally, appreciative of the unity and intimacy that come from everyone drinking the same thing, together. After months of lonely expatriate pregnancy and new-mother stress, all I needed to recalibrate was a drink in a pub with friends.

Back home in New York, living in the suburbs, it’s been harder to relax and connect the same way. I’m not studying abroad, on vacation, or on an expat assignment. My town doesn’t have plazas and beer gardens; it has schools and sports fields. Parents gather on the sidelines, at school events, at the farmers’ market, in the park—where there is no café. This well-off community, whose children are at such great risk from drunk driving and alcohol abuse, this community that pays for the DARE program to be taught to ten-year-olds, is not as openly appreciative of the good a drink can do. I find myself defensive of the age-old equation: Good wine equals good cheer. The idea of a pub with a playground in the back is ridiculous here. I know parents who won’t even drink in front of their kids; they don’t want to set the wrong example.

Sarah tells me that alcohol is also a daunting problem among English teens, and of course adults, too. Alcoholism is widespread. So the “moderate” European society doesn’t produce universally moderate teens. Still, Sarah believes in educating her kids about alcohol and at some point sharing a glass of wine with them around the table. Otherwise, she believes, complete denial would lead to complete excess.

I have three kids now, and I know that whatever is denied them—a puppy, a trampoline—becomes extra alluring. Luckily, I have not had any teenage alcohol disasters in my family, but Sofie, now fourteen, has seen the ominous DARE warnings materialize among her peers: the lying, the sneaking, the lawbreaking, and the terrifying overindulgence that leaves disastrous social consequences (or leaves by ambulance, in the case of the kid with vodka in the lunchroom).

As I’ve watched this happen, I’ve done my own forbidding and offered Sofie unlimited rides home. I’ve told the kids I’m allowed to drink because I’m a grown-up, with a fully developed body and mind. But at the same time, part of me—the European traveling part—agrees with Sarah and still harbors that intention of instilling a moderate attitude among my clan. I’m not about to hand a beer to my eleven-year-old, but I came up with a plan that I thought would be appropriate.

At one of our recent Shabbat dinners, I served the kids a sip of wine in the beautiful antique glasses my mother had passed on to us. There was a fair amount of giggling and balking and very little appreciation for the fruit of the vine. The next week I did it again, and they all refused it, saying it was wrong for them to drink wine. Maybe that was the moment, uncomfortable though it was, when the middle ground could have been explored—a perfect example of drinking alcohol not to get drunk but to appreciate, together at a family meal, the ritual of wine drinking as well as the bounty we had before us. But I froze. I suddenly saw myself not as guiding them to a future life of moderation but as teaching them to drink now. To find myself thinking, Come on, it’s just a sip was alarming; the kids would have whipped out their DARE whistles. Just as my bossy obstetrician had advised, absolutes are easy and comforting. The week after that, I poured them apple juice: same ritual, different fruit, no middle ground.

I figured Jaime and I would just continue to have our own glasses of wine and leave the kids out of it, but then I heard that phrase, “drunk parents.” The kids still chafe at the bottle of wine on the table. Drinking is bad. Can I explain to Sofie that drinking vodka at lunch is bad but that in a few years drinking a glass of wine in good company will melt her inhibitions and allow her to bond with foreign people and places, as Mom did in her Spanish heyday? I can’t, really. I can’t compare my late-college experiences to her early teenage ones. She’s not ready, and that’s why she shouldn’t drink, not yet.

Teenagers don’t readily recognize moderation. They, more than anyone else, binge, overwork, slack off, or make absolutist announcements like “I’m never eating meat again” and “Drinking is bad.” One day Sofie will grow out of this teenage brain.

I suspect my kids will not be dry until their twenty-first birthdays, when they will suddenly go to a lovely café and sip a glass of chardonnay. But for me, it’s about showing them a life where alcohol is not a demon but an asset and helping them arrive there safely. I look forward to the day when I can share not only a meal but also a bottle of wine with my children. I might have to spring for a trip to Europe in the process.