by Stefanie Wilder-Taylor (Make Mine A Double)
The wine bottles were starting to take on a dramatic glow in the artfully lit frame of a bar and I couldn’t help but think how good a glass of nice Merlot would taste after my long day. The reason I quit drinking was that I was doing it every night, at home, isolated – not because I drank too much when I went out or was alone in a bar with no responsibilities, right? Right? Well, no. This was a question I’d already posed to myself many times before I made the humbling decision to give up drinking entirely. It wasn’t that I always drank too much in a social environment; it was that sometimes I did. And I couldn’t predict when those times would be. So I knew that drinking was out of the question. Yet, I was fantasizing about wine like it was an old boyfriend I’d had a dysfunctional relationship with yet when I missed him could only remember the way it felt when I was asleep in the crook of his arm or the way his voice softened when he said “I love you.”
I was alone. In New York. With no one watching over me. But the bartender was now talking about how he moved out of his house when he was sixteen because as he put it, “my mother liked the bottle too much.”
“Really,” I said, not as a question. “Does she still drink?”
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Stefanie on Drinking:
My Sobering Secret
Hair of the Dog
A Shot Glass of Truth
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Raising preemie twin girls plus a sassy preschooler while trying to make a book deadline isn't for wussies. In her Mommy Track'd column, Make Mine a Double, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor takes imperfect parenting to an art form. Each week she breaks the pristine laws of the mommy manuals as she reveals how she attempts to parent her three children through instinct, intelligence, and a lot of trial and error. She is the author of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, and It's Not Me, It's You: Subjective Recollections from a Terminally Optimistic, Chronically Sarcastic and Occasionally Inebriated Woman. She’s appeared numerous times on The Today Show, is a member of the Us Weekly Fashion Police and writes on her blog, Baby On Bored.
