Every Mom I Know Is Doing Drugs

Family Mommy’s High Right Now With three kids in their teens, I’m finally out of the parenting trenches. Perhaps that’s why the moms around me are all doing drugs. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Getty Images Plus. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The first one came from the Frisbee mom. For years we had stood together on the sidelines, cheering for our kids and exclaiming over their adolescent energy and balletic grace in the sharply slanted light, texting now and then about carpools and team snacks. So when she called one afternoon with an extra ticket to see Weezer, I said yes. When I arrived at her house, two other moms were already there, pulling wine bottles out of the refrigerator and filling glasses. Our host disappeared to change into her daughter’s jeans and a concert T-shirt, and when she came back, she was shaking an amber bottle. “Who wants an Adderall?” she asked. She pressed one into my palm, and when no one was looking, I slipped it into my pocket. The women in my social orbit were smart and educated, and most of us once had real careers; some still did. But in Seattle, even if you earn enough to cover childcare, your salary is likely dwarfed by your tech-employed spouse’s, and your own career starts to feel like an indulgence your children pay for. So I gave mine up. When the kids were little, the offer was wine. If a child had a meltdown, another mom would say, “Wine, immediately.” If my husband was out of town and I was parenting solo, someone would offer to drop off a bottle. I owned a “Yes Way Rosé” sweatshirt, and though I never called myself a wine mom, I definitely was one. Then, somewhere along the way, I stopped needing it. As the constant stress of raising young children receded, I started caring more about my health and less about surviving each day with my sanity intact, and I quit drinking altogether. Wine had been for getting through the day. The new offers were for something else. The next one came at a pinball bar, from moms I’d volunteered with at our middle school, taping torn library books and stapling student artwork to hallway bulletin boards. These were the cool moms. They didn’t cover their grays or get Botox. Not giving a fuck was their brand. One of them, a teacher and mom of teens, was aggressively flirting with the bartender. Before long, she was slumped over the table, possibly passed out. Another reached into her oversized tote, produced a key-bump of cocaine, and held it to our friend’s nostril. She sat up instantly, revived, as if someone had plugged her back in. “Anybody else want some?” asked the woman with the keys. Then there was lunch with a lawyer friend whose son was born three months after my twins. She was one of the few women I knew who had held onto a high-powered career after the realities of motherhood set in, and she had never seemed at peace with that decision. When I met her at her office, she was wearing a necklace that said Mother in swirly gold script. Her pink sweatshirt was stained. “Sorry if I’m a little off today,” she said. “My performance review is right after this, and I just took a Xanax. Want one?” I had given up my career, and she had kept hers. Neither of us, it seemed, felt that our lives were adding up to the sum of their parts. I began to feel paranoid. Why was everyone so sure I’d say yes? Did I have resting drug face? Or did I just look like a woman who needed something to help her calm down, feel better, pull herself together? In one of my WhatsApp mom groups, where perimenopause remedies came up constantly, a woman announced she’d filled a prescription for testosterone. It came dosed for men, in a large box full of little tubes. “It gave me ‘roid rage,” she wrote, “but I’m happy to pass it along if any of you want to try it. It’s supposed to turn you into a towering intellect and a sexual goddess, if you can handle the side effects.” Two of the moms wanted to try it. I scrolled past, then scrolled back. A towering intellect. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a thought that wasn’t about who had to be where, and when. After a while, I started to hear each offer as an invitation to self-optimization. And honestly, why wouldn’t I want that? For years, my life had been circumscribed by my kids’ needs and desires. Now they were in their early teens, and they didn’t need me the same way anymore, except as a driver. My evenings and weekends disappeared into a carousel of practices, events, and shopping trips, with no room left to learn a new skill or pursue a single interest of my own. I was distinctly unoptimized. After the Weezer concert, I had gotten ready for bed in the dark so I wouldn’t wake my husband. I slipped the Adderall out of my pocket and set it on the nightstand. I woke before the alarm, and the frisbee mom’s words came back to me like an incantation: It makes you smarter, faster, more energetic. I thought about how nice it would feel to be any of those things. I swallowed the pill. That morning I cleaned my kids’ bathroom and organized my closet with uncommon efficiency. I still had energy, so I cleaned the kitchen, too, and then sat down to work on my book. I wrote more, and with greater focus, than usual. But when I reread the pages, they weren’t any better than what I would have written without chemical assistance, and I ended up cutting most of them. The pill had made me faster. It hadn’t made me anyone else. How could it have? The thing that made me feel unoptimized wasn’t my brain chemistry. It was my life. My dog had an ear infection that required drops twice a day. Still wired, I held him against me as he squirmed and growled, but afterward he curled up in my lap, happy to have his ears scratched. We stayed like that for a long time, just as we would have on any other night. Drugs Motherhood Parenting