1.
I was 16 years old when I learned to pretend, and alcohol was my first teacher. In 2002, I was a senior in high school and the youngest in my friend group—a burden more than a badge of honor. I had entered kindergarten early, skipped a semester of first grade, and spent my adolescence trying to keep up with friends and classmates who were always one to two years older than I was.
It was the same sort of thing that night: I was at a friend’s lake house in Conroe, Texas, for a sleepover. I had neglected to give my parents all the details—that it would be co-ed, that my friend’s own parents were not around, and that there would be alcohol. I took my first sip surrounded by laughter and the kind of reckless confidence characteristic of teens in the middle-class Texan suburbs where I was raised, with children too sheltered to understand risk, too privileged to fathom the many wrong paths a first drink could send them down.
My initial thought: I don’t like this. It was bitter. It failed my tongue and stabbed my throat. I winced. But when I looked around, everyone else was smiling, their faces lit up, elaborately cosplaying the happiest versions of themselves, or even acting inebriated from just one swig. Nobody said anything about the taste, and I didn’t dare speak up. Instead, I smiled too, mimicking their joy, swallowing the drink. I do not like bitter things, yet I committed. I pretended. The hangover, my first, left me physically wrecked, with a pounding headache and waves of nausea for days after.
When, the following week in AP English, we started the Greek tragedies, I would find myself particularly drawn to Aristophanes’s The Frogs. As Dionysus descended into the underworld, I felt like part of the chorus: hovering in the background, hesitant, unwilling to say the truth.
After that night I didn’t drink again until my early 20s, when it proved to have real, usually positive, social consequences. There were brunches and happy hours and work dinners and milestone celebrations. A flute here, bottle here, shot here. G.M. Shepherd’s 2012 book Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It Matters explores how the brain processes taste and how sensory adaptation can influence our preferences. Over time, repeated exposure can lead to a learned preference, even for initially unpleasant tastes, as can cultural and social influences.
My friends joked that I would “babysit” cocktails; take tiny sips of my fruity or creamy drinks during our meetups around the city. The fact was then, as it is now, that I do not like the taste of alcohol. Liberian-born and Texas-raised, my sensibilities have always reflected the hyper-feminine end of those cultures: I like beautiful things, symmetrical things, soft things, sweet things. Yet all the serious relationships of my 20s, including the one with the man who would become my husband, were with partners who enjoyed conversations about 15-year-old Laphroaig scotch and start-up farms for luxury tequilas in places like Sag Harbor and Milan. A person’s taste in alcohol in that stage of my life said something about how well they traveled, which ZIP codes they called home, and sometimes, how long a conversation would last.
So I played along. I learned to enjoy Opus Ones. I learned which years and blends I liked. I wonder now who else in those rooms was like me. Tolerating the bitterness, the wicked means to a freedom from awkwardness, from anxiety. Peace of mind. The power to forget.
2.
By 2024, I had had three children in three years: a girl in early 2021, a boy in 2022, and another boy exactly one year later, a surprise pregnancy I discovered at 15 weeks. After spending my 20s traveling the world, writing, and squeezing everything I could out of my Brooklyn life, it was time to settle down, I was told by older family members, Liberian traditionalists, baby boomers in their fourth and fifth decades of marriage. So I settled down. I had the children. And as I began to fall behind in my literary career (I was nearly four years past the deadline for my second novel by baby number three), I felt guilty for feeling anything but joy—especially after my first pregnancy, in 2019, had ended in loss.
So when anyone asked about the children, the husband, the duplex on the Upper West Side, the life I had worked for and dreamed about, I sipped my wine and I told them all was well. I sipped my wine, and though admissions of sleepless nights and mental depletion followed, I smiled. Yes, I felt joy. But the truth was that my joy sat alongside other conflicting emotions that no one could prepare me for. I was anxious. I was afraid. I missed myself.
Motherhood, like social drinking, came with its own set of unspoken rules. It was more pushing through the means to arrive at that golden end—of successful children, educated and married and useful to the world, hopeful and grateful and eager to give you grandchildren in turn. I felt expected to smile through the exhaustion, to hide my anxiety while my body and mind were still healing.
Thank God it all came to a head.
My husband started renting a summer house in Southampton for our family, and we were hosting friends for the weekend there. On the first night, dinner snowballed from jovial banter and friendly debate to the awkward silences and antagonistic quips of too many strangers using glasses of fine wine to referee political debates, and to cope. I drank more than I ever had before that night, and the next morning, a new friend pulled me aside for a walk.
Apparently I had said a few things about members of my family—things that seemed unbelievable to me now because I had never even thought them before—and she wanted to check in. She hadn’t been there to hear them herself, but another guest, a stranger to me, had told her. I had no defense, no memory, no control. I felt helpless. What had happened? Was the alcohol to blame? Post-partum hormones? Or was it general stress? I spiraled. Can you imagine? I thought to myself later that day, crying as I played with the children upstairs. All that, and I didn’t even like the taste. I haven’t had a drink since.
3.
A year of sobriety gave me clarity on all the tiny ways I pretended, and where it began. I was truthful, first, about my writing. Nobody was, or is, going to save me. If I wanted to finish my novel, I had to demand it of myself, focusing not on the final packaged book, but on the first word. If I wanted to feel like myself again, I needed therapy, guidance in understanding this new role in my life—mother—one that at once consumed all others. If I wanted to feel safe again, I had to pay closer attention to who I was letting into my inner circle, but I also had to take a look in the mirror. In what ways did I silence myself over the years? How often did I laugh when I wanted to cry, wanted to scream? Those early lessons in restraint, for social gain or the avoidance of conflict, withholding truths to blend smoothly into the pot, had a long tail.
Until fairly recently, we rarely saw stories about how challenging it can be to become pregnant, how long the recovery can take, or the very real psychological adjustment demanded by motherhood. There is so much joy, but some days are incredibly, and sometimes unreasonably, hard.
I want to teach my children that no affirmation, not from the rooms, the tables, the circles, the jobs, the marriages, or the friendships they experience over the course of their vast lives, will beat the power of learning to authentically and radically affirm themselves. I want to teach them that bliss and sorrow can coexist, that they are kin and both valid. Pretending taught me how to survive, but it also taught me what I no longer want to carry. I want my children to see that life’s glory is in the raw, unfiltered moments of living fully, and without fear of inconvenient truths. Living fully and making it sweet.