I identify as a late-adopter. I might even pride myself in this. Smart phones? At least a decade after everyone else. A.I.? Not yet. Our family was still mailing DVDs back and forth with Netflix long after everyone else streamed their movies. It’s not that I try to be a Luddite, although I surely am one, I just don’t seem to be paying attention to the trends around me. Or maybe I get complacent. Regardless, the world by-passes me when I’m looking the other way. I’m the same with TV shows, by the time I get around to watching something, everyone else is has moved on. That’s why I’m writing about a TV show that has been off the air for five years.

Did you ever watch Mom? It ran eight seasons, from 2013 to 2021. I have no idea if it was popular. I’ve never heard anyone mention it before, but eight seasons, that’s pretty good, right? Plus, it stars Allison Janney. I know her from The West Wing. I assume she’s a respected actress. She’s won Emmys, an Oscar and a BAFTA. Probably in the comments, an annoyed reader will admonish me, “Dude, everyone knows Mom!”

Susan and I have been binging (bingeing?) Mom for months. We’re rather ineffective bingers. We typically watch two episodes on most days, and since there are one-hundred-seventy episodes, it’s slow going. Right now, we’re most of the way through season seven, and just this morning, I realized something important is missing from the show—a character like me.

Quick synopsis: Mom tracks the misadventures of Christy and Bonnie Plunkett, a daughter/mom duo trying to navigate sobriety by attending Alcohol Anonymous meetings. The supporting characters are, by and large, the women they’ve met in the A.A. program. There’s a core of five women with other women dropping in and out for a season or so. It’s a funny show, even though most of the humor plays off of two-dimensional stereotyped characterizations. In my opinion, Allison Janney, as the immature, narcissistic Bonnie, mostly carries the show. She’s a hoot!

Now, the annoyed commenter from before is back. “Dude, the reason you don’t see yourself in the show is because it’s about women with drinking problems.” Annoyed commenter seems to have a point, but I’m not looking for a male alcoholic, I’m looking for someone who didn’t quit drinking because they hit and bottom and stayed there. The women in the show have, for the most part, been arrested, done time, endured bouts of homelessness, and irreparably damaged their lives. They all turned to sobriety as an exit ramp from their super screwed up lives.

I don’t want to imply that I never hit bottom. No, I never lost my job, got a DUI, became homeless, or got beaten to a pulp because I lack a filter, impulse control, or common sense as a drunk, but you could accurately put an ‘almost’ in front of all those examples. Countless mornings, I woke up mortified by antics the previous night, or worse, I couldn’t remember them at all. I spent entire weekends hungover from an epic Friday night and then went to work on Monday, mourning my wasted weekend. Pretty much every few weeks, I had an event that might cause someone else to say, “Hmm, maybe I should quit.”

Eventually, I started drinking responsibly.* Not all at once. My scale-back took years. Lots of internal questioning about whether I should have another drink, or if I already had enough. I commonly lost this debate, but I made creeping progress. But by the time I moved to Gettysburg twenty-one years ago, my ‘sobriety’ was complete. Drunkenness was a thing of the past. Although I still drank every day—always two, often three, sometimes four drinks—my backouts and embarrassments were gone.

The reason I finally quit drinking altogether wasn’t that I hit bottom, it’s that I got far enough from bottom to understand the hold alcohol had on my life. I thought about drinking all the time. All.The.Time! As soon as I hit my nightly two drink allotment, I began wishing for tomorrow. At work, I craved my evening drinks all day. Once, after spending an entire day stuck on the highway in a snowstorm, I pulled into my driveway at three-thirty in the morning, Susan went straight to bed. I sat down and drank my two glasses of wine. I wasn’t an addict in a physical sense, but my emotional connection to alcohol had the same pull.

I can relate to messed up stories the characters on Mom tell—the women one-upping one another with the life-threatening hijinks of their prior lives. I’ve lived that. But it’s not why I quit. I am sure the show’s focus on bottom-dwelling, egregious, dangerous, unlawful behavior has convinced thousands of viewers that the grip alcohol has on their lives doesn’t warrant intervention. It’s easy to watch the show and say, “I’m not that bad, I guess I’m fine,” even if you’re not.

I suppose I’m too late with this complaint, the show is complete. But since it’s streaming now, I ask the distributor to put a thirty second public service announcement in each show reminding people that alcoholism doesn’t always include waking up in a ditch. All they need to say is, “If alcohol negatively impacts your life, you have a drinking problem.” And then list some ways to get help.

If you or someone you know has an unhealthy reliance on alcohol, this website is a good place to start: https://alcohol.org/

* Thankfully, when I met Susan, she told me she was uninterested in dating a drunk. And then she stuck with me as I learned how to not be a drunk.

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