I didn’t realize I had a drinking problem, until I tried to stop.
My precarious relationship with wine began later than some, having been raised in a house where alcohol was largely absent. My mother’s father had a known problem. We all heard the stories, mostly whispered behind hands, or at kitchen tables when they didn’t know we were listening. Some of the stories were told as warnings. But we understood, that alcohol wasn’t in the house for a reason. My brother, sister and I all knew the excitement of taking sips of wine from tables at weddings, or the odd beer at a house party, but the three of us were well sheltered from the effects of alcohol till we left home.
Things really took a turn for me after the dissolution of my first marriage. Shocking, I know. The subsequent self-destructive embrace of all things previously forbidden, mixed with meeting new friends at new and exciting parties, gave entrance to the blissful numbing charm of a good night of drinking. It brought a loss of inhibitions and a fantastic excuse to do all the wild and crazy things I would have mostly done anyway – charged by the knowledge that I could say the next morning: I did what? Heavens we were so drunk!
Years later, alcohol had become the feature to each important day. Celebrations! Fridays! Birthdays! New Babies! Weddings! The day I was brave enough to read my first slam poem on a stage. The day I met my now husband, and bought him a Red Stripe. The day I invited him over for a movie night, and got us just drunk enough to lose more inhibitions. The day we decided that we were going to have this baby we found ourselves suddenly surprised with. That day, alcohol punctuated with a new blow, as it had to be absent for the first time. I was surprised in the days that followed, how much I wanted to reach for it. Quitting for my first pregnancy wasn’t hard, though yes I missed wine, but for my second – LORD. Having reached nearly the end of a long journey towards a Masters of Science in Geochemistry, I found I had become very reliant on a glass of wine to get the “creative juices” flowing to write my thesis. And finding myself without my “creative writing muse” I was floundering. I floundered. I would have the odd small glass of wine or sip of beer, but I found that made things even worse. One glass was never enough.
For my third (and more surprising that the first) pregnancy it was even more of a struggle. I found myself constantly pushing the “one glass of wine rule” and explaining often to others (very scientifically) how you can’t pass alcohol through breastmilk once he was was born. I drank more than I would like to admit during that maternity leave from work. The one small glass of wine in the afternoon that I found made it easier to join them for a nap, or to make three children under four generally more tolerable, soon became two. When I noticed this and tried to make myself wait AT LEAST till supper, I found that one glass of wine while cooking nearly always resulted in finishing a bottle by bath time. I started buying wine in a box, to save money of course, but then found myself stumbling by bedtime as I no longer had a gauge for how much wine I had drank.
The warning bells began when I found myself making excuses for drinking during the day, or liquid lunches – cracking a beer to go with the Mac and Cheese I had made for the kids. When others started to notice, I began finding sneaky ways to pour that beer into a tall ceramic glass or wine into a travel mug. I found just the right water bottle to hide 3/4 a bottle of wine to take with me to the playground. I was often drinking wine at bath time, or when the kids watched shows in the evening. And always after they went to bed. When I started hiding wine bottles in cupboards from my husband, and got caught, we both knew what was up but neither of us were quite ready to say it out loud. He would passive-aggressively hide them instead, till I would go out to the shop, and buy more, and hide those from him, and repeat.
As I write this, my youngest has moved past the toddler years and I’m finding the warning bells harder to ignore. The pandemic of 2020 didn’t help. Locked at home with my family for months, I decided to learn to make wine, while everyone else was making sourdough. And I did, though not well, and drank every single one of those horrible bottles that were created in this house last year. I counted, there were a lot. There are currently three left downstairs, and even talking about this is making me want to go open one right now. To put off sobriety another day.
But I noticed the warning bells. And I said so out loud to six of the people in my life that I know care. Some made excuses or told me that I wasn’t that bad, but my husband – who has lived closer to me this last couple years, just nodded. And said nothing except: yup. Speaking it aloud helped. It may not help me quit today, but it will make it extremely hard to continue to ignore the slip of the slope. I started an amazing book this week called: We Are The Luckiest: The Surprising Magic of a Sober Life by Laura McKowen. And upon reading it, I realized I’m scared to give up alcohol (especially wine). Forever? Impossible! Never again at a wedding? Never again at wing night? Never again a shared bottle at a gorgeous little vineyard that we bicycled to on this fantastic wine tour we booked in France?! Bullocks!! But that’s part of the problem. Laura says:
Forget forever. It doesn’t exist, anyway. As Eckhart Tolle also said, “It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living,” and that’s exactly what you’re doing when NOW is swallowed by projections of FOREVER. Nothing in the future exists yet. But anything is possible right now. Including the thing you think you cannot do.
So, get living I guess. And try not to open that last of three bottles downstairs. Wish me luck.