SUNDAY 24TH JULY 2022
Less irritable this week – hurray! On the whole, I’m feeling much more calm and positive and the best part is that I know/hope I’m on an upward spiral – I’ve not got a boozy weekend coming up that’s going to send me straight back to square one. Last night I had to pick my daughter up from a friend’s house at 10 pm. Had I not been on this sober journey, it would’ve irked me that I wouldn’t be able to have a drink on a Saturday night till after I’d picked her up. That not being an issue at all was really liberating.
MY WHY
I am a mum, so it goes without saying that my children are the most important people in my life. Lately I’ve been overcome by the realisation of how strange/wrong/ironic – I can’t quite articulate it properly – it is that a habit that has such an impact on my life has absolutely nothing to do with the most important people in it. There is NOTHING about my drinking that can possibly have any positive impact whatsoever on my relationship with my children. Clearly, they don’t drink themselves, so it’s not as if I have any fond memories of bonding with them in the past over alcohol, like I do with the adults in my life, and I have no desire to drink with them in the future. Me drinking around them can only have a neutral impact at the very best, certainly never a positive one. Yes, I did buy into the whole “Mommy Juice” thing for a while and I even remember messaging friends on What’s App while pissed saying something about alcohol making parenting more fun. We laughed about it at the time but now I cringe and it makes me angry to think that mums are actively targeted by Big Alcohol. Parenting is hard and I fully believed that alcohol relieved the stress and saw it as a reward. I wish it hadn’t taken so long to dawn on me that that’s not true at all – it is just so much harder to deal with it all the next day when you’re not feeling your best. I would like to think (please, God!) that any drinking I’ve done up to now has not imprinted any negative memories on my children. Nothing bad has happened because of it. Drunken arguments have never been a thing in our house – if anything, we probably seemed more fun on occasions when we were drinking. However, my kids are getting older and whereas they might not have thought about why mum was being fun and silly in the past, they are now getting to an age where they will know it’s because she is pissed and I don’t want that. Earlier this year I went alcohol-free for 30 days, which they were aware of. One day my son asked if I had felt better when I wasn’t drinking, to which the reply was obviously ‘yes’. He then asked why I’d gone back to it and I was at a loss. The honest answer would’ve been ‘because it was my birthday and then it was dad’s birthday’. Another truthful answer would’ve been ‘because that’s what adults do’. I can’t remember what I said in the end – I must’ve fobbed him off in some way or another because my honest answers seemed too stupid to admit to him. There I was – totally shown up by an 11-year-old! I know that there are going to be bumpy times ahead and I feel like I’m going to have to be on top of my game to be able to deal with all the hormone-induced anger and angst. I won’t be on top of my game if I’m drinking – I know that now. The actress, Ann Hathaway, has been quoted as saying that she’s giving up drinking till her kids leave home. What a great way of stopping but not putting the burden of ‘forever’ on it! Maybe I’ll join her, maybe not, but I do think that, after this year is up, I’ll make a point of not drinking in front of my children. I’m not naïve enough to think that my not drinking will set such a good example that they won’t be inclined to drink themselves – my own mum was never a big drinker and that didn’t stop me. I do hope, however, that if I can drip feed my new-found beliefs about alcohol into their subconscious over the next few years, they might not be so inclined to overindulge as I have been. I keep reading that Millennials are rejecting alcohol as the drug of their parents’ day so I hope my Gen Zs will follow suit.
Theme Tune: Kids by Robbie Williams