Mrs D is Going Without
Page 3
Tuesday: Hungover. Get a bottle and drink half. Weekly total = 2 bottles.
Wednesday: Non-hangover day. Supermarket day. Buy 2 bottles, drink 1¼ bottles. Weekly total = 3¼ bottles.
Thursday: Very hungover. Get a bottle, perhaps have 2 glasses. Weekly total = 4 bottles (?? ish, it’s getting hard to total).
Friday: It’s Friday!!! Drink at least 1½ bottles of wine. Weekly total = 5½ bottles.
Saturday: Hungover. But who cares?! It’s Saturday! Drink at least another 1½ bottles of wine. Weekly total = 7 bottles.
I seem unable to push aside my worry about my worsening drinking habit. There are two voices in my head. One is telling me boozing is fun and I deserve it and I’m totally fine. The other is telling me it’s not fun, I don’t deserve it and I’m not totally fine. I fluctuate from worrying for a week then not caring for a week. Worrying for a week then not caring for a week. Worrying, not caring. And all the while still drinking. It’s madness! And no one knows about it, sees it or gets it, because from the outside I’m still a superwoman. High-achieving Lotta charging ahead with her life. I’m not having crazy drunken arguments with anyone. I’m not failing to achieve anything I need to achieve in my day-to-day life. Outwardly I’m fine. But I’m not fine. I’m drinking way too much.
My private, personal hell is at its blackest at 3 a.m. I come to consciousness in my bed, my brain is fizzy, my mouth is dry, my head is sore and my bladder is full. I walk miserably down the hall to the loo. I feel guilty. I regret. I just feel so unhappy.
I’m sure I don’t seem as miserable to others as I sometimes feel. The misery comes and goes and it seems I can shove it to the side often enough to keep living normally and, most of the time, happily. Aside from my overly enthusiastic drinking habit, things are pretty good.
One long weekend we head to Napier to holiday with a bunch of Wellington friends that are driving up to meet us. We all book in to the Top 10 Holiday Park and spend three days drinking, eating, chatting, catching up, playing games with the kids, and just hanging out together.
It should be a fabulous fun weekend but it’s not great for me. I have this insane notion that a holiday weekend like this has to involve a lot more drinking than normal. This is how I’ve approached holiday weekends all of my adult life, but now at nearly 40 I’m finding it hard to control the amount of wine I pour down my throat and keep it together.
The first night I try to create some kind of crazy, boozy, party buzz which really just means I get hammered and will the others to join in with my enthusiastic wine-drinking. There are a few others that hit it along with me but all in all the night is a gentle one and I feel a bit flat heading for bed that the night is over and was lacking in some way. Lacking? What the hell am I wanting? I have the people, the environment, the holiday, but I can’t settle into that. I have to chase a boozy high. ‘Must get drunk to have fun’ methinks.
On the last night of the weekend I just go for it without caring that no one else is. Hell-for-leather drinking. I’m pestering others to get wine out of their units after ours has all gone. I’m talking total rubbish. I’m slurring. I’m noticeably trashed. I stumble into our unit at midnight completely and utterly written off. Crouch over the toilet vomiting, vomiting, vomiting. I lose a dearly beloved earring my sister gave me—is it down the toilet along with the contents of my stomach?
I wake up the next morning and put on a facade of being okay, all faux cheery and smiley as we pack up our unit and get the kids into the car. We wave goodbye to our lovely friends and drive for four hours home to Auckland. It’s an awful journey, I cry all the way. I feel unhealthy. I feel dysfunctional. I feel sad. I feel lost. And I have this nagging, gritty, burning feeling that things just aren’t right here and something has to change.
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Back home again I step up my efforts to try and control my intake. I get a book from the library called Controlling Your Drinking by William R. Miller PhD. It’s full of questions for me to answer to help me figure out if I have a problem and frankly I feel good at being able to tick ‘No’ to so many of them: ‘Do you ever drink before noon?’, ‘Have you gotten into fights when drinking?’, ‘Have you ever lost a job because of drinking?’, ‘Have you ever been in a hospital because of drinking?’, ‘Have you ever been told you have liver trouble?’, ‘Has your spouse (or other family member) ever gone to anyone for help about your drinking?’ No, no, no . . . Phew. I feel reassured.
I decide anyway to try the author’s moderation technique called ‘Keeping Track’. For this I have to get a notebook and draw a table in it with intersecting horizontal and vertical lines. Across the top are the headings: Day, Time, Type of Drink, Amount, and Situation. Below there are numerous rows to fill in the details for each drink taken. I put my notebook in the bedroom drawer and on my first evening of ‘Keeping Track’ I run back and forth from the kitchen to the bedroom to fill it in.
There’s a lot of running.
After the first couple of drinks I can’t be bothered filling in most of the boxes and I abandon the whole thing after the first night. Too much bloody running back and forth to the bedroom! There’s no big mystery to my drinking habit. I drink glasses of wine, at home, fast. I gulp. I devour. I practically inhale the sweet nectar.
I’m desperately clawing for the same feeling I had when I began drinking all those years ago. The same fissure of excitement when alcohol enters the picture, the same delight at the dangerously alluring taste. But slowly, deep down in the dark recesses of my brain, I’m realising that the fun in drinking is going for me. It’s being replaced with a kind of focused determination. It’s not uplifting anymore; in fact, it’s kind of deadening. Heavier. Less fun. More miserable. And embarrassingly now, on the rare occasions that I’m drinking in front of others, I’m getting sloppier.
Corin and I go to a barbecue with his TVNZ colleagues. On arrival I cheerfully and gratefully accept a chardonnay from the hostess. ‘That would be lovely, thanks!’ As the barbecue progresses I continue to drink, perhaps just a tad too enthusiastically. I get a bit loud and opinionated. At one point in the evening I go to the bathroom and as I’m washing my hands I take a good long look at myself in the mirror and think, ‘You are drinking too much, slow down.’ I return to the dinner table and try to calm myself down, but en route home I feel uncomfortable about how I was acting. I know I was being overly chirpy and forced all night, not steady and calm. Not mature. Just boozy. Boozy me.
A few weeks later Corin and I have a rare child-free night out on the town. We start with a few drinks at home as we get ourselves ready and get the boys to bed. They’re bouncing off the walls, excited knowing Mum and Dad are going out and a babysitter is looking after them. After a few extra bedtime stories (and wines) we finally manage to extract ourselves and head into town to a bar at the Sky Tower for cocktails and tapas. My brain tells me: ‘Fun romantic evening! Must drink for the special occasion!’ Drink I do. There are spirits involved. Bad mistake. Last stop of the night we head to a small underground bar where some DJ mates are spinning tunes. I’m quite drunk by this stage, and slurring. An old workmate comes over for a chat and I’m aware that I’m struggling to get my words out. It’s excruciating, even I can see that from inside my drunk mind. After a short while he makes a bad excuse to get away from me, and I find myself sitting alone at the bar feeling drunk and embarrassed and strange and just wrong. This is all wrong. I find Corin and make him take me home ‘right now, please’.
Fun romantic evening.
Then late one Friday at work my boss announces he’s shouting dinner at the local bistro. We all have drinks in the office beforehand. Of course I manage at least three wines and drink them fast (I’m still locked in that mindset of free drinks in the office = must take advantage). We make our way to the restaurant, where I proceed to hit it even harder. Is everyone boozing away as merrily as I am? I have no idea. Possibly. I certainly am. Wine, wine, wine and more wine. By 10 p.m. I’m not really in cont
rol. I wobble to the toilet, spinning out. I must be pretty obviously drunk by now, but it’s Friday night! Isn’t everyone?! I make it into a taxi and concentrate very hard in the back seat all the way home. In my bent brain I realise I’m actually really fucking drunk. I manage to pay the driver and get inside, racing for the toilet. Now I’m puking in the loo. On my knees, in my work clothes, vomiting up my dinner. I’m nearly 40. I’m a happy, contented wife and mother. A working woman with it all going on. What am I doing here on the toilet floor, holding my hair back and vomiting up my steak au poivre? I think of Corin and our sons asleep down the hall and hope like hell they can’t hear me. Hope they don’t see me. This is not good. This is not normal, healthy drinking.
I beat myself up for the rest of the weekend (and my throat is sore from vomiting), but by Monday I’ve decided I’m going to drink again that night. The guilt gets pushed aside, and the more time that passes since the Friday night binge the more I see it as merely a rare blow-out and no big deal. Who doesn’t have those? I convince myself it’s normal for a middle-aged mother of three to end up on the toilet floor puking from too much wine, and I go on my merry way.
Of course, wine is still constantly on my mind. I start doing deals with myself: ‘I won’t drink much on Sunday night because I want to go to the gym on Monday morning. Then Monday night I can have a few because Tuesday isn’t a gym day so it’ll be okay to have a hangover. That hangover will stop me drinking too much on Tuesday night which is good because Wednesday morning I want to go back to the gym.’ Sometimes the best-laid plans go awry and occasionally (or quite often) I find myself at the gym rolling my body over a swiss ball with my guts churning and my head throbbing. I look at the ladies around me and wonder if anyone else is secretly hungover. I feel so miserable.
I’m conscious of every time I take a big gulp of wine at home. Standing at the kitchen bench. Sitting on the sofa. Over and over and over again I gulp wine. I seem unable to ignore what I’m doing. Can’t anyone else see? I feel desperate and alone.
So I get really brave and phone the Alcohol Drug Helpline. I speak breezily and confidently to the woman at the other end of the phone line. ‘I’m just wondering about what’s normal?’ I chirp. ‘Is a bottle a night too much?’ She’s calm and gentle. I can tell she’s letting me talk, letting me figure it out. ‘I’m pretty sure I’m fine,’ I chirp, ‘but yes, you might as well send me some information.’ I’m left feeling dissatisfied with the conversation. What did I hope to get out of it, I wonder. She wasn’t very helpful, really, I conclude. But the truth lingers.
I called a helpline. I called an alcohol helpline.
The calm lady does as promised and some information arrives in the mail. Contained among the pages is another questionnaire designed to help me assess my drinking. It’s far more pertinent than the questionnaire I did earlier, and as a result less reassuring.
Question 1: How often do you have a drink containing alcohol?
Answer: Four or more times a week (worst possible answer).
Question 2: How many standard drinks containing alcohol do you have on a typical day when you are drinking?
Answer: Hmmm. Well, this I’m not sure about, as I don’t really know what constitutes a standard drink.
The helpline’s information pack tells me. It says one standard drink of wine is 100 ml. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, so I get my red plastic measuring cup from the kitchen drawer and fill it with water from the tap to 100 ml. Then I pour that into my wineglass. Holy shit! That’s only around a third of what I normally pour! That means I’m having almost three standard drinks in just one of my glasses of wine.
I think back to my ‘Keeping Track’ table and how inaccurate my inputting was. It really should have looked like this:
Don’t add that up, okay? Moving on . . .
Question 3: How often do you have six or more standard drinks on one occasion?
Answer: Daily or almost daily (worst possible answer).
Question 4: How often during the last year have you found that you were not able to stop drinking once you had started?
Answer: Daily or almost daily (worst possible answer).
Question 5: How often in the last year have you failed to do what was normally expected from you because of drinking?
Answer: Never. Well, phew! I get to click on the best possible answer here. I’m a high-functioning boozer, baby!
Question 6: How often in the last year have you needed a drink in the morning to get yourself going after a heavy drinking session?
Answer: Never, never, never! Woohoo! I’m on a roll! I’m starting to relax now; maybe I’m not that bad after all.
Question 7: How often in the last year have you had a feeling of guilt or remorse after drinking?
Answer: Shitballs. I’m going to have to be honest here. Daily or almost daily (worst possible answer). Damn that guilt.
Question 8: How often in the last year have you been unable to remember what happened the night before because you had been drinking?
Answer: Never. (Phew. No black-outs for me thankfully. Although sometimes I do find myself watching an entire episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians without realising until near the end that I’ve seen the whole damn thing before.)
Question 9: Have you or someone else been injured as a result of your drinking?
Answer: No. (This is good.)
Question 10: Has a relative, friend or doctor, or other health worker been concerned about your drinking or suggested that you should cut down?
Answer: No! (Whoop!)
I finish the questionnaire feeling overall like I’m going to be okay. I tally up my score and it’s 17 out of 40. Surely that’s not too bad. But then comes the shock—the comment attached to my score reads: Your drinking will cause you or may have already caused you problems.
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I shelve it. The information pack and questionnaire gets shoved in the hall cupboard and I decide to press on as normal. I mean, what exactly am I supposed to do with that knowledge anyway? Will cause or may have already caused you problems sounds way too severe, way too dramatic. I have no idea what to do with that so I shelve it and move on.
I do decide, however, to talk sternly to myself about my drinking and my need to moderate it, and so I write myself a note. Two notes actually, on two pages of a reporter’s notebook. One I title ‘Goodbye’ and the other ‘Hello’.
Goodbye
– To the ‘rebellious’ Lotta
– To the Lotta who throws common sense out the window when it comes to drinking
– To the Lotta who ignores the inner voice that knows it is stupid
– To hangovers, headaches + sick guts
– To wasting time worrying and beating myself up about drinking
– Say goodbye to a need to GET HAMMERED every time I drink
– To telling myself ‘stuff it, it’s okay to pound it harder’
– Say goodbye to allowing the HUNGER for drink to dominate
– Say goodbye to thinking the only way to have a good time is by drinking LOTS FAST
– Say goodbye to the old Lotta
– Grow up, move on, embrace a different second half of your life.
Hello
– Say hello to the Lotta you want to be for the rest of your life
– Say hello to a Lotta who is grown up, reliable + sensible when it comes to drink
– Say hello to a Lotta who is happy to stop drinking when the feeling is enough (think about going to bed, sleeping + waking up in the morning)
– Think about that image of the person you want to be; who feels together, sorted
– Hello to a mother who is not going to cause her sons any worry or harm
– Drink slower. Enjoy it. Remember the effect is delayed
– STOP.
I scribble the notes off quickly, rip the pages out, put them in my bedside drawer then dive back into my life.
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nbsp; And I try to moderate, I really do try. But you know, when that sweet nectar hits my throat and the tingles start around my body, when the warmth spreads from my backbone up to my brain, I’m lost. I’m a goner. I just love drinking wine. And so pretty soon I’m back into my same habits. My heavy-drinking Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays, and my lighter drinking Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Pretty soon I’m looking for excuses to drink more (let’s have a disco with the kids after school on Friday—I’ll get the bubbles!) and am chatting to the man at the local bottle store about my studies. He knows about my life.
I love drinking, yet I hate it as well. I love it at 5 p.m. and fall more deeply in love with it as the evening progresses. I’m still loving it when I fall into bed around 10 or 11 p.m., but sometime in the wee small hours the love morphs into hatred and time and again I find myself awake at 3 a.m. burning with guilt and disgust. Come 7 a.m. and the guilt and hatred have turned into a deep misery. I put on a smile and get on with my day and by lunchtime the misery is lingering only slightly. Once the afternoon is underway the negative thoughts have all but disappeared and the longing and desire starts to grow again. And then it’s 5 o’clock.
I’m locked in a ridiculous, vicious, nasty, insidious, twisted, sick, exhausting cycle of booze drinking. I am completely obsessed. I drink. I regret. I drink. I regret. I drink. I regret. I’m lost, drowning in a sea of vino and mixed emotions. And I’m lonely with it. It’s a private miserable drinking hell and although I might try to draw Corin in, my split personality makes it incredibly hard for him to really help. The Jekyll in me—the worried person—cries and moans to him about my drinking, but the Hyde—the enthusiastic boozer—just wants to keep imbibing and shuts him out. I’m my own worst enemy and as a result my inner angst is largely mine alone.
Also, to be fair on Corin and the others around me, there’s not a lot for them to point at. Outwardly my drinking, while clearly of the ‘enthusiastic’ variety, manages to dance just inside the line of social acceptability. Outwardly I’m still a busy, high-performing, high-functioning woman. I’m still running the household, mothering full-time, working on my thesis part-time, dragging my sorry ass to the gym a couple of times a week, maintaining friendships and a social family life. I’m sure if my friends and family were pushed they’d probably say, ‘Yeah, Lotta likes her wines’, but nothing more than that. I want our house to be known as a warm house—open and social and busy and fun. I love fun! And I love community. The more friends we have the better, I say, and what better way to entertain them than by popping a cork?