by Jill Stark
The move is all part of a shift in our culture that has seen more women drinking than ever before. Since the end of the six o’clock swill, women have been integrated into a drinking culture that used to be the domain, primarily, of men. The industry was quick to respond to this social change, developing wine coolers and sweet-tasting, brightly coloured pre-mixed spirits in stubby-sized bottles, to appeal to women who didn’t like drinking beer. The ‘alcopop’, as the latter became known, was a massive hit with girls and young women.
Some alcohol companies are now looking to mothers as the next growth market. Australian online parenting community Real Mums has its own wine club, with bottles delivered to your door. ‘No more dragging the screaming toddler to the bottle shop and having people look down their nose at you!’ the website reads.
And I wonder how long it will be before we start seeing brands like MommyJuice sold here. This American wine company targets busy mothers. The logo shows a woman cross-legged on a yoga mat, juggling a house, a laptop, a teddy bear, and kitchen utensils. ‘Moms everywhere deserve a break,’ the blurb reads. ‘So tuck your kids into bed, sit down and have a glass of MommyJuice — because you deserve it!’ The battle for the mommy dollar is so fierce in the United States that a rival company, Mommy’s Time Out (‘we all know that being a mommy is a difficult job’) recently tried to convince a court, unsuccessfully, that MommyJuice’s use of the word ‘mommy’ to sell wine was a trademark infringement.
While I’m fairly certain that most of my friends with kids would rather eat their own eyeballs than be seen drinking a glass of MommyJuice, I don’t doubt that there would be a market for such a product in Australia. The mother-of-two behind the wine — the name for which was inspired by her children, who used to say ‘That’s Mommy’s juice!’ whenever they saw wine glasses — says that it’s no different from beer ads, which have for decades used sport as a way to attract men. I’m all for market diversification, but it troubles me that women are being targeted in this way. Is drinking really such an intrinsic part of motherhood that mums are being convinced they need a bottle of wine to survive it?
To Meagan’s surprise, the opposite has proved true. Since she stopped drinking, managing small children has become a lot less stressful. ‘I realise now that I cope a lot better without alcohol. It was adding another layer of stress, because you can’t really deal with your emotions and the real issues if you’ve got a bit of an alcohol haze around you. There’s always that low-level irritability, even if you’re not hung-over.’
And what about those boozy girls’ lunches? They’ve got to be hard for someone who described herself as ‘the life and soul of the party’. ‘I really worried that they were just not going to be fun. I thought that these good times were all tied up with alcohol, but I had the best time recently with my girlfriends. I laughed my head off, and they were laughing with me. I realised that I’m just a silly duffer and, whether I’m drinking or not, that’s who I am, and [not drinking] doesn’t make me any less fun or interesting to be around.’
This gives me hope as I prepare for my sober birthday celebrations. Maybe I can still have a wild time without booze — only this time, my antics will be remembered for quite different reasons from my prolific drinking talents. It will be the year that Starkers stayed sober, and surely the novelty of that will be enough to elevate it to a position in the annals of history that will match the notoriety of previous occasions.
WHEN THE BIG day comes, I’m one week away from three months without booze and, oddly enough, this scares me more than the thought of a beer-free birthday. I started out doubting I’d last the full three months and now, as the finish line approaches, I’m questioning whether it’s long enough. I’ve gained insight into my motivations for drinking, but I’m not convinced that it’s enough to change my relationship with alcohol fundamentally. I can see myself a few weeks down the track, hung-over and regretful, spiralling into a chaotic world of late nights and lost mornings, just like old times. I’ve learned that I don’t need to drink to be confident, honest, or affectionate, but I wonder how quickly those lessons will be swept from my mind, like footprints beneath a rising tide, when I’m faced with a good bottle of red and a night without limits. I now know that the line I thought age or motherhood might someday draw under my binge drinking is written in pencil, not permanent marker. If I don’t want to be waking up with the same wretched hangovers five or ten years from now, I’m going to have to work a bit harder at changing the way I drink.
Besides, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up feeling so healthy, calm, and motivated. Just like my liver, I feel as if my body and mind are regenerating. The cells are being replenished.
I have a strange sense that I’m standing at a crossroads. I could go back to Habitland, where Catherine found herself so soon after having children, or stay a while longer in Sobertown. There are so many other experiences I want to try without alcohol. Can I survive a Melbourne winter without red wine? Will watching footy be as much fun booze-free? Could six months without alcohol see me kicked out of the Press Club?
I decide that another three months off the booze just seems right. It feels like I’ve got a lot more to learn before I invite alcohol back into my life.
Neil and his wife, Ker, and my nieces, six-year-old Daisy and three-year-old Orla, arrive on the week of my birthday. I’m excited to tell them that I’m going for another three months without alcohol. It’s such a pleasure to have them stay in my new apartment, and to show them around the city I’ve grown to love so much. They live in Singapore, having moved there from Edinburgh three years ago. I soon realise that, although I can’t toast their arrival with a beer, sobriety is actually making my time with them more special. Being dive-bombed by two squealing Scottish monkeys at 6.30 a.m. is much more enjoyable when you’re not feeling scratchy after drinking wine till midnight. And when I find myself running with my brother around Princes Park at seven o’clock on a Saturday morning, I can only marvel at how things have changed.
On the afternoon of my birthday party, which I hold in a beer garden just to make the challenge more real, I’m feeling happy but a wee bit nervous. I’ve invited a lot of people and have a few pre-party jitters. I’m anxious that people will show up and that the weather will hold out. Mostly, I’m just thrilled that my friends will get to meet my family, and my Scottish and Australian worlds will come together, putting my two halves in context for those who love me.
It turns out to be a perfect day. The sun shines all afternoon, the kids play, and my friends and family gel beautifully. The idea that having a drink in my hand will somehow make the occasion more rewarding suddenly seems silly. True, there are no singing policemen or dalliances with dreadlocked life coaches, but that’s okay. This year, I have more than that: I have the energy to immerse myself completely in playing with my nieces, I have the lucidity to appreciate how heartfelt my brother’s words are when he says he’s proud of me and the life I’ve made for myself, and I have several moments of genuine, full-to-the-brim happiness — the kind so warm you could curl up and live in them — made even more profound by knowing that they’re not in any way enhanced, stimulated, or manufactured by alcohol. It is joy in its purest form.
April
LAST NIGHT, AS I slid along the polished floorboards on my knees, rocking the air guitar to Bon Jovi, it occurred to me: I don’t need alcohol to be ridiculous. For so long, booze has been my ticket to a world of silliness. I have danced on bar tops, belted out karaoke, and waltzed with stolen traffic cones, all under the protective cloak of drunkenness. But as I enter my fourth month without alcohol, I realise that I don’t always need a beer in my hand to be silly.
Nowhere is this more apparent than at an ’80s dance class. Without alcohol to amuse me, I’m open to almost any form of alternative entertainment — and this one’s a beauty. On Thursday nights, instead of enjoying pre-weekend drinks at my local boozer, I’ve been getting kitted
out in legwarmers, fluoro tights, and a headband, and heading to an inner-city dance studio to bust out moves to classics from the decade that style forgot. We’ve done Alice Cooper, the Pointer Sisters, Xanadu, and, last night, the captain of cock-rock himself, Jon Bon Jovi. This is not a class for those who take themselves too seriously. So I decided pretty early on to leave my hang-ups at the door, rolled up in a ball next to my sweaty ankle socks and my vanity.
It gets me wondering, as I swing my ponytail around my head and pump my power fist in the air, why have I spent so much of my life worried about what other people think? Why has it taken half a bottle of wine for me to lose the self-consciousness that seems to follow me everywhere, like a playground bully? The more I think about it, the more I see that it’s not going to alter the course of my life irreparably if a stranger thinks that my bum looks big in my new gym shorts. If I flirt with someone at a party and they run for the door, it might be embarrassing, but it won’t kill me; and there’s unlikely to be any long-term ramifications from an uncoordinated dance routine or a dodgy note in a karaoke bar full of colleagues. As Mum’s been telling me since I was old enough to take fright at the sight of a full-length mirror, people are generally far more interested in their own lives than they are about the size of my bum or the relative boofiness of my hair on any given day. Yet I have wasted countless hours worrying about looking stupid.
This is part of the appeal of being drunk — it frees you from the suffocating constraints of social conditioning. You’re either so blind that you don’t know or care how you look, or you’re consumed by the giddy hubris of intoxication, which colours everything you do with that glowing hue of awesomeness. I must admit that I do miss the liberation of drunkenness; you have to work a lot harder to feel bulletproof when you’re sober.
So I have a choice. I can either be socially reserved, using my sobriety as an excuse for timidity, or I can let go of my inhibitions and channel my inner piss-head, minus the booze. This is what I did in February, when I saw one of my favourite bands perform: Primal Scream were touring, in celebration of the 20th anniversary of their seminal album Screamadelica. Hearing the wonderfully dishevelled Bobby Gillespie chunter on about the good old days in his gruff Glaswegian accent, as the iconic images of one of the defining albums of my generation played in a psychedelic light show behind him, I was transported back to the heady heights of my teenage years. As the first glorious bars of ‘Movin’ On Up’ rocked Melbourne’s Forum Theatre, it was the closest I’d felt to being pissed since I stopped drinking. The music was so exhilarating that I couldn’t help but dance like no-one was watching. But someone was. A picture taken by one of the Age photographers captures me dancing with such divine abandon — eyes shut, singing loudly, sweaty hair flying in all directions — that it prompted my friend Beck to comment on Facebook: ‘Holy sobriety. I didn’t think a girl could roll like that going pure.’ I’m learning that if I can lose myself in the moment, free of introspective bullshit, alcohol becomes superfluous.
But sobriety can’t make every night top-notch. At a less than enjoyable party earlier this month, I found myself hankering for a beer. Crammed into a corner, shouting banal pleasantries to strangers above the sort of doof-doof music you hear on government anti-drugs adverts, I fantasised about how a few beers might make this party better. Then it occurred to me: sometimes a shit party is just a shit party, and no amount of booze will change that. If only I’d figured this out earlier, I’d have saved myself a lot of energy making small talk with obnoxious try-hards and hooking up with charmless narcissists. Previously, if I was having a shit time, I’d drink more; I reasoned that the faster I could get pissed, the better the night would get. It wasn’t great logic, and it rarely worked.
There are, however, some things I’ve not yet learned to do sober. Sex and soda water have proven to be incompatible bedfellows. Apart from my Australia Day eve pash at Cherry Bar — a romantic interlude which, incidentally, fizzled out before it began — my love life has ground to a halt. When I pause to reflect on why this might be, I’m faced with a number of answers. Firstly, I realise that I haven’t been sober during sex in years, probably not since my eight-year relationship ended in 2007. After the split, I threw myself into a series of unsatisfying flings and one-night stands, unions all signed in the sticky ink of pale ale and vodka. I met most of the men in a bar or at a party — which, as we all know, is the ideal starting point for any meaningful relationship. There was the hot police officer, who insisted on having the true-crime television show The First 48 as the soundtrack to his performance, and tortured me the next morning by blasting out Cold Chisel songs as he drove me home in his Holden Commodore. Then there was the 20-something guy I picked up at 5.00 a.m., after deciding he was potential boyfriend material based solely on the observation that he was sexy and wearing a nice hat. In the harsh light of morning, I discovered that his hat was clearly designed to deflect attention from the fact that he didn’t seem to own shoes. And how could I forget the romantic charmer who did the deed and waited until I fell asleep to flee, leaving me to believe, for the first few minutes of the next day, that I’d dreamed the entire unedifying experience.
If this is the calibre of men I’m hooking up with when drunk, perhaps it’s better to be sober and celibate. The ugly insides of the handsome strangers I used to be attracted to are so much easier to spot now that I’m sober. Several times in the last few months, I’ve had guys chat me up, only to see them lose interest when they discover I’m not drinking. It’s disappointing, but instructive — the kind of guy who needs a woman to be drunk before he can make his move is not much of a man.
This year, I’m going to have to change my tactics. If those Sex and the City gals are anything to go by, I won’t need alcohol to pick up blokes: I’ll find my guy easily by seductively perusing canned goods at the supermarket, or by pretending to shop for power tools in a hardware store. Perhaps I’ll join one of those singles cookery classes, or adopt a dog to act as a man-magnet.
While sober dating scares the hell out of me, it’s got to be better than drunken dating disasters of the past.
WHEN I TOLD my editor that I was giving up booze, she thought it would make a good feature for the paper. We weren’t really sure how the piece would take shape, but we figured that an examination of Australia’s drinking culture, told through the eyes of a binge-drinking health reporter during a break from booze, might hold some interest for our readers. Now, she’s shocked to learn that I’m voluntarily opting to stay sober for another three months. She presumed, as I did, that when 1 April came along I’d have the drinks lined up on the bar, trumpets sounding and party poppers popping, as I counted down the last few seconds of sobriety and prepared to embrace my old pal boozy mcbooze-pants. Instead, I find myself writing a piece about my three months without alcohol, and how it has changed me so much that I’m extending my drinking ban until July. Outing myself as a massive booze hound in the national press was not part of my career plan, but this is exactly what I’m about to do.
The night before we go to print, I’m hunched over the news desk, staring at a printout of the next day’s paper. There I am, dancing like a maniac at the Primal Scream gig, my toothy grin and wayward mane prominent above a 2500-word confessional about my binge-drinking ways. My editor laughs. ‘I can’t quite believe you’re doing this,’ she says, and I shoot her a look so panicked that it prompts her to rest a hand on my shoulder and tell me not to worry. It doesn’t reassure me. Holy shit — what the fuck am I doing? Tomorrow my colleagues will read this. Health professionals who respect me, and know nothing of my party-girl side, will view me in a different light. In 12 years of journalism, I’ve never had something so personal published. Our job is to report the news, and occasionally to give our opinion on it, but rarely to become it.
The next morning I wake up early to grab the paper. My tale of drunken debauchery takes up an entire broadsheet page. My face beams back at me; it’s hu
ge. In a secondary picture, I’m captured grinning inanely, my head wedged between two large glasses of beer — somewhere a village is missing its idiot. This morning I’m cocooned inside my flat, the blinds drawn, but I feel as if I’ve invited the world into my living room. I am starkers, in body, mind, and moniker.
Then the text messages start. Friends reading my story in bed while contending with mammoth hangovers tell me that they found it inspiring; it’s made them think about how much they drink, and why. The head of public affairs at one of Melbourne’s major public hospitals messages me to say that he found the article courageous and life-affirming. On Facebook and Twitter, friends, acquaintances, colleagues, contacts, and complete strangers are talking about the story in terms that make my heart lilt and my cheeks redden.
It’s not even lunchtime, and the article has become the most-read story on the Age website. Dozens of people leave comments. Reading them, I realise that this is not just my story — my love–hate square dance with alcohol is one that countless others are having, week after week. Many are desperate to find a new dance partner. Some comments are from women my age, caught in a cycle of partying that’s no longer satisfying. Others are heartbreaking: a man talks of his alcoholic father, reduced to drinking methylated spirits after retirement left him without the financial means to accommodate his habit; the father had died three weeks ago, brain-damaged, broken, and too young. For some, my story was neither uplifting nor motivational. One reader says that she found the article sad — sad that my peers define me by my drinking, and sad that I was scared to be my true self. Another thinks that the problem is not alcohol, but my inability to say no and to respect myself. One says that a six-month period of sobriety last year was ‘the most boring and depressing time of my life’, and informs me, ironically, that booze bans are usually instituted by social bores. A number of teenagers relate to my experience, saying they feel pressured to drink in an environment that views abstinence as abnormal. Nothing I’ve ever written has had a response like this — it’s like group therapy for binge drinkers. It suggests that this is a conversation worth having.