Getting Sober – My Why

I couldn’t wait to start drinking, I had been brought up, like most, with the midset that to finally be able to drink meant you was a grown up – How exciting!! To at long last be able to have something which was forbidden for so long.

Well, full disclosure here, I was allowed as a “treat” at Christmas a good old sweet tasting snowball was permitted with dinner, for those who have never experienced one of these it consisted of advocat, lemonade and a drop of lime, more of an alcopop than alcohol don’t you think?

Then of course there was the fifteen year old obligatory getting smashed session without your parents knowing at your friends house! Funny story really, we were as a four pretty trustworthy, hard working school girls, not quite geeks but certainly not part of the cool kids crowd.

Stupidly one of said friends parents entrusted her with the bedroom which held the booze as a way of keeping her wayward brother from finding it, little did they know that their innocent daughter and friends would find it amusing to raid the holy alcohol cupboard to play silly drinking games.

Needless to say, homeward bound, one of us was sick in the street, falling about and laughing I heard her exclaim “look it’s clear”. I managed to make it home and came up with the most ridiculous excuse that my friends mother had put booze in a birthday cake that I ate and wasn’t told after eating a big slice, oh dear god how pathetic (i’m now sat cringing at the memory)

My mum thankfully is no dummy and just sent me up to bed knowing that my excruciating hangover the next day would be punishment enough.

From then on, drinking wasn’t really on my radar, we would hang out with other friends who somehow sourced cider but I had lost interest and was still scarred from the cake eating experience.

Around a year later, I was with a couple of friends in the park near where I live and we got chatting to a couple of boys, I suppose young men really they were a little older than us, seventeen and eighteen years, one of which lived a few towns away in a very large house and was that evening (it was a Saturday) was throwing a party with his parents being away on holiday.

Myself and my two friends began to collude:

1: How to get there?

2: What would we tell our parents?

3: How safe would we be?

4: Money for travel

Unbelievably we managed it, feeling very adept we got to the party by bus and a little walking to find a house full of lively people, the music was booming they were big fans of Queen. The two young fella’s seemed pleased that we made it but saw that we hadn’t brought anything provisions and suggested we out to contribute to the booze sitch, a little embarrassed and after a quiet huddled discussion we decided that the best and most sensible option of course was for us to forgo our bus fair home and get the ones old enough to go and buy us the cheapest stuff. Good old Cider, oh how I now can’t stand the stuff now. It did the trick though but also made me very sick indeed, right on the poor boy’s front door step!

Needless to say that was a fairly short encounter and we left the morning after for a long walk home to never meet up with those two ever again.

Once more that taught me the lesson of drinking makes you sick, until at least I turned seventeen, I then had my first ‘real’ boyfriend and as a birthday surprise he whIsked me off to our local town for a night of drinks and dancing, I don’t quite remember much of it, except for the vile hot toddies he tried to get me to drink.

Drinking then became the norm, weekly outings with my sisters and friends, hangovers from hell, it was cool to get trashed every Wednesday (yes, we went clubbing on a weekday!) as well as Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Thank goodness booze was so cheap back then, we would spend our nights working out how we could buy the strongest drink we could to get drunk as quickly as possible without spending too much money. Looking back it was such a bazaar attidtue but eveyone was doing it, it was the norm.

This kind of binge drinking went on for years, then my own kids came along from the age of 25, married with young ones killed some of the joy of drinking too much, but I did still manage a few nights out a month where I would go too far, end up sick or get the headache from hell.

I’m not quite sure when the drinking at home kicked in, maybe in my early 30’s? I was a grown up now and discovered the sophistication of drinking wine with a meal, hubby also liked a drink and it was deemed acceptable and the next natural step to take, to eat our evening meal, then sit and watch a film whilst sharing a bottle of wine, it never seemed to last that long between us, so why not get 2, 1 each, that seemed so logical, 4 -5 glasses from a bottle wasn’t very much after all.

This kind of attidtude towards drinking has led me to where I am and how I am feeling today and until my son had questioned me like he did I had not considered that I had any kind of problem, I had done dry January for 3 years running so if I could stop like that, surely the problem wasn’t palpable.