On Monday straight after my husband, Mr D, took my two eldest sons off to their Scouts meeting, I jumped in the car with my toddler and drove down the road to the bottle shop. Sad fact number 1 is that I said to Little Guy as I grabbed him "lets go prove how disfunctional I really am". Sad fact number 2 is that in my haste to back out of the carport I ran over the new pram and smashed up one of the front tires. It's now completely stuffed. I hadn't even had a drink!! Sad fact number 3 is that when I got to the bottle shop I grabbed two bottles of wine instead of just one.
Actually there are far more sad facts than that. It's sad that I had only been back drinking for 5 days after 3 1/2 weeks off. It's sad that Mr D and I had a brief discussion before Scouts and had said that this Monday would be an alcohol free day. And it's sad that I couldn't manage that.
So home I come with the wine and promptly skull half of the bottle of white while I bath the Little Guy and tidy up the dinner mess. Then I panic and feel bad so decide to HIDE THE REST of the white and pour myself and Mr D a glass of the red and leave the rest of the bottle sitting on the bench showing it's nearly full.
I had to use caps there because that right there was a turning point. I had never hidden wine before.
Mr D came home and kind of laughed that I hadn't been able to go without and I laughed too (a ha ha!) and made a song and dance about how I'd gone slow - see look the bottle is nearly full! - and then Mr D had a couple of small glasses over the next hour and I finished off the rest of the red myself. Sigh, another binge.
Of course I slept like crap and woke up feeling tired, hungover and really really guilt-ridden and disfunctional. This was yet another binge for me, one binge at the end of a long line of binges. My drinking history is long and probably typical. What's perhaps not so typical is that lately, as my drinking has been escallating so too has my inability to accept it.
So Tuesday mid-morning I write myself a letter (I'll re-print it in a later blog). Lunch-time Mr D comes home from his shift at work and we chat and inevitably talk turns to last night and I cry and confess to the hiding the wine and he admits he wondered and did actually check the recycling bin to see if there was another bottle as I had seemed more full of wine than I'd said. (He wasn't going to tell me he'd checked the bin, that too is really scary right there).
And, long story short, I've reached a tipping point and from now have decided to remove alcohol from my life.
I'm scared, it's going to be hard. Our family all drink. Our friends all drink. And I'm going to try and do this without any outside support. Just this blog. So stay posted and I'll let you know how I get on.
Love, Mrs D xxx
