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At approximately 10:30 a.m. on Monday it will be seven years since I last had an alcoholic drink.
It’s been seven years since that grotesquely warm beer, drunk from a can, in the house of a person I barely knew. It’s been seven years since I came home drunk, when I should have been preparing to drive with my husband and four-year-old daughter to spend a pleasant bank holiday weekend with my in-laws in Wiltshire.
It’s been seven years since I sat on the edge of my bed, mascara caked in my eyes, trying to block out the bright light outside and the dawning realization that I was ruining my life with alcohol.
It’s been seven years since I allowed myself to acknowledge a terrible truth: that if I didn’t give up alcohol, I was going to die.
It’s been seven years since I allowed myself to acknowledge a terrible truth: that if I didn’t give up alcohol, I was going to die. I was going to die by choking on my own vomit. Or I was going to die by choosing to take my own life (at that point, thoughts of suicide were, I’m afraid, more frequent than thoughts of brushing my teeth).
Or worse, I was going to die from continuing to live this Groundhog Day existence, abandoning all my responsibilities as a mother so I could worship at the altar of alcohol.
That moment in 2017 wasn’t the first time I decided to quit. I had vowed to do so ever since my first drink at age 14: a bottle of vodka I drank with a friend in a park and then vomited into none other than the Temperance Fountain.
“I’ll never do that again,” I told myself the next day. But the following weekend I drank again, and so began a habit that would last for almost 25 years.
For a long time, I told myself I was a party girl. When I met my husband at 31 and got pregnant, it didn’t even occur to me that I would continue drinking like I had throughout my teens and twenties.
Nowadays, I barely think about alcohol. I have friends who know me as “boring Bryony,” the one who never goes out at night.
I assumed motherhood would do for me what rehab does for everyone else: I would give birth and then occasionally enjoy a glass of red wine with dinner.
It was a shock then when, two weeks after my daughter was born, I left her at home with my mother and went to the pub where I got blackout drunk.
The next day, I sat on the couch nursing my hangover instead of my baby, and shamefacedly googled how long it takes for alcohol to leave breast milk. I looked at my beautiful daughter and realized I was a monster.
I buried this truth deep within layers of justification for my behavior: a drink after she went to bed made me a more relaxed mother, I told myself.
When I was four years old, I was like a duck paddling frantically underwater to stay afloat: at first glance, a successful 37-year-old woman, but in reality an alcoholic leading a double life.
I don’t know why the decision not to drink remained firm on that holiday seven years ago; perhaps because I had surrendered to the fact that, when it came to alcohol, I had no decision at all.
Kirstie is right, I need to give my girl freedom.
Channel 4 presenter Kirstie Allsopp
God bless Kirstie Allsopp. This week she shared on social media that she had allowed her 15-year-old son to travel by Interrail around Europe, prompting outrage from his parents who thought he was too young to travel alone.
Allsopp said: “If we are afraid, our children will be afraid too; if we let them go, they will fly away.”
She’s right. My 11-year-old daughter Edie is about to start high school and every bone in my body wants to stop time.
But I know I have to let go, and my efforts to protect my daughter are, more often than not, efforts to protect myself from the reality that she is growing up and needs me less and less.
What I do know is that I am extremely lucky: lucky to be alive, lucky to have friends, and a 12-step program that allowed me to spend 2,555 days with my head on the pillow without having to drink anything.
Nowadays, I barely think about alcohol. My daughter doesn’t remember me being drunk, and I have friends who know me as “boring Bryony,” the one who never goes out at night.
All of this is a far cry from the woman I was seven years ago: broken, ashamed, unable to imagine a life without drinking. Now, I find it almost inconceivable to imagine a life with alcohol. My life is so abstinent that “normies” (i.e. people who can drink normally) often think I need to be cured.
“Surely you can have a drink from time to time by now,” they say, genuinely bewildered when I tell them I haven’t had a drop to drink since August 2017.
But even though it’s been seven years since I last drank alcohol, I remind myself every day that I’m still a hardened alcoholic. If I had a glass of wine now, I’d be back to full strength, as if the last seven years had never happened. For me, it’s actually easier not to drink at all than to have just one drink.
I don’t take my sobriety for granted and every day I do a little bit of “work” to move forward in my recovery.
When I inevitably find myself complaining about this (I am an alcoholic, after all), I remind myself that seven years ago I would have walked through fire to get to a drink, so attending a 12-step meeting or doing some meditation for 20 minutes isn’t asking much of me.
Staying sober is hard, but not as hard as the alternative, which is losing everything to alcohol. Plus, if I give my sobriety one hour, it gives me back 23 hours.
Only by remembering every day that I am an alcoholic can I be all the other things: a mother, a wife, a functioning human being with a job.
This is why I am celebrating my sober birthday.
And like all true queens of sobriety, I’d like to take this anniversary to send a message to anyone who is in a similar situation to the one I was in 2,555 days ago.
So you know that not all is lost and that every morning presents a new opportunity for change.
Oh, grow up, Bennifer!
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez at the Golden Globes in January. J-Lo has filed for divorce
So that’s it for Bennifer, after J-Lo filed for divorce from Ben Affleck.
This isn’t her first rodeo: it’s her fourth marriage and his second, as they had a whirlwind engagement in the 2000s.
We all have friends like that: couples who break up and get back together. They often think of themselves as star-crossed lovers experiencing a passion that us mere mortals can’t imagine.
Newsflash: You’re actually emotionally immature and boring everyone. It’s time for you to grow up, Bennifer!
I’m not a fan of diets, but Channing Tatum revealed this week that he’s on a two-week “iPhone diet,” allowing himself to be alone with his thoughts and not look at his smartphone. Yeah, I like that one!
My must read for every woman
If you’re a woman in your 40s or 50s looking to feel more sane, you need to get your hands on Miranda July’s All Fours.
Forget chick lit. The new genre is “perimenopausal prose.”
In Breakdown by Cathy Sweeney, a woman walks out of her life and into the beds of men she’s not married to, while I just finished reading All Fours by Miranda July.
It follows a 45-year-old mother on a very strange journey across the US. Everyone is talking about it because of some very interesting sex scenes.
If you’re a woman in your 40s or 50s looking to feel saner, you need to get there faster than you can say “HRT.”