project 72genX

After years chilling out of an evening enjoying my private ceremony,  I realise that I have made lots of decisions around my drinking. I didn’t like to go to far out for dinner because I always had to take a risk of driving home over the limit. I would plan every free day around lunch out and a nice glass of something. I always needed to have a kip in the afternoons. I found a way to have a drink at every event. Saturday morning birthday parties, is 10 am to early for some bubbles? It’s little Sammy’s party after all!

Thinking back, it all started when my babies were born. Nobody tells you how hard it is with small babies. Its like this, you know that your whole life will change but what you really need to know is, there will be times that you can not plan to do a single thing for yourself! You can go day after day doing the “eat, play,sleep” routine and then think, I need something for me. I want to go out for dinner with my partner. I’ll take these beautiful children, my new little family and we will go out for dinner. You get to the restaurant, the kids are shitty and crying and you bust your ass for 45 mins of absolute grief trying to shut’em up while everybody else is throwing you daggers like you are the worlds worst parent with this crying child! AND you get to then pay someone for that awesome experience!!! Lets do that again!!! NOT!

The first 5 years of raising small children can be hell! Take all the good bits and treasure them cause the hard yards are Tough going! This is when I started drinking, a small little pocket of space I could give myself that was for me alone. It was intimacy in my relationship, it was my fun, my happy place. It certainly took the edge off and I was always home anyway.

Day 1: 6.30 am. Awake. Sober. 1000 steps here I come! 6.30 am is a beautiful time of day, why have I never seen it? Who the hell are all these bloody people? What is this world that I live in?? I feel like a vampire, awake all night and asleep in the day. First Lesson, people are up and out doing stuff early, like lots of them!! 1000 steps, three stops, hard work! It felt great though.

There has been a shift……

I can’t believe its been 12 months since I stopped drinking! I was talking to a girlfriend the other day and she was talking about some of the things she loved about drinking and I must say although its been 12 months it had me thinking about a glass of wine. She put into words perfectly what was one of my favourite ceremonies. To have a beautiful bottle of my favourite reds “Pinot Noir” and  share it with my partner after we put the children to bed. That ceremony became a ritual and because I am such a creature of habit it quickly became a daily necessity. Not straight away, but over time it increased. I started having one or two Chardy’s before that bottle of red. On weekends, hey, what’s a couple of beers to chase it down? It started to be a daily thing, I just didn’t seem to be able to curb it. I think that’s the thing with drinking, it can creep up on you over time, sometimes years, and it can become a part of everything we do.

01/03/2014- My partners birthday. I took a picture of my de-hydrated face and sore head. That was it! From that day on for the next three months I would be Alcohol Free! I was on the Hello Sunday Morning 3 month pledge. If I could not achieve this, then seriously I had a problem. That one step has changed my whole life in every way!