Day Twenty Nine and how I take a big chance, because I was forgetting I'm sober now

In the interests of remaining positive, FOUR WHOLE WEEKS DONE! Only the rest of my life to go...

A few times in the past couple of days I've just totally forgotten I'm sober and I can't decide if that's a good thing, or a bad one?

Forgetful moments

Forgetful moment one: walking into the supermarket and past the bottle shop (just one of my several regulars) to the left and mentally noting I should leave room in the trolley on my way out so I could stock up. Immediately followed by inwardly rueful smile and headshake - silly woman, no you don't.

Forgetful moment two: driving past a bar I'd always meant to try out with the Prof and thinking 'Must do that in a couple of weeks when all the tourists go home'. Then remembering - hey, I don't drink now, what's the attraction? Then thinking - well, might still be fun. Maybe.

Forgetful moment three: seeing a roadside stall selling bags of limes and thinking 'Corona' instead of 'Thai salad'.

Forgetful moment four: heading home from dropping 60% of my immediate family at the airport to visit 20% of our family (leaving only me, and the dogs, cat, chooks, and blissful peace) when the idea of going by a drive through bottle shop to stock up on wine entered my head. Only then remembering we had wine at home anyway. Only then remembering that I don't want to drink it!

Because I don't

I really don't. I don't want wine and I don't want to add gin to my tonic water - I've been looking at pickling recipes that will use up my gin since the Prof won't drink it.

But I guess there's a price for everything you do and currently the price includes reminding myself this is a good thing.

I don't want to drink alcohol. I don't need to drink alcohol. I've had my share. I forget how to stop once I've started. Moderation doesn't work for me. 

I've found the answer for me: stopping is easier than slowing down.

Everything is easier this way

Like everything. Really.

So, with these forgetting/remembering things swirling around in my mind I felt like I needed to do something that set a longer view on this sobriety gig for me. Something that would start to put a shape around 'forever', a calendar entry at a time.

The big chance

And yesterday I took a big chance, for me.  I booked into a wellness retreat (in Bali!) for October.  

I thought about doing this last year but a) money was tighter then, and b) I'm not spending money on booze now, and c) i wasn't confident enough then to go spend a week with 13 unknown women and would have needed to drink to much if I did go, and d) I didn't care much about 'wellness' then and I do now.

Deposit paid. Excitement building. Commitment to yoga and lime sodas under Indonesian sunset, begins!

MTC

Day Twenty Five - sliding down the rabbit hole

Far out.

This self-reflective compulsion is overwhelming.

I can't stop reading, reading, reading books and blogs, articles and guides. Not just about sobriety but about all kinds of ways that we fall into uncontrolled, destructive behaviour - food, drink, sloth, anger, over-work, misery.

I feel like I need to step away from it for a bit, because it's stopping me from my day to day work (and being self-employed, that is more than a little problematic) but at the same time I feel like I need answers and the opportunity to hunt Why is too good to miss.

I am so motivated to understand how I got to this place, where I could say 'Enough'.

So I don't think I will climb out of the rabbit hole just yet.

But I really have to do some work tomorrow!

MTC

Day Twenty-One - three weeks! Sober bitchiness, and a new PUPPY pic

On being THAT person

If there's one good thing about the general aura of shittiness I'm exuding at the moment, it's that my family can't blame all my past grumping on grog.  I'm short-tempered and a bit fed up with not having wine in the past couple of days. 

We've had some lovely dinners at home and yes wine would have been a nice and natural addition, but I was also able to throw a big fat reality check at myself: I'm not a 'glass of wine with dinner' person, and if I was I wouldn't be intentionally sober now, or writing about it to stay strong!

I'm a glass of wine before dinner person ... AND topped up twice while preparing dinner, grudgingly shared with partner over dinner, topped up again (possibly from a new bottle) after dinner, and maybe another time or two - or three, if there was something good on tv, or four, if it was a Friday night - just to make sure I could sleep. 

And sometimes that would definitely make me a cranky person, a mean spirited person, a laugh too loud person, an impatient person, an intolerant person, a lazy person, a slow person, and an isolated and unhappy person too.

Replay

So it would be very reasonable for the family to feel that alcohol was the reason every time I had the cranks up after dinner, and judging by comments made in the past year or two they certainly noticed the difference in me mentally and physically when I was inhaling runny grapes.

It hurts to write some of these comments down but I am going to, because I deliberately didn't want to acknowledge them at the time and they remain horrifying to me now. I need to replay these moments in my head, with my totally three-week sober brain, and own it.

Sample comments

• I hate it when you get like this (teen child with meaningful glance at my wine glass after I'd snapped at her or her father)
• Maybe if you hadn't drunk so much already (teen child, with contempt, as I refused to help with something or other that yes, he was probably capable of doing but, well, it wouldn't have hurt me to get up and assist)
• Have you ever thought it might be easier to just stop drinking so much? (teen child, helpfully and hopefully, when I was talking about the latest attempt at diet and exercise)
• Go and pour yourself another one (husband, with contempt, pissed off that I was snarking at him about something)
• Maybe don't have another one? (teen child, helpfully, after me breaking one glass of wine by knocking it over and, after cleaning up, heading to the kitchen to replace it)

Ouch. Yes, just a sample.  And not occurring every night or even every week - but maybe once or so a fortnight  in the last year?

So then... choices

I'm not perfect. I'm going to get cranky sometimes sober or not. But I'm going to remember at least one big difference is that when I am sober, I am so aware of how I feel that there's a level of choice in my mood.

I can choose to walk away if I am irritated.

I can choose to use kinder words.

I can choose to see a situation from someone else's point of view.

I can choose to rise above pettiness.

I can choose to set an example of adulting that I'm almost too late to share with my younger children.

And I do. I choose this. I choose to be sober and to be responsible for myself.

PUPPY!!

Your reward for scrolling this far down the page is a sleeping puppy.  Pic taken earlier this week but as I type she is in almost the same position. Lying over my left toes, under the desk, enjoying her third most important nap of the day.

Day Eighteen. Who IS this woman who gets excited about fruit juice?

Good JuJu

Mango, pineapple, mint, ginger and lemongrass.
Orange carrot, red capsicum, black carrot, lemon, ginger and turmeric.
Goulburn Valley pear, mango, passionfruit, Thai basil, and cayenne pepper.
Pink lady, raspberry, boysenberry, mint, rose water and lemon.

Am I living in the luckiest era of sobering up ever?

I was doing a quick swipe through the supermarket today when I paused - uncharacteristically - next to the fresh juice cabinet. Guess where some of my first wine-money savings went?

And there is a cordial of lemon, lime, mint and cucumber, and another of red currants, cranberry, and pomegranate, as well as the local Buderim ginger brew.

Juice is for kids

We aren't much of a juice family these days.  The teens mostly drink water or - when nagging prevails - binge on tart soft drinks like Solo or ginger beer. The Prof is a Type 1 diabetic and won't touch juice (he says it takes too long in a hypo but in reality, why waste your sugar fix on juice when you can have lollies?). And generally juice is too sweet for my taste, even when I was a kid myself.

Yet it wasn't so long ago that a couple of big bottles of apple or orange juice were a permanent item on the shopping list and doled out diluted with water or soda water (as per 'good' parenting rules in the noughties).

'Mum-juice'

Wine, or mum-juice, is of course made of fruit.  

'Come over and have some runny grapes,' says a dear friend of mine - I haven't had to reply to that one yet, since Day One, but I am sure she'll be fine with it when I do.  I was a very bad influence on her every time we did get together, opening bottle after bottle and playing cards or pictionary in teams against our husbands, neither of whom were big drinkers.

Last time I saw her, last year,  I drank so much I really did get a hangover, a very rare event because my body was a stunningly efficient alcohol processor by then.  It was one of those nights when I was aware I was going overboard but thought the best answer to that was to have another glass and keep laughing. 

Poor woman.  How bloody horrible for her.

Sigh. Still processing those moments. I imagine it will take some time.

Mum's juice

From mum-juice to Mum's juice: those pretty coloured bottles are mine, along with a glorious new array of teas (sipping on green tea with lemon and ginger just now) and mineral waters galore.  I don't see any reason for sobriety to be dull.

The first sampling tonight was the Lemon, Lime, Cucumber and Mint cordial with soda water and some slices of cucumber.  It was at least as good as the last drink I had with cucumbers (and Hendricks Gin) and in many ways, so much better.

Seriously though: how awesome is it to be sober when there's so much more in the juice section than apple, orange or tomato?

MTC

Day Fifteen - in which not drinking is like not hitting your thumb with a hammer (and a puppy in MUD)

Builder's tricks

I don't know how common this saying is, but in my little world we sometimes talk about walking away from a bad situation as being like no longer hitting your thumb with a hammer.

I'm a builder's daughter, and correct hammering and sawing were some of the few useful things my father ever taught me (most of my paternal lessons were observational and involved learning how not to be a functional adult, but more on that another day).

So if you aren't familiar with the hammering scene, the saying conjures the need to keep doing something even though it hurts.  You can't leave a nail half-hammered and you can't let pain get in the way. You are totally focused on the job in front of you and you come to associate the job with the pain as a necessary thing.

It's only when you either become really good at hammering or you stop hammering that you might recall, with a flood of relief, how good it is to not be hitting your thumb with that bloody hammer any more.

Don't examine the analogy too closely, it has all sorts of holes (boom tish), but trust me: there are times in your life when you only know how great something is because you stopped doing the awful thing that had become your very focused normal.

The path to peace, and unbruised thumbs

And here I am, two weeks' done, and the bruises are fading from my metaphorical thumb.

Yesterday, for the first time in a fortnight (let alone pre-sober) I woke up without a dull headache.  It took me an hour or so to realise what was different.  This morning I was a bit headachey again but I had a late (dry) night and sleep was a bit broken so I was not on top of my game anyway.

BUT, here are some things I'm noticing about not hitting my body, brain and spirit with alcoholic hammers every day:

• hints of inner peace. I would think it's anything like the vaunted 'pink cloud' but of course it's very early days for me yet.  There most obvious thing is a slight slowing of my Popcorn Brain.  Ideas stick with me a bit longer and don't bounce away before I really grasp them.
• my skin feels about a hundred times softer.  Maybe that's about hydration, as I'm drinking about four litres of extra water and tea every night.
• flavours. I'm enjoying flavours more and using less salt on my food.  To be fair, this is partly because a month of sub-tropical downpours and humidity have rendered every salt source in the house unusable, but without the grog I find I mind much less!
• reading non-fiction. I have been reading pretty much constantly since I was three years old (47 years ago) and apart from text books I reckon I've read perhaps six books of non-fiction, total, including biography and autobiography. At first it was falling headfirst into The Sober Diaries and Mrs D Is Going Without, then trying (and rejecting) similar stories but of car-crash style alcoholics who I can't relate to, like the journo in High Sobriety and others.  But now I'm into a looong book called Lost Connections about the nine major non-chemical causes of depression and anxiety (not as grim as it sounds)  and absolutely relishing every page.  I can only reason that this is connected to the aforementioned inner peace and being willing to delve into my own thinking without having to hide from myself.
• self care not self denial. Friend J called back after the disrupted puppy call and we talked at length about the why of not drinking.  This handy phrase was how we decided to describe the difference between past attempts and my current mindset. In some ways I'm still a long way from traditional self-care (you DO NOT want to imagine the stains on the toenails of a 50 year old woman who can go barefoot most days but is suddenly surrounded by mud), but by not drinking any more, I'm also fully and permanently immersed in caring for myself. And it feels good.
• time to do things. For a long while now I've been (blearily) wondering how I ever found the time to do more than work and slump.  How did I ever have enough hours in the day to bake cakes, sketch and paint, crochet, read magazines, clean things, garden, visit people and places? Turns out that needing to ensure you get and wallow in your daily alcohol fix takes a lot of time and mental energy.  I'm no DIY dynamo yet, but there's a gleam in my eye and a vision of a gorgeous acre of garden that will outlive me and bring joy.

Muddy puppy

If you've made it this far, you deserve a treat xx 

(Also you've seen too much of the clean, cute and fluffy side of Ms Maggie, here's her inner grot shining through.)

MTC

Day 13 and I'm coming out (also a new pic of PUPPY)

Hello Sober World, how ya doing?

I've been busy busy with work upheavals (just don't even ask) and cooking batches of soup, casserole, curries and cakes for two families after my brother had a serious operation last week (my SIL doesn't cook).

I have been quietly working through some sobriety thinking though, and  - ta-da-da-da-duuuuum - I've told a few more people that I've given up drinking.

It's a bit of a weird thing to say, isn't it? 'Oh hey, guess what? I stopped drinking!"

I said it on the phone this morning to my wonderfullest friend J.  She and I have both stopped drinking before, and tried to stick to AFDs and switch to spritzers, or shandies, or alternate wine with water. We gave up together a couple of times, egging each other on to stay strong (I think we almost made it to 10 days once - and that was with free-drinks allowed for the weekend!)

But there it is: I told her I'd stopped and she, gorgeous creature that she is, asked some really sensible questions and we were in the middle of a really good chat about the how and why of this Big Decision when I spotted Naughty Puppy chuffing up the driveway to inspect the chooks at the front fence and I had to bolt (we live on an acre block so it's a short jog but not conducive to conducting phone conversations at the same time).

Puppy break!

Here's today's Naughty Puppy pic, shown hitching a ride to school this morning on Youngest-By-One-Minute's lap.

Ms Maggie's adorableness makes it easy to forgive her anything, even having to run up a muddy driveway in my PJs home office clothes, dumping phone and friend along the way.

The pact

So back to sobriety, and I'm fairly sure the three co-residents (the younger teens and the Prof) of my house have made a pact not to talk about me not drinking.  Either that or they really are all as oblivious to me as I have occasionally suspected. But no, I think there's a pact.  

No one has said anything to me about the lack of wine and the Twenty Zillion new ways to drink fizzy water I'm displaying each night. And I'm very ok with that. I'd like this to just keep ticking along until at least the three month stage before I really talk about it to anyone other than my aforementioned bestie, and my 500+days sober friend, and perhaps my doctor.

Still. It's weird that none of them has even looked at me sideways. 

MTC

Day Eleven, and a good old sob.

I'm curious about other people who just quietly stop drinking like I have.

I will have to look for more stories in blogs, I think, because so far most of what I have read has been quite dramatic.

I know I said on Day Minus-One that I was stopping because we were getting a puppy, but the step before that is the more important one.

I stopped drinking because my dog died, but it was not an immediate decision.  It's really only now that I see it as cause and effect.

Something big had to change in my life so that I was not quite the same person, because that person was the one who vested so very much in the fact that her dog loved her without limits and wanted nothing more than to be with her.

That sounds soppy doesn't it? You need to know though, that I am country-tough about pets and this was the exception that proved the rule.  We just found each other, that's all.

She was the only creature, human or animal, who - at least in the last five years - made me feel unconditionally loved and worthwhile.  That isn't to say that I have not been loved, but with teenaged children and a long running marriage, and a thankless job followed by a struggle to work out how to run my own business, it's pretty easy to believe you're just a utility.

Of course, the alcohol wouldn't have helped with the worthlessness either...

But May was always there. Always. And there was nothing I could do or say that would ever dent that devotion.  And when I woke up in the middle of the night I would feel for her with my feet and within a few minutes I could fall asleep again.  She was my calm.

After she died I didn't do very well.  Perhaps strangely, I didn't really drink more than usual, but I also took less and less pleasure in it.  Everything was sour. Nothing was lively. I began to sense self-destruction and the seeds for sobriety were sown.

I wrote something, about three days after she was gone, because my heart was breaking over the space beside me where she should have been. I'd just seen one of those A letter to... articles in The Guardian and it felt like the right thing to do.

A letter to … my dog, who saved me.

I’m country born, and so were you, but we met in the city when your family lost their farm and you needed a home.

We had a dog already, always one. My mother used to say, ‘if you have one dog, you’ve got a friend, but if you have two dogs you’ve got two dogs’. Like many clever things she said, it turned out to be wrong.

You were meant to be pack for our slightly anxious dog, and to chill with the kids.  

But instead, you chose me. 

I didn’t encourage you, but perhaps you could tell that no one else was choosing me then. Not my weary husband; not my fight-to-be-free teens; not my former career. 

You, an outside dog for your first five years, landed your 30kg at my feet in bed on your second night and never left.

“She’s a woman’s dog,” your first owner told me, “she’ll know when you’re sad”. I believed her, because she’d known a lot of sadness, but I didn’t really understand until it happened.

The tap of your toenails, the jink of your name tag, the huffle of your evening sighs. Big Labrador eyes watchful for cheese or a carrot end flipped your way. For four years I immersed in your sounds, sight, smell, and snowy drifts of hair. I had to accept you actually wanted to be with me. I couldn’t resist the peace you gave me, you were my calm, my flow, my other self.

My younger daughter declared: “I’m going to fall in love with the man who looks at me like that dog looks at you, Mum”. Everyone knew there was an affair going on in our house. You tap-tap-tapped behind me on the wood floors, never far off.

I called you Silly Old Lady, I called you Great Big Dope, I called you My Love, and My Loyal.

And so: you were lying behind my armchair where you caught the fan’s breeze but knew immediately if I got up. 

Only you weren’t, really, because an unknown number rang my phone and when I ignored it my husband’s rang and he answered and I was running before he hung up.

“Yes, she’s ours,” I’d heard, and, “Yes, we’re on the Connection Road too”. I passed the mailbox chanting no, no, no, because that shape on the road in the headlights couldn’t be you.

There was blood below you, dark shine on the lit bitumen, coming from nowhere I could see. You were clean, soft, and the man said, “She’s gone I think”, but you were still breathing.

I cradled you, your eyes on me. You breathed three, four more times.

I don’t want a plaque, or your ashes, or to plant a rosebush. You weren’t my baby. I wasn’t your mum. I won’t keep your collar in a box.

All I want to keep is the peace we made together, but I am broken now and it has all spilled away.


MTC

Day 10: Double-digit-dry-days! And PUPPY update

Day 10

Hello day 10! Yay for double-digit-dry me :-)

I got my hair done today - I might be old  but it still grows way too fast so the regrowth was well and truly up to skunk stripe stage after six weeks.

Before I went in I had this imaginary conversation with my hairdresser (Sue, I love her) in which she noticed something different about me and I would say, Why yes! I gave up the grog and I think it's starting to show!

But she was just her normal loveliness so it was left to me to continue the chat inside my head in front of the terrifyingly large mirror while she finished another woman's foils.

Me: is there something different about your face?
Me: yes I think it's changed since the last time I looked in this mirror
Me: not so bulge-y around the gills?
Me: I think that's fair. And what's that in your eyes: have your eyeballs started to go WHITE?!

It's true.  They might not be shiny white again yet but the burst blood vessels have beat a retreat and the dull jaundice smears are fading to at least an eggshell tone so far.

Let's hope my liver is looking a bit more cheerful too.  Not that it was more than 'a touch down' according to my GP, after my last blood tests, which I always try to dodge for fear of being diagnosed with kidney disease, or Type 2 diabetes, or some other vile alcohol-induced illness.

So my hair is pearly blonde and my eyes are going white again, and as I type this I'm in my favourite wifi cafe, noting they have got a liquor license now and not the slightest bit bothered that I won't ever be using it.

Bloglovin'

Mrs D (THE Mrs D) came to visit, because she is, it turns out, just a delightful in her post-book real-life as any of us could hope.  And being a gorgeously polite Kiwi lady, as are several of my friends, she left a comment that made my day (Day 9 was made, to be precise).

It reminded me how absolutely wonderful blogging can be.  Some of my longest adult friendships are in fact from my newish mothering blogging days.  I've met many of them IRL over the past 13 or so years and we still support and entertain each other although it's mostly on Facebook and Instagram these days because who has time?

Well I do, now.  I have the time that's not being drowned in wine. And it is making me a happier person.

PUPPY

If you (if there even is a you, apart from the delightful Mrs D) read my first post as Mrs Sobers, you will know that I pinned my launch to sobriety on the arrival of our new puppy.

Her name is Maggie, and I have been remiss in not sharing more of the puppy love she brings to our family.

So here she is.  Keeping my every-brightening eyes on the prize:

MTC

Day Nine. Getting shit done

I'm realising how much of my life had been tied up in planning for when I would start drinking each day.

Without being especially conscious of it, I'd be thinking about what there was to drink, how I would make sure there was enough to drink if there wasn't enough, reading special offers from wine delivery companies, then, of course, the glorious moment when drinking could begin, and pretty much nothing happened after that. Nothing meaningful anyway.

It wasn't always like that. I know that back a few years I was actually doing things after dinner.  Work, reading, crafty crap. Helping with homework.  Making calls with friends.

But that slipped away and more recently it's been a zoned-out, numbed up, slobby collapse on the lounge with tv and social media and not much else.

And that evening slothfulness extended into the afternoon, and the day, and less and less got done. 

I had all sorts of excuses for it - depression, anxiety, worthlessness. And as I got fatter and fatter it was physically uncomfortable to be more active (totally understand how people end up gigantic now, because the fatter you are, the less you want to move, and the more fat you become).

But really was it depression that made my drinking worse or - shock horror - actually my drinking that contributed to that vile depression and off-the-charts anxiety?

Yep. Box number two looks like the winner to me too.

today

I slow roasted pork that I'd marinated overnight; made chicken stock from the huge bird I roasted and served last night; baked a flourless chocolate-beetroot cake; cleaned up after all of it; felt more like a younger version of me.

Still not drinking.  Still pretty much ok with it. Still wondering if this is just too easy for now?

MTC

Day Eight: Sober hangovers

When will the headaches end?

So I googled something like this in the hope of finding the answer to the question friends and I have asked before - how come you can still feel like utter crap some mornings when you haven't drunk a drop?

I have had a headache for parts of most days since stopping drinking (Yay me, by the way, one week down!) and despite drinking upwards of three litres of water and green tea a day I am waking up dry mouthed and feeling dehydrated - just like after drinking a bottle or two of wine the night before.

I had drunk so much, so regularly, for so many years that I rarely had real hangovers any more. I might have this achey head, or, if I'd really hammered the grog - like adding red wine or spirits to the mix - feel a bit queasy. But almost never what most people would call a hangover.

The Prof asked me a few times over the past five years, perhaps as I opened another bottle at 10pm on a weeknight, 'Don't you ever feel sick the next day?' and I could honestly (gleefully, defiantly) say No.

So why do we suffer still when we stop drinking? 

Headaches, insomnia, and daytime sleeping are the main downsides for me at present.

The science-y bit

Withdrawal from alcohol is the obvious answer, but the Interwebs aren't tremendously helpful in this department.

Most searches for 'alcohol withdrawal symptoms' will land you on American rehab websites that are paying a lot for SEO to hog the first pages and create a terrifying scenario where every housewife can expect the DTs if she doesn't sign up for their six week in-house program.

This bit below from the Victorian Government was more helpful, describing how the neurotransmitters in the brain get disrupted by alcohol and compensate to restore a functioning balance.

Alcohol acts in the central nervous system by changing the balance of neurotransmitters, which are chemicals that send messages between nerves. Alcohol reduces the effect of excitatory neurotransmitters, and increases the effect of inhibitory neurotransmitters, altering the natural balance of the nervous system.

Over time, the brain tries to fix this imbalance by increasing the activity of the excitatory neurotransmitters and decreasing the activity of the inhibitory neurotransmitters. When alcohol is suddenly taken away, this compensatory effect keeps going, resulting in overactivity of the excitatory neurotransmitters and underactivity of the inhibitory neurotransmitters. This causes withdrawal syndrome.

But you still need a biochemical course to really make sense of it. Basically, with alcohol your brain is damped down too much so it internally revs up the neurotransmitters it needs to help it function. These revving messages keep going for a while when you have taken away the dampers, which might cause the headaches and insomnia (which in turn leads to daytime tiredness).

The good news

Hopping around to find semi-readable nuerological studies, I came across this piece of spectacularly good news.

https://academic.oup.com/brain/article/130/1/36/346458

The damage alcohol does to your brain is not just in rewiring the transmitters, it's physical harm. We've probably all seen the 'permanent brain damage' warnings about heavy drinking, but it turns out it can be healed.

The study from Brain Journal showed a 2% growth in brain size after heavy drinkers were sober for only seven or so weeks!

Something to aim for - a big fat brain and a shrinking butt.

MTC

Evening Seven. Bored, craving, and playing the long game.

Crave, crave, crave.

It's Friday night, and that is usually my signal to double down on the home-drinking.  Expect close to two bottles of wine to pour down my fat gullet, on most Friday nights.

But they won't tonight.  In fact, the simple act of opening up this post and writing it down will stop me for now.

And earlier, as Wine-O-Clock ticked by, I grabbed the very fat labrador and my very fat self and we went for a neighbourhood walk - something we haven't done in months and months.

Acting out

Got home and started finding fault with things so have taken myself off to my study to slug down mineral water (Voss - and I don't care if it's overpriced and overrated! If I'm not drinking wine I'll be buggered if I'm going to drink 95c homebrand soda water).

And I found myself writing a crankypants email to my slow-paying client and nearly sending it, which is not the point of writing crankypants emails is it? Crankypants emails are written so you can get them out of your system, so I barely dodged a wine-craving bullet there.

Part of the reason I was cranky was because they should have paid me today and I was planning on some lovely shopping for Not-Wine things, like new PJs for my lovely sober nights, and maybe some eye cream for my much-less-puffy eyes, and a big bunch of flowers, and new paints to tackle a still life of that bunch of flowers.

But now I can't do that until next week. Bah fucking humbug.

But I still won't send the crankypants email.

I snapped at the Prof instead. Then I opened up this blog post.

Visualisation

Something I did while walking the dog was practice the last-drink-not-first-drink visualisation.

It goes something like this:

Don't think about the first drink - any fool can have a first drink.  Your (talking to myself) problem is the LAST DRINK, which will be about 10 drinks later than it should be.

And because of that LAST DRINK you will be vague and say stupid things and get fatter and fatter and feel sluggish, at best, in the morning, and GO NOWHERE.

So here I sit.  With my Voss. NOT drinking, but going online to decide what gorgeous PJs I will buy next week with the money I would have spent this week on wine.

MTC

Day Seven. Bored now.

Unlike a lot of other stories I've been reading, I've not been especially worried about becoming a boring person because I have a pretty low opinion of just how interesting I am anyway and am old enough to know that drinking doesn't make me more interesting to other people - it just makes other people more bearable for me.

But I am a bit bored with myself.

For the past couple of nights the Prof has had, at my urging, a glass or two of wine (HOW DOES HE DO THAT!) and I've been drinking things I like, anyway, like plain mineral water, or soda water and apple cider vinegar, or that newish low sugar Buderim Ginger Beer.

(Interesting: the Ginger Beer is 4 points on Weight Watchers - just like I was adding for a single glass of white wine. Except I can admit now I should have been adding 8 or even 10 points per the size glass I was drinking...)

And I'm totally ok with it.  

I had a moment a couple of nights back when I found a new bottle of Pinot Grigio at the back of the fridge and put it in the door shelf.  I checked in with myself and thought: nope, don't want to drink it. I wanted the Prof to enjoy it though.  

The 'moment' was just a fleeting 'I'll never get to taste you'. But it passed, and no pangs about it since.

No one has said anything about me not drinking wine at home yet.  The Prof and teens do daily car drives to school together so it may have been discussed there, or maybe they just haven't noticed.  

Anyone looking at the iTunes Family account will see half a dozen books with 'sober' in the title, so that's a dead giveaway.  I still don't feel like making a big announcement yet - it seems like it will jinx things for me.  I'm better off underselling this to myself for now.

But. A bit bored to be me.

MTC

Day Six - Dry Drunk vs Sober

I've seen other writers talking about the difference between 'dry drunk' and 'sober'.

A dry drunk is someone who stops drinking. A sober person is also someone who has stopped drinking. And the difference seems to be a combination of motivation and goal.


This wouldn't have made sense to me before - but I can see it now and I think today is a good day to think about my two most recent 'dry drunks', both occurring in the past two years:

- dry for nearly five weeks following a severe bout of viral meningitis, although for the first 10 days of this I was in hospital vomiting with pain so that bit might not count!
- dry for six weeks after I hit a horrendous low point of anxiety and depression and the most serious suicidal thoughts I've ever had. I was, of course, drunk at home at the time. It was awful and I wanted to die to stop all the feels and particularly to stop being the source of pain to my family. 

Both of these times I would say I was a 'dry drunk' because all I was doing was stopping, for that day and maybe the next. I didn't have a goal. I didn't have a plan. I didn't know what to expect or how to get through it.

The post-meningitis dry was really more about convalescence than anything. When the lining of your skull and spinal cord gets a virus and inflames, you don't feel like eating or drinking anything much at all so a bit of self-denial doesn't really earn any points.

And the post-low-point dry was one of those 'prove you don't have to drink' dry periods.  I'm as stubborn as the next man and a lot more stubborn than the next woman, so setting myself a test like that is not so hard.

Why is this different?

Well that's the thought that made me set up a blog for Day Minus-One, isn't it?

This is different because I know what I want to achieve (sobriety) and I know how I want it to feel (clean bodied and clear headed) and I know how to get there (keeping the long game in sight, not just day by day).

MTC

Day Five - what I'm reading (Clare Pooley, Lotta Dann et al)

A big part of my mindset is due to the reading I've been doing in the past week. The Sober Diaries and Mrs D is Going Without are the highlights.

The Sober Diaries

Seven days ago I downloaded The Sober Diaries and read it like it was water in the desert. I couldn't stop.  Clare Pooley's story was so much like mine, except I'm still working more or less full time (but I did leave horrible senior exec roles to be self-employed so I'm at home, ie, close to the wine fridge).

As I read through the stages Clare described I could see myself there. When she talked about visualisation I pictured myself where I wanted to be. I drew a mind map of everything I'm hoping to achieve in the next five years and what that would look like and feel like.

For the first time, when planning anything about my future, I added SOBER in a little cloud, along with FIT and ACTIVE - which are regular aspirations for me, and I didn't feel weird about it.

I turned 50 last August. It doesn't feel real yet and I didn't really mark it with any milestone activities, but I have had this feeling that something big needed to happen.  It never crossed my mind until Clare's book that the 'something' would be giving up grog.

Things that are me from The Sober Diaries

• Mother of three
• Former career high flyer (ish)
• Wine belly (how have I never called it that before? Of course that's what it is!)
• Good if quirky husband who drinks but can stop
• Wine-gulper (how do people take sips? I never could though I tried and tried)
• Wine-stasher (sometimes I'd hide how much I'd had from a bottle, sometimes I'd brazen it out with a big SO?! if the Prof was a bit shocked another bottle had disappeared while I made dinner).
• Embarrassed about the amount of wine-bottle-recycling that's gone on, especially because our son has to carry them out as his job.  It must stink - I never thought of that part much before.
• Regretful drinker - knowing it was too much and out of hand in the morning, pushing it all aside by wine o'clock to start again (and feel soooo good)
• Rarely has real hangovers any more (the Prof can't understand why I don't feel worse in the mornings but either I don't feel it, or I hide it from him)

Things that are not me from The Sober Diaries

• Her kids are still young. How I wish mine were and I had stopped sooner
• She has a social life. I used to have a bit of a social life when we lived in Sydney - both work and personal, but since moving north I've been a virtual hermit.
• She's more financially secure
• She's got a happy childhood/extended family
• I'm four years older than she was at the giving-up stage.  I'd like those four years back but a big part of the message I'm getting from the books I am reading is to just 'own' it and move on. 

Mrs D is Going Without

I love that Lotta is a Kiwi. There are so many stories out there from American but there's a different drinking culture there - it seems to involve more dependence on spirits and a lot more religion and I just can't identify.

The only time I've ever drunk too much hard liquor is when the wine ran out.

Oh dear. Yes, I see that too.

But back to Lotta for now.  She and Clare (a Pom) both guzzled wine, like me, and had three kids, and a husband who could drink and then stop.

Things that are me from Mrs D

• Journalist/writer who loves to blog (more later on my whole secret-blogging past)
• Antipodean! 
• wine guzzler and gulper (see note above)
• battles through hangovers

Things that are not me from Mrs D

• young children
• working husband
• likes reality TV (although I have a soft spot for cooking shows AND Say Yes to the Dress)
• has real hangovers, which are these days very rare for me because my body is a drinking machine
• goes to the gym
• has a massive social schedule of weddings, parties, etc

So what?

Well the reading is helping. A lot. 

I have picked up a couple of other books about going sober but I can't really identify with the extremes of being picked up by police or crashing cars.  I'm an alcoholic out of control drinker but I am definitely at the high-functioning end.  Keeping it all together is part of why I told myself I needed  to drink. 

Apparently that might turn out not to be true.

MTC

Day Two - eerily calm, updated to add a STORM

Afternoon

The non-drinking today was pretty uneventful.  The Professor (Prof, my other half, he who can drink and stop) asked if I wanted a beer with lunch and I just said no and got mineral water instead.

I haven't told him yet, because I feel self-conscious and a bit superstitious about jinxing myself to failure.

There is only one person who knows. An old friend, Gem, who recently posted on Facebook that she was 500 days without a drink ('first 499 are the hardest, ha ha') and who had never struck me as a big drinker.  I messaged her late on Day One and she came back super-supportive and is now definitely part of my plan: if in doubt, message Gem.

Thanks for being in my corner, lovey.

***

Evening

Wow. 

I just had the biggest screaming match I have ever had in my life with the Prof.  I don't know if I can even go there, but I sort of want to record it so:

• kitchen clean up is supposed to be shared by the three resident non-cooks, which usually means not me
• the teens both know what they are supposed to do (unpack, pack dishwasher, put stuff away, wipe benches) and the Prof usually checks the dishwasher (because nobody does it right) and does any hand-washing of big stuff or delicates (my knives are precious).
• things rarely go smoothly, largely because the Prof changes the rules all the time and for 10 years (since they were five and their big sister nine) has been - sorry but true - fucking with their minds by also chucking a big male tantrum if they don't skip merrily to the chore
• I get his frustration, but I also get that kids are unlikely ever to skip merrily to a chore, at least, not since about 1963, in black and white, with Bryl cream and hair bobbles.
• I also DO NOT get his frustration because there's a really simple way to deal with this situation which I have explained until I WANT TO VOMIT THE WORDS.  Be consistent, don't do the job for them, make it enjoyable. It's what I do for jobs and it works about 87.5% of the time, which I consider a major parenting win.
• I decided about seven of those 10 years ago that I could not be the breadwinner (he'd retired), AND the mother, AND the wife, AND still do his share of domestic admin for him. So I generally try not to get involved (other than the occasional above mentioned word-vomit - often but not always fuelled by wine)
• Besides, after dinner is me-time. I'm usually nearly at the end of the first bottle of wine by then and don't I just deserve it? I've worked, I've cooked, I've been there for people. 
• except last night there was no wine and had not been any wine for almost 48 hours... And he started chucking his big male nobody-but-me-ever-cleans-up tantie at Sparkle (girl twin) and she told him to Shut Up (not condoned by me) and he shouted she was NeverToSpeakToHimThatWayAgain, and  I got involved.

Bad thing: 

I was, as Sober Mummy says in her excellent book (see Day One) The Sober Diaries, 

feeling all the feels.

Good thing:

I knew I was actually feeling the feels and had no little voice in my head saying 

'shut up shut up shut up you're drunk and over-reacting'.

Bad thing:

Feeling utterly justified in feeling the feels and letting loose my unholy judgment upon the situation.

Seriously? I shouted at him so hard I was spitting. It was disgusting. I was disgusted with myself as I was doing it.

The little voice that would normally tell me I was drunk was instead trying desperately to shush me because

for god's sake woman the neighbours will hear you

even though we live in the middle of one acre.  Yes. It was that loud.

Another bad thing:

The Prof is not a backing down kind of guy.  When cornered by, say, a bizarrely sober and furious woman who is making an argument to which he has no answer, he will come out swinging.  Generally this means high-rotation subject changes to keep me off balance.

See if you can spot the switcheroos:

Me: you would NOT have this argument all the time if you just stuck to one set of rules instead of changing routine all the time and pretending it's normal

Him: SPATULAS get washed up by hand!

Me: You've never said utensils had to be left out, when did that rule begin?

Him: ALWAYS, it's ALWAYS been the rule. And I don't have to put up with this rudeness!

Me: She should not have said what she did but I get why she's frustrated when you're blaming her for something she hadn't had a chance to do yet.

Him: Every night, every night I have to put your cooking things away too.

Me: what are you talking about? 

Him: (waves top of the food chopper wand thing) THIS - you NEVER put this away, I do it EVERY time.

Me: you have no idea how often I use that and that's because I put it away most of the time and anyway for god's sake it's a two second job...

And on it went.  Except that - being sober and over reacting is different to being drunk and overreacting.  I snatched the Food Chopper Wand Thingo and gave it a good air swing to emphasise whatever point I was making at the time, and the cord end whacked me on the back of the skull (which bloody hurt but I wasn't going to say so).

The pain broke my need to scream, though, so I put away the Food Chopper Wandy Thingo that never gets put away, and told him I WASN'T GOING TO LET HIM MAKE ME ANGRY and I stormed to the bathroom and slammed the door.  Which wasn't enough, so I slammed it again.

After five slams it felt about right so I stood and cried and thought, as I have thought so many times when we have fought loudly, about the kids.

Because arguments are loud but apologies are soft, and too often they haven't heard the apology part.

Moving on though...

I had another thought: a big fat self-gratifying thought.

"He can't say I'm just drunk tonight."

Wowsers.  That is massive.

I don't know when it began exactly (because, drunk) but a few years ago, we had a terrible argument and the Prof was probably trying to shut it down and he said - why don't you just go and have another drink?

And it's happened a few times since.  And a couple of times the kids have said it too.  Not constant. But pretty terrifying to my drunk-not-drunk brain.  And always answered with my most twisty, smartarse replies about the argument having nothing to do with drinking and how dare the person try and weasel out of it that way.

I'm a word person - did I mention that yet?

Anyway.

No need for that this night.

And even though it was a terrible argument and even though I felt horrible for the kids being spectators, a part of me, a little, newly sober, part of me, felt truly, fucking, awesome.

mtc

PS - we made up, and he even apologised and I did too.  But I still haven't told him about the not drinking.

Day One. Tick!

Puppy time

I'm catching up with this post (it's actually Day 3) so I'll keep it quick and add a photo because - adorable.

Here you go.

This is River  Maggie (edited with her new name after living with the uncallable River for a week!).

  She's only six weeks old - and although we were led to believe she was twice that, it's ok.  We know puppies and she's in good hands so please no guilt about how she should still be with her mother because that ship has sailed.

No guilt about anything actually because, as per The Plan of Day Minus-One, I got through the whole 24 hours of our new puppy ownership without a drink.  I didn't even obsess about it too much.  Dwell, yes, but obsess? No.

And look at that little face! You couldn't disappoint her, could you? You couldn't be less than the very best she wants you to be?

It makes me feel sick that I didn't see how important that was with my human children. I know you're not supposed to regret, but I do for now. It's not that my worst drinking was going on when they were little - not at all - but I really wish I could have a do-over and enjoy it all more.

My kids are amazing. More on that later.

For now, Day One is done.

More to come (mtc).

Day minus one

The difference this time

Tomorrow I'm going to give up alcohol for good.

Right! How many times have I said that?  Well actually, nowhere near as many times as I've said, "That's it, last night was my last drink".

If those two things sound the same to you we might not be able to be friends any more.

Let's look at them again:

1. What I thought this afternoon: Tomorrow I am giving up alcohol for good.
2. What I thought on waking most mornings for more than a decade: That's it, last night was my last drink.

One vs two

Statement Number One, let's talk about you first.  Your biggest difference to Statement Number Two is that you may (could/will) be true.  We don't know yet.  

You are a plan and I used to be very good at plans, before I became this giant blob of anxiety and alcohol.

You have some details too, and a rationale.  

Details

Tomorrow, has a pleasingly divisible date - 3/3/18 - and because the first numbers match, even an American knows what day that is.  It appeals to my need for magical thinking. 

Tomorrow is also the day that we drive three hours to collect the new border collie puppy whose mother has the same smile as my utterly adored labrador Maya. 

Puppy (name tbd) is a new start, not a replacement for my constant companion, whose steps tap-tap-tapped behind me all day and whose curve of back at my feet each night brought me the only calm I've ever known to last.

By tomorrow I will have finished the latest of the sober-up-woman style books I'm reading to prepare (see? preparation = a plan) and I will have the ingredients for replacement drinks in the fridge. I already know what brand of mineral water I'm going to splurge on, because it's still cheaper than wine.

Rationale

a. I'm fifty, and I'm over it.

b. New puppy (Prof wants to call her River, Joe wants to call her Gin, but I'm leaning towards Buffy, we all have a strong girl thing) will only ever know sober me.  If I drink again I will be letting her down, which means it's not about me - at first.

'At first' matters, because I am hoping very much that after a few months of making this about puppy, it will start to be about me too, and my beautiful family, and my actually pretty awesome business and the new directions I want to take it in.

But I know I will need an 'at first' crutch. And who among us could ever bear to disappoint a puppy?

Statement Number Two

Hello my old friend.  You and I know each other well, don't we? You're the voice of regret and hindsight and you fuck right off when I really need you.  So maybe 'old friend' is too strong - maybe you're a partner. In life, in business, in crime? You're there, until you're not.

You come to me as if you're a new idea, but the age of you makes me feel sick.  You act all strong and sensible and resolved, but you're a failure and a phoney and you know I hate that.

In fact, you know I hate myself which makes it even worse that you jump into my head most mornings and sing your stupid song.

You're not a plan. You have no details. I know for a fact you aren't coming true for at least all those other times you promised. 

You have no rationale other than I don't want to feel foggy and fat any more - not until 5pm, at least.

I don't like you.  From now on I want to be friends with Number One.