6 days sober and no idea!

Hello and welcome to my blog. If I'm honest with you I have no idea what I'm doing, no idea how to do or use a blog, so I guess I will use this as a writing journal and see what happens!  So here goes....

My name is Stacey, I am almost 35 (in exactly 20 days)and I am 6 days into being alcohol free.  I have two gorgeous children who are 10 and 8 and 2 step children who are 12 and 9.  I have an amazing partner who without him wouldn't be here to tell the story.  On Tuesday I took my children to school, went to Sainsburys and brought two small bottles of wine, I drank them and went home.  I got home and cooked a shepherds pie to freeze, hung out the washing and had two glasses of neat rum.  Now my secret drinks are normally cans of gin and tonic, they are so cheap and so easy to buy and no one knows you are actually drinking alcohol (this is my very sad, pathetic drinking head).  For as long as I can remember I have always known I have some sort of issue with alcohol.  I always knew that I couldn't take it or leave it, oh no I had to take it...and them some!  However its only until now that I have come to realise there is no safe level of drink for me, ever again.  So after my wine and rum I left my house to go to my Mums who lives half hour away, from then on it has all gone blank.  The next thing I know I woke up in my Mums spare room after wetting myself (classy eh) on her sofa not knowing what had happened.  Turned out I had a crash, yep, I smashed my car up, my beautiful car that I love, smashed!  Now when I figured this out and still probably a little drunk, my devastated Mum and Step Dad said "its over Stacey, this is it for you, you have no more lives".  What did I say?...…"Ok if its over, let me go out with a bang and have a few more drinks" and believe me I meant it, I wanted another drink at that moment, in my still heavily poisoned head.  My partner was devastated, my parents devastated, my friends devastated, everyone that loves me was devastated.  How many chances was one person allowed, 1, 4, 10?  I know that feeling of loving someone so much and watching them drink there life away and turn into someone I didn't know, yet I was doing this to everyone else.  Obviously I blacked out, 2 hours of my life are a blank, so I had to fill the pieces in.  I left the house at 11am, I know that because of our ring doorbell.  I then must have gone to Sainsburys as I had a small bottle of blue gin in the car and I also spent money in Sainsburys.  After that I have no idea, I can only imagine I got more drink and kept driving.  I can only thank my guardian angel for protecting me but more so for protecting the poor innocent people that I so selfishly put in danger.  I am fortunate enough to say no one was hurt, myself included.  Its unimaginable the danger I put other drivers in, pedestrians, the people going about there day to day life whilst some selfish drunk is on the road. I was one of the lucky ones and I am unbelievably thankful.

So I guess already and rightly so you have painted a picture in your head of me, low life, selfish, scum, dirty alcoholic.  Well....I am none of those things, in fact I am the opposite.  I don't look like the typical Mum who has a drink problem, that would go to that length of utter selfishness. I have a good life, a great life in fact.  I don't want for anything, I work, my partner works very hard.  We do well for ourselves, comfortable I would say.  I live in a lovely home, I am a very clean and tidy OCD sort of person, my children are always well presented and turned out, I take pride in all this and I take care of my family.  You wouldn't think this if you had seen me that day, you would have thought I belonged in the gutter.  I suppose what I am trying to say is that I always thought that alcoholics were people I would see on a park bench or the parents that didn't give a shit about there children, drinking cans of super tenants.  I didn't think they were the every day Mums who have untold demons, or just simply cant handle life.  Life with children, life with stress or simply having a very mundane life...the list is endless. I know I am a fortunate person, however when you want that drink, fortunate or not, you just don't care. My partner tells me how protective I am of the children, more than Mothers he knows. So he will never understand why I would ever put myself at risk like that but of course that's what addiction is. It makes you put everything and everyone in front of it.  I think of it as the little drink devil calling me back, telling me I don't have a problem just so I will grab that next drink.

I don't drink every day, far from it.  I don't drink wine at home when the kids are asleep like a lot of Mums and you will understand why the further I go on with this blog.  I do it secretly because my partner wont allow it and thank god for that because I would be in a worse way than I am now.  So instead I drink secretly, little gin here and there just to give me the buzz, a couple wont hurt I say to myself because I cant have that relaxed release any other way so in secret it has to be. This happens once in a while unless my partner and I have a row then I don't care, I will say to him I am having wine and that's that.  Of course just another excuse for me to drink and even better to be told ok...bingo! I gave up drinking about a year ago, I gave up for about 6-8 months but I never in my right mind thought I would never drink again.  This was just to get it back under control, I didn't want to lose my partner, I didn't want to drink but didn't want it to be forever, I was still in denial clearly. During this time I was also seeing a psychiatrist who helped me an unbelievable amount.  I have seen many therapists and none ever worked for me until Kat, that was her name.  She was truly amazing and helped me in more ways than she will ever know.  If anyone needs therapy, I suggest keep trying until you find the right one and not give up. For me it wasn't about talking over my past and my issues, it was understanding my brain and how and why it responds in such dramatic ways and actually understanding the route and the pattern, this was what I had needed. However saying that she still wasn't able to cure me and get the drink devil away from me.  Of course she couldn't, only I would ever be able to do that.  So I eventually introduced alcohol again, little bit here and there and of course only ever social and in the right company and this for me was good, I was proving to myself and to others that I had control, I didn't have a problem and that I could just be 'normal'.  So this lasted a good while and my partner and my family were relaxed. Summer months came and the holidays came, we went to Cornwall, I drank.  We went away at weekends, I drank, I went out for brunch, I drank.  Slowly but surely it creeped up. I had a couple of instances where the drink took over and I would pass out. Those times I even take tablets, strong ones just to knock myself out. This isn't because I am so unhappy I cant face life, its simply because I have drank, the drink is my body, the poison takes over and I am possessed, sometimes literally. 

Holidays were over, kids went back to school after months of lockdown and there I was sneaking the drink again behind peoples backs, sometimes they found out, other times not.  I am talking one or two cans of gin and tonic and then stop but that's the gamble I take because some of those times I am unable to stop which is when I am in danger and in a couple of instances, other people are too. :-(  My Mum said to me "this will sneak up on you, its only a matter of time".  If I had admitted that its already starting too then I would have had to stop, and up until 5 days ago I wasn't ready for that.  The drinking socially and when I am away eventually led to the crash. 

Now I am not sure what has happened here because for me I now know I have no CHOICE.  The question is, alcohol or my life, that has how serious it has become. Not because I am so dependant on it that I will die of liver disease.  No, I will kill myself (by accident of course) or worse I kill someone else and spend my life in prison paying for what I have done and I wouldn't survive that.  I will ruin my children's life, my partners, my parents and friends if something happens.  If I hurt someone else then there family is left devastated, all the horrendous rippling effects this can have on people and all because I couldn't resist that bit of liquid.

You may think all this sounds dramatic, people make mistakes etc.  What if I told you I had a horrific car accident back in 2017 on the motorway, my car was crushed and flipped across the road and I was rushed to hospital.  I came out of that alive and unharmed and the hospital said it was a miracle how I survived, no was else was hurt or involved.  I had drank a bottle of vodka and drove on the motorway until I flipped the car unable to control it.  I was devastated of course, I went and got help straight away and stopped for a bit but that was it.  I was remorseful like you wouldn't believe and I truly believed I would never ever do that again...but I did.  I was going through a bad time then, I had separated from my now ex husband and it hit me harder than I thought.  I didn't want to be with him anymore but the trauma of separation brought back and triggered some upsetting memories which I later found out speaking to Kat.  So of course I used this an excuse, I have used everything as an excuse.  When I was about 22 I was so drunk I fell onto London Bridge train tracks, luckily I was removed and I was ok. Many stupid and irresponsible things have happened but it never stopped me drinking.  Its only now that I had the recent crash that I have finally accepted that I am an alcoholic, plain and simple. I have no excuse why I had a drink, I have no excuse why I got in the car, there is no excuse. The simple fact of the matter is I have a severe drink problem. I have finally stopped lying to myself. Only took 20 years!!  

When I had my children I changed my life, drink wasn't important anymore, going out wasn't important. I am actually what they call an introvert, I am my most happiest at home with my home comforts and a cuppa watching TV but when I was younger I was fighting so many demons it seemed drink was my only option.  So...I had my babies and I was so content, all I ever wanted to be was a Mother and they were and truly are my blessing and my life. When my Mum said I am putting drink before them I still struggled to believe it but that is exactly what I have been doing.  When you have babies they rely on you and only you and what I found is the older they got the more I started to drink.   Once I moved in with my ex in laws the drinking quickly crept up because I had them,  I felt like a spare part, no more washing, cooking, ironing, my ex Mother in law did it all so up crept the drink.  Now I look back at this I realise I have always had a huge problem with alcohol but was never ready to really accept that it was as severe as it was.  Now I am at my most happiest with the man I love more than anything but.....the drink devil eventually will rear its ugly head until you face it and deal with him head on.  I read something before in a book and it stuck with me.  She said "a lot of people don't have just one rock bottom, they have many rock bottoms until one day they just have there last".  I believe that's what has happened here.  I have had my last and final rock bottom.  I am not saying it wont be hard, of course it will, but now more than ever I actually, truly don't want drink in my life and I will do everything in my power to stop for good.  I believe more than ever now that a life without drink will be better and a hell of a lot less heartache!

So for now that is it, I am taking one day at a time and I will keep it all in a diary on this blog.   You will also notice that I have said alcohol free and not sober because the adjective of sober according to the internet means....serious, sensible, and solemn and I am NONE of those things! ha ha ha

I hope this helps some people and makes you realise you are not alone. 

Thank you for reading. :-)

Lots of love Stacey x