To my shame, I put booze before my baby I had a virtual stranger in my house ordering drugs as my child slept upstairs
She was a bestselling author and prominent mental health campaigner. But as she reveals in her brutally honest new book, behind closed doors BRYONY GORDON was falling to pieces...
WHeN my daughter edie was two weeks old, I took her to the pub and wheeled the buggy back home drunk.
No milk had come into my breasts, and I’d not put up much of a fight when it had been suggested to me by a kindly lactation consultant that I switch to formula. It meant I could drink, and I needed a drink, didn’t I? to let off steam, to relax, to remember who I was. A mum, yes, but also Bryony.
the trouble was, Bryony back then was an expert in self-sabotage, a 32-year-old woman who had hoped that pregnancy would do for her what a course of rehab did for others.
I had, perhaps naively, assumed that becoming a mum would cure me of my tendency to put drinking — and sometimes drugs — before everything else.
ever since I had first picked up a drink, at the age of 14, it had been the magic elixir that seemed to cure everything — most importantly the horrific intrusive thoughts and depression that were a result of the obsessive compulsive disorder I had suffered since childhood.
When I had a drink, I felt the way I imagined everyone else felt: relaxed, happy, at peace with myself. Without one, the heaviness of life was on me again, the trauma of mental illness making it increasingly difficult for me to function. so, like many, I self-medicated with alcohol.
still, I wasn’t an alcoholic, was I? I had rules — never drink before 7pm or until edie was in bed asleep; don’t touch spirits — and these rules were very important to me, because they proved I wasn’t an alcoholic.
sometimes it felt as if my entire life’s work was proving I wasn’t an alcoholic.
I couldn’t bear the word and would have done anything to avoid it. It conjured up images of tramps on park benches, of the destitute and desperate, and I was none of these things.
I thought having a baby would cure me of my wild ways, but in fact, as a hardcore drinker who once wrote a party girl newspaper column, I had picked up almost exactly where I left off after a couple of weeks of motherhood. this was too appalling a fact for me to properly accept, so instead I did what most people in the grips of an addiction tend to do: I buried it deep, under denial.
the truth was, my life was defined by alcohol. I didn’t drink every day — not quite — but I thought about it day and night.
When I did drink, I frequently blacked out, or put myself in horribly vulnerable positions.
In the first four years of my daughter’s life, I sometimes simply disappeared and took off with ‘friends’ for an evening that would inevitably end in a flat full of the detritus of a night’s binge. Whisky glasses, fag ash, me passed out on the sofa. Sometimes I hid where I’d been and who I’d been with from my husband. I’d wake up and take a diazepam so I could immediately go back to sleep and block out the day, or fantasise about being hospitalised for ‘exhaustion’, so I could be sedated. I was ashamed.
the irony was that during these four years, I somehow managed to build a reputation as a expert mental health campaigner. I’d written four books on the subject, including several bestsellers. I had, and still have, a popular podcast called mad World, on which I’d famously interviewed Prince Harry about his struggles.
But while I could talk about the oCD I had suffered from, I was too ashamed to talk about the selfmedicating I did to try to deal with it. this was the weird juxtaposition of my life: I had never before been so successful, but I had also never before felt like such a mess.
my endlessly patient husband Harry picked up the pieces at home in south London. He had no choice but to be complicit. Was it worse for him, in some strange way? I was out of control, but at least I had my hand on the brake. He was just a passenger.
I did want to stop. or at least I wanted to cut down. Never again, I would say the morning after, knowing that whatever had led to this ‘never again’ would be replaced by something else that would lead to another ‘never again’ in a few days’ time. Again and again and again.
Until, in 2017, at the age of 37, I began to hit rock bottom. It was may and my husband was away for the weekend.
I was supposed to be taking edie to a literary festival I was appearing at — but it was a glorious Friday, and when a friend texted suggesting she come round for a drink, I decided edie and I would get on the train to the festival the next morning.
I put her to bed in my customary fashion: hurriedly, finding the shortest book possible to read, and putting a dummy in her mouth to soothe her, despite the fact she was now four. then I went downstairs and opened the chilled cava.
ten minutes later, my friend turned up, along with a friend of hers I had not met before.
I suppose this might have annoyed someone else, a person who had perhaps expected a deep and meaningful catch-up. But as far as I was concerned, the more the merrier.
Within an hour, the person I had not met before had put in a call to her dealer. It shocks me now to think of how quickly, in the end, I broke one of my most unbreakable rules: a virtual stranger in my house ordering drugs as my child slept upstairs.
I was protected by my privilege, by my middle-class professionalism — and though this line in the sand was crossed only once, I now see that once could have been enough for some involvement from social services. I can barely force myself to type this, but I need to put it all down, because it pierces the wall of denial, even now.
At 4am, I texted my agent to tell her I had a stomach bug and would not make the literary festival. three hours after that, I found myself trying to get to sleep as my daughter woke up. I pulled out my husband’s iPad and put on some movies for her as I tried to get some rest.
I gave up. I called my mum and told her we were coming round as I was ill. I ordered a taxi I couldn’t afford, and bundled us in. We had to stop on the way so I could buy water and be sick.
In the checkout queue, holding my daughter’s hand and watching the normal, happy families going about their saturdays, I began to cry silently.
that summer of 2017, something changed inside me. I went on another all-night bender with a ‘friend’ whose surname I couldn’t tell you, switching off my phone so Harry couldn’t reach me. I woke up at 1.30pm the next day in her flat, oblivious to the huge worry and hurt I was causing him.
I knew that if I didn’t try to stop, and stop for ever, the rock bottoms would become seedier and seedier. I was not even sure I
I spent the duration of Edie’s new school picnic planning a pre-rehab binge
would live through them. I felt like an interloper in my own family. In my mind, I’d become a monster who had no right to what I had.
What was I doing to my family? To Edie, at this tender age, for whom a distracted, hungover mother had become normal?
She was young, but she was not stupid, and she was absorbing this situation into her brain without even realising it — my disappearances, my irritability, my constant ‘food poisoning’. How long before it started to change the very fabric of her cells, of her story, damaging her until there was no going back?
Which was how I found myself, in late August 2017, sitting with my husband in a nondescript building in a smart part of London with a rehab counsellor telling me I could start on an outpatient programme for the princely sum of £8,000.
I didn’t have £8,000, of course. What did they take me for? An alcoholic, or a sensible person with savings? I lived on my overdraft and then, when I maxed out that, I lived on a credit card, before pay day started the whole insane circle again.
But there was nothing that the NHS could really do for me. So, sure, £8,000 was a lot of money, but, like I said, I was desperate, and alcohol was going to end up costing me a lot more than that if I carried on drinking it.
‘Can you tell me what your success rates are in terms of getting people sober?’ asked my ever-practical husband, who’s a financial journalist and used to weighing up investments.
‘It’s about normal for a rehab centre,’ said the rehab man. ‘Around 40 per cent of our clients are still sober six months after leaving. Addiction is a tough illness to manage, I’m afraid.’
The odds were not good, but I admired his honesty, and I’d always liked a challenge. I looked at my husband’s kind face, at the worry in his eyes. And I knew then that I was going to try to be part of the 40 per cent. We applied for a loan that day. The same week I was due to start rehab, Edie was due to start Reception. On the Friday before, I took her to a picnic organised by her new school so that everyone could get to know each other — and it’s testament to my alcoholism that I spent the entire duration of it planning the binge I was going to have when I put her to bed.
This was my last opportunity for a drink — I had to be clean for 72 hours prior to starting rehab — and I had it all worked out. Dinner at 5pm, bath at 5.30pm, story at 6pm. If all went well, I could be ordering beer on Deliveroo by 6.20pm, and drinking it shortly after.
Once again it was Harry who saved me. I rang him at work to invite him to my last evening of drinking, to plead for his approval, but he was angry and told me no. As my finger hovered over the Deliveroo app, he was suddenly there, home early from the office to stop me.
I screamed when I saw him, but it wasn’t an angry scream, nor a defiant scream. It was a terrified scream, the scream of someone who didn’t know how she had ended up in this place or how she would get out of it. Harry took me up to our bed, tucked me in and told me it would be all right. That together we would get through this.
We cuddled and I knew that I was one of the lucky ones. I had supportive family and friends, and a bank loan for almost ten grand that would allow me to go to rehab. I had a way out.
I spent the next three days downing Night Nurse to keep me in an almost permanent state of sleep. Anything to get me to rehab in one piece.
And I still am — so far at least. I applied myself to rehab the same way most addicts apply themselves to things: passionately and absolutely.
The end of 2017 — especially Christmas — was hard, but I got through it, partly by leaving parties after an hour, and partly by baking.
The old Bryony would sneer at this, but in sobriety I was realising that so much of what I claimed to despise was actually what I hankered after desperately. Safety. Security. The ability to nourish and look after myself.
That Christmas, Edie and I baked banana bread and danced to festive songs in the kitchen. We whisked and licked spoons and laughed together, and when It’s The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year came on the radio I could have cried shiny tears of joy.
I’d always told myself that Edie was the most important thing in my life, that my love for her was all-encompassing. But alcoholism had made a mockery of this, and I realised that, in reality, my daughter had spent the first four years of her life playing second fiddle to my drinking. She had not been the most important thing in my life. Alcohol had.
THIS simple but stark fact winded me on an almost daily basis. I wanted to use its force to turn back time and do everything again. I wanted to take myself back to the delivery room where I’d had my emergency C-section, to whisper into my morphined ear that whatever I did, I should never, ever pick up an alcoholic drink again. But I couldn’t, so instead I used its power to propel me forward.
At the time of writing this, I am almost three years sober. Every morning, once I’ve enjoyed the feeling of relief at my clear head and lack of nausea, I get up and make Edie’s breakfast.
It is a small thing, an obvious thing, a thing that happens in households around the world every day. But for me, it is almost miraculous. From pouring the milk and cornflakes into a bowl, to the very fact we have milk and cornflakes to put in the a bowl.
I take my time to brush her hair and teeth, not rushing as I used to because I couldn’t (or wouldn’t) get out of bed in time.
Staying sober is never a done deal, and if there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that I have no idea what will happen to me tomorrow, or the day after.
But I still see a rehab counsellor once a week, like clockwork, and my life has changed so much: the thing I once couldn’t imagine being without — alcohol — has now become the thing I cannot imagine a life with.
Edie has changed, too, of course. Today she can read by herself. But she also knows that she will be put to bed every night by a woman who will always, always, read her a story, from the longest books she can find, for as long as she likes.