I WENT TEETOTAL ... AND MET THE LOVE OF MY LIFE
THE date I gave up the mother’s ruin is forever etched on my brain — September 15, 2014. Prior to that, I liked the bottle that bit too much. I’d call myself an extremely functional alcoholic, featuring some spectacularly dysfunctional moments.
After three decades of booze houndery, I finally reached my limit at the age of 43. It’s no coincidence that I hadn’t had a long-term relationship for eight years. I was the original hot mess: thrilling to be with, impossible to stay around. ‘Wasn’t that a blast?’ I would drawl to my partners-in-crime the morning after, valiantly hoping it had been.
Booze was the great love of my life and, when I ditched it, I allowed room for a new one.
I met my boyfriend Terence, then 40, precisely 90 days later at my first sober party. Two chaps showed an interest in me that night: one, my usual drunken maniac; the other, this moderate management consultant. For the first time in my life, I made the sober choice. (It helped that he was also quite the looker.)
The first thing I should say about being a reformed wino is that we would not be together had I not dragged myself onto the wagon.
In fact, we wouldn’t even have spoken. I would have dismissed Terence not being drunk and disorderly as dullness; he would have shunned my drama-queen antics.
During my first two years of abstinence, both my parents died in the worst possible circumstances. I also nearly lost my baby nephew, who was left acutely disabled by his illness. Grief and early sobriety did not make for a dazzling honeymoon period.
However, Terence lovingly did everything to keep me on the straight and narrow. He carted around Tabasco for Virgin Marys, and decaffeinated tea bags for late-night pick-meups, while learning how to ask for non-alcoholic drinks in a string of different languages.
I am fortunate that my beloved isn’t a carouser. He doesn’t do extremes. When we met, he told me that — as I was always zero or ten in terms of behaviour — he was happy chugging along at a five. Once, I would have deemed this boring. I now see it as the key to a happy existence.
When he does, very occasionally, get mildly hammered, he is a charmingly amiable drunk. The worst I have seen him do is dance on his own in his shed to reggae, one hand clutching his wine-maker sister’s brandy, the other waving teen-clubberlike in the air.
At times, I miss the wildness. It was a part of me facilitated, but not created by, the booze. This woman was capable of anything — the gutsy heroine of a life full of epic (mis)adventure.
I started drinking at 13, looking so much older than my years that I was able to order rounds in my school uniform.
An introvert keen to pass for its opposite, I found it was the social fuel I required. For 30 years alcohol was my crutch, my hobby, my joy. Booze was no less than my single fuel — the thing that gave me the energy for, while blunting the edges of, my lonely life; ensuring single was how I remained. My epiphany came on September 14, 2014, after I found myself on an inadvertent bender that started at 11am and ended at 7pm asleep in a friend’s bath. When I add that the bender was a christening, you will begin to perceive the enormity of said spree.
Happily, Terence was not the cause of my quitting, to be begrudged forever after.
I had dragged myself through the first three months of sober angst, bingeing on AA podcasts while not going out.
For the first few days, I ached as if I had flu. I was dazed, moody, tearful; throat sore, glands swollen, tongue furred. I got conjunctivitis and my eyelashes fell out.
The brief moments of sleep I managed to snatch were so night-terror-filled that I would wake sobbing.
Even so, after 90 days, it was blindingly clear that sober was how I should remain.
While I still find it massively challenging at times, sobriety has given me the man of my dreams I didn’t even know I had, my first adult home and a dog that I adore. This would be a very great deal to p*** against a wall.
‘Booze was my crutch, my hobby, my joy for 30 years’