The day I realised I was a ‘grey-area’ problem drinker
Soaring alcohol-related hospital admissions among over-40s are no surprise to Kate Baily
Very few of the 10 million Brits with alcohol use disorder seek help
When I was young, I thought alcoholics drank White Lightning on park benches. I thought the condition was public and ugly, that you’d know if you had a problem if you woke up and poured yourself a vodka at 9am, or if you were constantly falling over and disgracing yourself at family functions. I thought it existed entirely in the space that I now know is referred to as “rock bottom”. I thought problem drinking wasn’t a term that applied to middle-aged, middle-class mums like me. I now know that couldn’t be further from the truth.
A Daily Telegraph investigation has found that over-40s now account for more than three quarters of all alcohol-related hospital admissions. The investigation revealed the NHS is treating fewer people aged 30 and under for alcohol problems than a year ago, while the numbers of middle-aged drinkers requiring medical treatment has soared.
I wasn’t surprised in the least to read that it’s my generation that is struggling. At 50, I have been sober for four years, but it took me a very long time to realise I had a problem, longer still to admit it and start to do anything about it. Nothing about my sobriety journey has been what I might once have expected. There were no stints in rehab, no dramatic accidents or horrendous moments where I was threatened with having my children taken away.
My alcohol use disorder was quiet, secretive and pervasive. From the outside, everything appeared to be ticking along nicely. Behind closed doors, I was an anxiety bubble waiting to burst.
In my teens there had been a bit of drinking, at university a bit more. But it wasn’t until I was living in London and working as a journalist that I really began drinking in earnest. We had no money but would come home from work and drink cheap wine and think we were terribly sophisticated. Then on Fridays we’d go out and drink until we passed out. It was good oldfashioned binge drinking, as sanctioned by Sex and the City and the adverts for Blossom Hill that came on before Friends. There would be the odd blackout or killer hangover, but it was all so normalised. Occasionally, I’d wonder if I was going a bit too far, but then I’d look at my world around me and see myself reflected back. “This is just how it’s meant to be at this age,” I’d think, and pour another glass.
At 29, I trotted along to an AA meeting. It was full of old men telling tales of their varying “rock bottom” moments. I didn’t fit in; their stories didn’t sound like mine. I was drinking a couple of bottles of wine a week in bars and friends’ flats. I could go days without drinking and then have a heavy weekend. I wasn’t an alcoholic.
In my thirties things shifted a little. By that point my husband and I had moved to Brighton, and the pace of life was beginning to slow. I no longer had those regular outlets where it was socially acceptable to get drunk. I’d drink a couple of glasses of wine in the evenings, which would accidentally turn into a whole bottle, selfmedicating underlying anxiety that would return with my hangover the next morning.
Having my first child at 38 should have been a turning point. Instead, things became darker still. It’s only now I have children that I’ve realised how pervasive this “grey-area drinking” culture of “gin o’clock” and “mummy wine time” can be – responsible, I’m sure, for a significant swathe of the 10million Brits with alcohol use disorder, of which only 76,000 seek help.
It makes sense in some ways: at a time when you are incredibly emotionally vulnerable, all the things that make you feel most like yourself are suddenly unavailable – you can’t take yourself off to meet a friend for a pedicure and a coffee when there’s a baby strapped to you. Those tools I needed to regulate myself had gone.
Six weeks into motherhood I drank a bottle of wine. I felt awful. I was so detached from my feelings and was struggling to cope, though you wouldn’t have known it from the outside. I went to the doctors and was referred to an alcohol counsellor who gave me one of those wheels so you can count your units. Needless to say it wasn’t a great help.
By the time I’d had my second baby, I was in a bad place. We’d moved out of Brighton and were living beyond our means, but didn’t have anyone to help with the kids, so I spent an awful lot of time with them on my own while my husband was out at work. I felt isolated and depressed; I was suffering from maternal burnout and though I hated alcohol and hated myself for drinking, booze was the only way I knew how to de-stress. I carried around huge amounts of shame and was constantly trying to stop drinking or set limits, which, of course, I’d then break and plummet into a spiral of self-loathing.
There is such an accepted culture of mummy drinking. Social media is full of it. Cards for mums have wine and gin themes – even school fêtes have a bar these days. Though I wasn’t around raucous drinking any more, alcohol was everywhere. And yet still, I struggled to admit I had a problem, in spite of regularly googling “Am I an alcoholic?” at 3am.
One night, I found a site called Soberistas. “Are you sick and tired of feeling sick and tired?” it said. I created an anonymous profile and posted a blog. When I woke up the next morning I’d had seven responses from people saying “don’t worry, we get you, we know what that feels like”.
I stopped drinking that day in July 2013. Since then there have been blips – I thought I’d sorted myself out after a year and that I could go back to having the odd glass, but familiar patterns emerged quickly and I had to ditch it again, forcing myself to discover new ways of feeling good that didn’t come in the form of a wine bottle.
I struggled to admit I had a problem, while googling ‘Am I an alcoholic?’ at 3am
Since going sober, I have made it my mission to try to help other women like me and call out “wine o’clock” as an emotional crutch for women. I now have my own blog, Love Sober, teach courses on self-love and sobriety, have a podcast and have written a book on the subject. I was terrified to go public about my drinking in 2016 when I started the blog, worried the other mums wouldn’t let their kids play with mine. I couldn’t have been more wrong. Most of the thousands of emails we get to the podcast every week are from mums.
Following the Telegraph’s campaign, experts called for urgent government intervention. To my mind, we need to start talking about the grey area which so many with alcohol disorders (myself included) inhabit. There is a lot of information when you hit rock bottom. But the real damage is accumulating among the middle-class mums like me; until there is support for those casually picking up a bottle of wine to de-stress as if it’s the most normal thing in the world, that won’t change.
As told to Rosa Silverman and Eleanor Steafel
Love Yourself Sober by Kate Baily and Mandy Manners (RRP £12.99). Buy now for £10.99 at books.telegraph.co.uk or call 0844 871 1514