How I Stopped Drinking
And Why I started — I worked it out!
For years the drinking was getting the upper hand, I was coming to realise that I was not a happy drunk…but I began to reach for the bottle as soon as I could identify a problem that would give me an excuse to drink.
It did not start like that! It started for a genuine reason, my father had died, my world imploded, I had no support, I was effectively alone with a young child propping a mother who I had not recognised as totally narcissistic.
I should have had clues in the way she took to mourning; an excuse to dramatise with her friends how sad and awful and so cleverly — it was all said in the doleful looks and the Eeyore silences. But in private she was revelling, I think, in her newfound freedom.
I was not; I was swimming in a sea of raw unaccustomed grief, made worse by the swiftness of my father’s demise. Two weeks or so from diagnosis to death. I was also dealing with an unemotionally available man who expected me to continue running a house, a business, organise a wedding and a funeral and who finally stormed off three weeks after the rather grand funeral pronouncing that I did not have “Time for him!”
I don’t think anyone gave any thought to “time for me”! So, the drinking pattern that had crept up from the New Year’s Day when it was clear that my father was…