My children have driven me to drink. Well, that's not totally true. I was quite partial to a tipple well before I had the kids (and have the scars to prove it) but since having them I have noticed a distinct change in my drinking patterns. I'm drinking a lot more.
Perhaps not so much in regards to quantity but in regularity. Rather than bingeing on a Friday night, those drinks are being spread out over the week. I am drinking every night.
Well I was. It was worrying me so much that I decided to address my drinking problem. I've decided not to drink on school nights. And to kick off the new habit, I decided to do Febfast, the annual fund-raising month where you abstain for 29 days (who forgot to tell me it was a leap year?) to raise money for organisations such as the Ted Noffs Foundation and Mission Australia that help young people with drug and alcohol problems. In 2011 more than $1 million was raised by about 7000 fasters and Febfast is confident the 2012 figures will be the same. (www.febfast.org.au)
Not that I'll help because I haven't actually registered. I've been way too busy getting everyone ready for the new school year. Perhaps February is a good month for fasting because of that. Makes more sense when you find out that the main participants in Febfast are women aged 30-45.
Which brings me to Tuesday night, first day back at school. I so needed a drink. It's pathetic to say that. I didn't need a drink, I wanted a drink. I'd done the pick-up, swimming training, cooked dinner, done a load of washing, dealt with first day of school, found the dreaded contact to cover the books. And all of a sudden it was drink o'clock. 6pm. But no, I remained solid, and filled my favourite Jamie Oliver wine tumbler (read wine jug, nothing standard about this serving) with lemon cordial, in the (vain) hope that just holding the glass would have the same effect. It didn't.
Tuesday reinforced why I've made this decision. I have to stop thinking I need a drink. It's OK to think I'd like a drink. But thinking you need a drink is only a few steps away from really needing a drink. Too many times (not that I'm a real lush or anything - don't mention the word denial) I've woken up a little seedy after doing nothing more than having a couple of drinks the night before, at home, by myself, perhaps while I've been doing the ironing, or the folding or some other mundane task. Nothing like facing an early school run with a slight hangover. (Worst-case scenario, after a particularly big hockey function, I had to face coaching the juniors the morning after, stumbled home, had a long conversation with the bottom of the toilet bowl and slept for the rest of the day - as if you have that luxury when you're a parent.) But seriously, alcohol is a real problem. Approximately 2 per cent of female deaths are alcohol-related, with the main cause being stroke, followed by alcoholic liver cirrhosis, road injury, and breast cancer (rates of which are 35per cent higher in women who drink three to four standard drinks per day, and 67per cent with more than four standard drinks per day).
And while most of us have probably been drinking since the day we could pass for 18, I truly believe becoming a mother changes the way you drink. I remember going to mothers' group with my first-born and sharing coffee and chat until one of us was game enough to ask for a wine instead. Look at me, I'm a fun, social, person, the one I used to be before I had children. (We used to joke too that it was fine to start drinking when Playschool came on at 3.30, but then the ABC moved it to 2.30 and we had to rethink that idea.)
There's a plethora of books that promote this idea, of it being cool for mothers to drink. American author, former stand-up comic and mother of three, Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, has written Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay and Naptime Is the New Happy Hour and had a web column called Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins and Tequila. She admits to not minding a drink or four of an evening, ''to be present, but not totally present''. A state all mother's crave occasionally. But then she quit drinking. ''I drink too much,'' she admitted. She's been sober for almost three years. (Check out her website at www.stefaniewildertaylor.com)
I'll admit I don't know if I could give it up totally. That seems a little drastic. Instead I'm endeavouring to find the best low-alcohol wine I can. But all power to Wilder-Taylor and to those other women (and men) who have made the same decision. For whatever reason.
In a little book I'm reading, Adriana Trigiani's The Wisdom of My Grandmothers: Lessons to Live by, from One Generation of Remarkable Women to the Next (Simon and Schuster, $29.99) there's a wonderful scene where Trigiani recalls an afternoon she spent with her 70-something-year-old grandmother Viola, a woman who lived through the 20th century juggling career and motherhood. The pair have spent the day getting things done around the house, washing the car, doing the folding. When the work is done Viola makes her granddaughter a cocktail (well before the Sex and the City girls made them fashionable), a ceremony of crystal tumblers and gold shakers.
''I'm not much of a drinker,'' Trigiani writes, ''but Viola's cocktails were delicious; they had a woodsy taste that burned my lips (the whiskey, evidently), but then went down sweet (the vermouth) and cold, as a lovely and immediate buzz ensued. After the chores that culminated in washing the car, I came to appreciate that lovely buzz. It meant we were finally off the clock; miracle of miracles, there was nothing left to do around the house.''
Her grandmother's wisdom? ''Every once in a while, have a drink,'' Viola tells her. ''When you've earned it.''
Perhaps the problem, in this ever entitled world, is that we think we've earned one every day.
This reporter is on Twitter: @karenhardyct
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