It was a regular summer afternoon for us, sitting downstairs in our basement area, drinking beer at 3pm. My 3 year old son playing with his toys, snacking on a fruit platter. Life couldn’t be better…could it? Whiling away the hours chatting about a whole lot of nothing.

The tiny moment that came next has profoundly changed the trajectory of my life forever. As I sucked down a long, greedy swig of beer, my beautiful little human turned to me and out of the blue said “Mummy, I don’t like this person”. I laughed and asked him what he meant, thinking, little people really say the strangest things. In response, he pointed to the bottle of beer in my hand. BAM. Like a punch in the face it struck me, exactly what he meant. Here was a child with limited vocabulary expressing his feelings about mummy drinking. My brain worked overtime trying to comprehend what he meant in that moment and try to make it mean something else. Something less crushing. Something frivolous and light hearted, I couldn’t. And I couldn’t quite relax for the rest of the day.

That night in bed, his words and the expression on his face played over and over again in my head. The internal narrative never ending.. “you’re over thinking it”.. “no, you’re not”… “you’re a terrible mother”… “you’re fucking up the most important role in your life”… “you’ve got to change”.. “how the fuck am I going to change” and on and on and on….

I’d like to say the next morning I made up my mind to stop drinking and did just that, but I didn’t. For the next few months I carried on regardless, with the usual attempts at moderation that always evaded me. Pretending I had my shit together, all the while knowing I didn’t. And every day without fail, those words would come back to haunt me. Mummy, I don’t like this person. It made me feel sick to my stomach. I know son, I don’t like this person either.

I spent a lot of time ruminating on it, deeply understanding it. Alcohol took regular loving mummy away and replaced her with apathetic mummy. I tried to put myself in his shoes to see how my drinking was impacting him. I imagined all the ways drunk mummy was failing to be the best mummy she could be. Drunk mummy certainly wasn’t as attentive and adoring as sober mummy. She didn’t interact and play with her child as much, she forgot to tend to her child’s needs sometimes, perhaps often. Late dinners, no dinners, skipped bath times, haphazard bedtimes, slurred bedtime stories. She got louder and more annoying, with over the top beer smooches. I particularly hated this one from my own childhood when my grandfather came home from the pub. She became increasingly unpredictable and erratic with each drink she guzzled down. Her fuse got shorter and sometimes she would lose her temper.

It took three months from that day for me to come to grips with the fact I was going to quit drinking. Wanting to quit every day, giving in to the fuck it’s every afternoon. I’d quit before, 5 years prior, with the help of a hospital detox program, but that’s a story for another day. I’d learned a lot and knew life was better on the other side, but I wasn’t a mother back then. This time I had huge overwhelming fears, and felt I couldn’t turn to such options for fear of judgement, What would people think? Or worse, What if social services got involved? Although I felt had to do this on my own, I knew I would need to get as much as I could from the resources available to me.

One Sunday morning, with another stinking hangover and a lot of self loathing. I dragged myself to the local book store and purchased a copy of This Naked Mind by Annie Grace and got stuck in. I signed up for The Alcohol Experiment, joined online sobriety forums, downloaded progress tracking apps and made an agreement with my hubby that he would do 30 days alcohol free with me. I also told my closest friends. And so began my Day 1…

That was close to a year and a half ago, I can honestly say that I’m grateful for every minute of sobriety. To be really present in life is the greatest gift you can give to yourself and those you love.