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My wine glasses got bigger, my world got smaller.
I started drinking more when I didn’t plan on drinking at all. Weekends started on Tuesday.
A glass of wine started to look good in the morning. I drank from extra-extra-large wine glasses so, I could say, “Well, I drink one glass of wine a night. ”
I drank alone, but didn’t count it as “drinking alone” as my husband and two young daughters were upstairs – asleep. And I was with my dog, my faithful yellow lab. Certainly I was not alone. I was social, I was fine. I was NOT an alcoholic.
And then, more than 11 years ago, I bottomed out. All my excuses for drinking alone, a lot, and without my own permission, ran out.
I came to the morning of Halloween 2004 and found that in my quest to drink the night before, I’d neglected to take my daughters trick or treating.
There was no rehab, no DWI, no arrest, no drama. There was the simple truth that booze had become more important than my two and five-year-old daughters.
That was it. No more, no less. I felt the lowest I’d ever had in my life. The worst. The bottom. Desperate.
I’d always known where Alcoholics Anonymous meetings were held; each Sunday I knew one took place at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital in Dover.
I went. My husband dropped me off with my daughters strapped into their car seats and I begrudgingly walked in, horrified, terrified, more scared to be there than in part of any Halloween horror story I’d ever heard.
I walked into a meeting, sat down and cried. A lovely woman welcomed me and I sat, feeling my world was at the absolute end.
The speaker that day was a beautiful woman who talked of finishing off other people’s glasses of wine after hosting dinner parties. She talked of filling her Duncan Donut’s cup with booze so she could go to her sons’ basketball games.
I gasped; she was telling my story; I’d thought I was the only one who’d ever drank from others’ glasses, who hid their drinking, who was, horrors of horrors – a MOM who drank. I picked up a twenty four hour chip. I sobbed.
⇒Click here to read the rest of Susan’s story in InDepthNH.org
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InDepthNH.org launched Breaking the Chains to give voice to people who are recovering from addictions. Breaking the Chains also provides information about where to seek help whether your drug is alcohol or heroin. Email nancywestnews@gmail.com to tell your story. We use first names when appropriate for this column only.
Information about recovery from addiction can be found at:
Heroin Anonymous NH http://goo.gl/HAxBj6
Alcoholics Anonymous http://nhaa.net/
Al-Anon http://www.nhal-anon.org/
Statewide and Maine http://goo.gl/kmSakf
