I read this in a book Mrs. D is Going Out, "It's the housewife's external quandary: crazy busy all the time but also strangely bored. Boozing worked well to solve that quandary by taking me away mentally while not taking me away physically."
I think this is where I started to really lose myself in recent years. Boredom and loneliness of being home with three little kids. Early on, I had three kids under the age of 4. I didn't leave the house often, and the days were long and exhausting. It was easy to dumb the boredom and turn to a glass of wine for entertainment after those long days. Wine made my trashy tv more exciting! It gave me a boost of energy in the evening to stay up and talk to my husband instead of crash at 7pm with the kids. It seemed fun and innocent early on. I also wasn't hiding it from my husband 5 years ago. It wasn't that bad. It wasn't every night. I wasn't crushing a bottle a night... but things started to change. I found a great group of housewives here in town to hang with and we started to have fun. Things slowly got worse. My history with drinking, my genetics, many factors made it so the cards were stacked against me...
I cannot pinpoint exactly when it got really bad. Perhaps, the weekend family parties at friends houses that started at 3pm on a Sunday and didn't stop until 10pm, and ended up with me so blacked out, I was hungover for two solid days throwing up. Or maybe it was the weekly playdates on Fridays at 3:30pm with all of our friends. "Bus Stop Fridays" we called it. Or was it the large friends gatherings around Christmas and New Years with friends and family where we would drink all day long while the kids played outside or watched tv, and we would just consume bottle after bottle. Eventually, we would have a full family dance party, and the kids were still too little and would only laugh and think it was silly. But the next morning, I would wake up so hungover, wonder how we got home, how the night ended, where my kids were, or what I did to embarrass myself. Such anxiety. The stomach pains were intense, the Advil popping wouldn't stop, the imodium was never-ending. It took me days, weeks to recover. The holidays were the worst... and I am in the middle of them right now. So, I don't know when it started, but looking back on it all it was probably the perfect storm of all these events.
Also, I would usually end up covered in bruises the next morning after a particularly boozy event, and never know why. Friends would ask, and we would laugh about it. I used to have to take close to 25 imodium every single morning just to get past the alcohol induced diarrhea which I blamed on IBS. I do have IBS, that much is true. But I lied to my doctor about how much alcohol I was drinking so it took a very long time to find the right medicine that worked for my body and that also allowed me to continue to drink the way I did.
I am scared some of my friends may some day read this and feel guilty for being part of this and blame themselves. Or they may question their own behavior. That is not the point of this. It is very evident that my issues are my own, and they are deeply rooted in my past problems. That I know. And for that I blame nobody but myself. By the end, I was responsible for allowing myself to climb into the hamster wheel of drink, blackout, hangover, repeat. That was all me. I was drowning in alcohol and there is no one to blame for that but me.
