Alcohol and RAGE

There's been lots of discussion in the UK recently about alcohol fuelled rage.

Airlines UK, which represents many of the major carriers, have called for stronger deterrents for passengers who decide to crack open their duty-free booze while still on board.

Ryanair have asked airports to ban sales of booze before 10am, and insist passengers drink no more than two alcoholic drinks before flying.

In the last year 387 people were arrested for being drunk and disorderly on a plane, up from 255 the year before.

I bet none of this surprises any of you.

I've found that one of the best things about being sober is the lack of ANGER. I still get cross from time to time, obviously, but it's a slow burn kind of cross, a gradually building irritation. Alcohol (or hangover) induced rage isn't like that at all. It hits you from nowhere like a tornado.

Here's what I wrote, back on DAY 190, about alcohol and rage:

I keep coming across stories in the newspapers about celebrities getting into trouble due to fits of rage. Funnily enough, it’s never the teetotal ones and there’s usually alcohol involved. The most common incidents involve throwing mobile phones at support staff, yelling at air stewardesses, being carted off planes and losing it over inadequate catering arrangements.

Needless to say, I love reading these stories, because all of us big drinkers have, in slightly less dramatic ways, had incidents of alcohol-induced rage. I remember (as, sadly, do many of the other guests) throwing a glass of wine at my husband (the wine and the glass it was in) during a row over a taxi booking at a friend’s wedding in France. Luckily, my aim was terrible, so no lasting damage done, but sometimes these fits of temper can have real consequences.

Years ago, when I was in the high-powered job (with the bar in the office), I had two large glasses of wine with a colleague at lunch. When I got back to my desk I found an email from a very important global client asking for a number of unnecessary changes to the edit of the new TV commercial we’d just shot. I fired off a reply in (drunken) high umbrage, calling him a Neanderthal nincompoop who was obviously unable to appreciate a work of true artistic genius. This email became famous and made me a heroine in the creative department, but it got me fired from that client’s account and could easily have cost me my job.

According to my research, alcohol narrows our focus of attention, giving us tunnel vision, meaning that we become unable to take mitigating circumstances, other people’s feelings or potential consequences into account if we’re provoked when drunk. This means that we can react violently in circumstances that we would ordinarily have shrugged off.

Also, because alcohol lowers our inhibitions, we are more likely to end up in dangerous situations, leading to potential confrontation. We get a dangerous, and false, burst of confidence. The problem is exacerbated by the fact that we are less able to process information properly and are, therefore, more prone to imagining insults (he looked at me the wrong way, Your Honour). 

Since I quit drinking I haven’t lost my temper once (well okay, maybe once or twice, but definitively not a lot). I am Zen-level calm.

Which is why events this evening come as a bit of a shock.

I’m in bed, about to drop off. Mr SM’s in the bathroom. As he closes the bathroom door I hear a whuuumph! as the wet towel I’d recently picked up off the floor and hung up hits the floor again. Needless to say, Mr SM (who must have heard it too) pays no attention and climbs, nonchalantly, into bed.

I sit bolt upright in bed and yell ‘THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD IT WITH THE TOWELS!’

Mr SM looks totally taken aback. Rabbit in headlights. There’s no stopping me.

‘I PICK UP YOUR TOWELS! I PICK UP #1'S TOWELS, #2’S TOWELS AND #3’S TOWELS. IF THE DOG USED TOWELS I WOULD HAVE TO PICK THOSE UP TOO! NO ONE ELSE IN THIS FAMILY EVER PICKS UP A TOWEL. IF IT WEREN’T FOR ME THE WHOLE HOUSE WOULD GRADUALLY FILL UP WITH TOWELS UNTIL WE ALL DROWN IN WHITE FLUFFY TOWELS!’

As I pause for breath, Mr SM puts his hand on my arm (very brave, as I am considering biting it off), and says – very quietly – ‘SM, this isn’t about the towels, is it?’

I stop and think. It strikes me that while I am, obviously, and righteously, cross about the towel situation, the truth is that I am always cross about towels. But a dropped towel won’t usually make me go stratospheric.

#1 is away on a school trip. I’m not going to see her for a whole week. The longest I’ve ever been without her previously is three days. I miss her. That’s why I lost it.

Had I had a few drinks, I would never have realised this. I would have ignored Mr SM’s intervention, which would only have increased my fury. I would have moved on from the towels, and on to my other pet hate – the way everyone leaves their dirty plates and cutlery on top of the dishwasher rather than inside it. I would have accused Mr SM of being a terrible husband and we both would have gone to sleep upset and angry with each other.

So, quitting alcohol doesn’t make the occasional bouts of irrational rage go away, but it does help you to stop, get a sense of perspective and realise that it’s not about the towels. Or the dishwasher. Or the catering arrangements. And that has to be better for our sanity and our relationships.

But I’d still love to know how to get anyone else in my family to pick up a sodding, sodden towel once in a while.

Love and zen-like calm to you all,

SM x

Booze and Bereavement

Thank you so much for all your kind messages yesterday after the death of my friend, Q.

It has been a very hard couple of days.

I have never seen my old Etonian, stiff upper lipped husband cry before, even during the whole cancer thing, but several times I've caught him quietly sobbing.

Mr SM and Q first met when they were at boarding school together at the age of seven, and there's something about wrenching young boys from their families, and subjecting them to inedible food, cold showers and the public school 'fagging' system that forges incredibly strong ties.

#2 picked up Mr SM's iPad yesterday and it opened on a site named 'coping with bereavement.'

I'd always thought that if a close friend or family member died I would play my 'Get Out of Jail Free' card. Nobody can be expected to cope with grief without booze, right? Alcohol was practically invented for this - it's medicinal. It numbs the feelings and makes everything bearable.

But I figure that drinking now would be like closing the front door on a house fire. You might be able to forget, temporarily, that it's there, but at some point you have to open that door again, and the fire won't have gone away, it'll just be more out of control.

Instead I've discovered nature's way of dousing the flames: weeping.

I've been doing it a lot. Twenty or thirty times a day. Every time I pick up the 'phone to another friend, but also at random times. The fact that I might be out on the street or in a shop doesn't seem to stop me either.

And, you know what? It really helps.

It feels like a safety valve that clicks into action just when you think that all those feelings building up inside are going to make you explode, or spontaneously combust like a character in a Victorian novel.

The children, who are at home for the holidays, have got used to Mummy randomly weeping.

I've explained to them that grief is an entirely good thing, as it's a sign that you have properly loved, and a life without having properly loved is no life at all.

They get this. What they would not get, and not like is if Mummy were also drunk and incoherent.

Oddly, I don't really want to blur the edges. I feel it would be doing Q a disservice. I want to remember all the times we shared in glorious technicolour. I want to properly grieve for all the new memories I thought we would make in the future.

Plus, I want to be there for his wife and children, my friend and our Godchildren, not just by sharing a few bottles of vino late into the night (which I am sad I can't do), but by helping with the housework, the cooking, the childcare and so on, which I couldn't do drunk or hungover.

One thing I am terribly grateful for is that I don't have any regrets.

The thing about someone dying unexpectedly and suddenly is that you don't have time to prepare. To make time to see them, to tell them that you love them, to show them how much they mean to you.

Had this happened in the Drinking Days I have no doubt I would have been riddled with regret. I'd neglected my old friends for years.

But I'd seen Q a lot recently. He'd been to stay with us in London, we'd seen him up in Scotland. I'm pretty sure he knew how much he meant to us.

I'm weeping again.

SM x

Boozy Parenting

Today is the first day of the summer holidays. 7 weeks.

On the one hand, I'm excited. No school runs. Lots of adventures - beaches, ice cream, surfing, lie-ins, movies, expeditions.....

But I'm nervous too. Seven weeks of trying to find different ways of keeping #1, #2 and #3 off the computer. Arbitrating sibling disagreements (aka trying to stop them beating each other up). Cooking hundreds of meals that at least one of them will turn their nose up at. Constant tidying, washing, sun cream applying, nose wiping, manner correcting.....

.....all without anything to 'take the edge off' at the end of the day. And with no time for myself with blogs, bubble baths, long dog walks or any of my other 'displacement activities.'

But it has to be better than doing all of the above with a hangover. Then letting them run wild from 5pm onwards while I get stuck into the vino. Then shouting at them because I'm slightly drunk and cross.

I'm starting the holidays with bags of energy. I weigh under 11 stone (154 pounds) for the first time in years. I'm (relatively) relaxed and even tempered. I can be the perfect Mum! (yeah, right).

I have always been the opposite of the 'helicopter Mum'. I've never done that buzzing constantly overhead, coaching, pushing, adjusting, organising endless 'improving activities' and monitoring appropriate play dates.

It's pretty impossible to be that kind of Mum and drink too much. I had to prioritise.

So, I've been more of a 'satellite Mum'. Bleeping somewhere overhead, keeping a weather eye and checking that no-one's in mortal danger.

I've made sure that everyone is in the right place at the right time, in the right kit (except when they're not). They all do their homework, their reading and their spellings (most of the time).

But Kumon maths? Suzuki violin? Mandarin lessons? Fencing? Extra tutoring in anything? I don't think so!

This approach makes me most unusual (almost unique) in my part of town. I'd like to claim that it is all part of a 'free range kid centred philosophy', but actually it was probably laziness, selfishness and booze.

Given my history, I was definitely not one of those mothers who could feel a personal sense of achievement yesterday as we watched our year 6's graduate from Prep (primary) school. #1's achievements were entirely her own.

Which is why I was utterly blown away to see her perform as the lead girl role in the end of year musical - belting out her solos to the back of the hall, despite never having been in a choir or had a single singing or drama lesson (outside of school).

Then she walked off with the cup for outstanding achievement and an academic scholarship to her next school. Out of sixty or so highly-tutored-intensively-mothered kids she came out top.

Blow me down with a feather.

If you're a Mum reading this, worried about what effect your wine habit has had on your kids, then stop worrying right now (and stop drinking right now, obviously). They are hugely resilient, and a bit of self reliance is good for them.

Plus their time frames are different from ours. I quit four months ago, and - for my kids, if not for me - it's already the 'new normal'.

I overheard #1 talking to a friend the other day. The friend said something about her Mum drinking wine. "Oh," said #1, slightly smugly, "my Mummy doesn't drink."

Now that was something I could take some credit for.

Love SM x