Why a Pandemic is the Best Time to be Sober

Like millions of people around the globe, I feel like I'm living in an unfamiliar, and unwelcome, parallel universe. 

The TV I watch, books I read and vivid dreams I have show people hugging, kissing, travelling, partying and working in offices. My diary is filled with festivals, concerts and theatre trips, parties and a few holidays - events that will never happen. 

Instead, we are all living in a world of isolation and fear. Even if we are lucky enough to be healthy, we worry for our friends and family, for our livelihoods, for the world.

At a time like this, it's easy to think that alcohol will help. Indeed, alcohol sales in the UK have increased by around 50%. My local supermarket's booze aisle has been stripped bare, and my social media feed is filled with memes about alcohol being the only way to survive all this. 

And yes, alcohol does - temporarily - blur all the edges. It softens our reality, which needs an awful lot of softening right now. It provides a well-deserved treat at the end of the day, when our lives are suddenly devoid of pleasures. And surely now is not the time to make our lives even harder by denying ourselves a drink?

I get it. But, now really is the very worst time to be drinking.

Firstly, alcohol increases anxiety. I know that seems counter-intuitive, but it really is true. Yes, initially it makes your shoulders relax and you can feel yourself unwinding. But, as the alcohol leaves your body, that anxiety returns magnified, often in the middle of the night.

Sleep is difficult enough at the moment, and alcohol makes it much worse. Booze might lull you off to sleep, but it'll wake you up at 3am and taunt you until your alarm goes off.

Keeping the ship afloat right now - trying to work from home while simultaneously home-schooling, providing endless meals, cleaning and doing all that worrying - is really, really hard, and so much harder if you throw a hangover into the mix. 

Also, drinking makes us short-tempered, and when you're stuck in a small space with your family, you do not want to add fuel to the fire of any simmering resentments.

Added to all of this, alcohol is a drug. The more you drink, the more your body and mind come to rely on it. And, like being on holiday but without any of the fun, a pandemic is a time when all the usual restrictions don't apply. You probably don't have an office to go to. You can start drinking earlier and earlier in the day and pour increasingly large measures - and you probably will. It's very, very easy to turn a moderate drinking habit into a serious problem.

There are some really, really good reasons to be sober right now.

Once you're past the first hard days of not drinking, being sober makes you so much calmer, stronger, and more able to cope. You probably have parents or children, or both, relying on you, and you really want to make sure that you're up to the challenge.

Also, alcohol messes with your immune system, and everything we know about this terrible virus tells us that the fitter and healthier you are, the more likely it is that you'll be able to shake it off relatively easily.

If you've been secretly worrying about your drinking habits for a while, this is actually a really good time to quit.

The hardest thing about the early days of going sober is other people. Dinners, drinks parties and holidays are tough to start with, so often the newly sober will self-isolate for a while, just like you're doing right now. You can easily empty your cupboards and fridge of alcohol and not go near the booze aisle when doing your weekly shop. It's probably empty in any case!

One of the things I'm most grateful for right now is being sober. 

If I were still drinking, I would be constantly anxious about where my next drink was coming from. Then I'd feel guilty about that anxiety, when there are so many more important things to worry about. I'd have emptied the cupboards of loo roll and pasta, and filled them with wine. I'd be (even more) bad tempered with the kids and the husband, and would be spending my evenings comatose and my mornings hungover.

Just writing that paragraph makes me feel queasy.

So, if you're thinking about quitting drinking, do it now. Then, when the world finally gets back to normal, you'll be in the very best shape to make the most of everything it has to offer. And if you're newly sober and struggling, don't make the mistake of thinking that alcohol would make it easier. it would only make everything so very much worse.

To read about my first year sober, and for hints and tips on how to do it and what to expect, read my memoir - The Sober Diaries.

For more information and inspiration, check out my SoberMummy Facebook Page. I'm doing a Facebook Live session on Thursday at 8.15pm UK time (after the clapping).

If you'd like to take your mind off everything and are looking for some feel-good fiction, my new novel - The Authenticity Project - is out now!

If you'd like to find out more about me, or to contact me privately, go to www.clarepooley.com

Love to you all. Stay safe and well.

Clare Pooley (aka SoberMummy)

What Happens When You Tell Your Truth?

Welcome to Mummy was a Secret Drinker. If you've found this page because you're looking for help quitting drinking then WELCOME!

All the information and support you need is in this blog. There are hundreds of posts, all free to read and share.  Click here for a good place to start! You can also find daily advice and inspiration on the SoberMummy Facebook page.

If you're looking for more information about me and what I've been up to recently, plus my recent blog posts, you can find me at www.clarepooley.com

I can't believe it's nearly five years since I started writing this blog, and two years since I published The Sober Diaries, the warts-and-all story of my first year without booze.

I'll never forget the long, dark nights before publication. I hardly slept. I was utterly terrified, not just about the book being out there, but about the fact that I was booked to appear on Woman's Hour, the Steve Wright show and Lorraine, and was going to be all over loads of publications, including the Daily Mail.

I hadn't been booked to discuss some impressive charity work, or business venture. I was expected to tell the whole world my darkest secrets, how I'd found myself drinking around ten bottles of wine a week, how I'd become a terrible mother, how I'd been anxious all the time, hugely overweight and unable to sleep. How I'd hated myself.

By December 28th 2017 I was convinced I'd made a terrible mistake. Was it too late to pull the plug? It was. The books had been printed, the advance paid, the PR lined up. I thought I was going to be horribly trolled, by people telling me (with some justification, I thought) that I was an unfit mother and a terrible human being.

You see, I'd spent YEARS covering up all my weaknesses, filling in the cracks, hiding my recycling bins, freshening my breath and curating my social media feeds. If you looked at my life from the outside it all looked pretty damn perfect.

But I gritted my teeth and did everything my publishers told me to do, then waited for the fall-out.

It never came. There were a few horrible comments in the Mail Online (my favourite was if I was her husband, I'd be drinking a bottle of wine a day!) but that was it. Instead what I got was a deluge of messages from people all over the world saying thank you for telling your story, because until now I thought I was the only one who felt like that...

What I discovered was that telling your real truth not only changes your life, but can transform the life of so many other people too, and create magical communities.

And that made me think. What would happen if we all told the truth about our lives? 

I started writing again, but this time a fictional story, about a little green notebook titled The Authenticity Project in which a terribly lonely widower and artist - Julian Jessop - tells his truth. He leaves the book in a cafe where it's picked up by the owner, Monica, who resolves to track him down and transform his life.

The book is passed between six people including Hazard, a cocaine and booze addict and Alice, a mummy instagrammer, who all write their stories in its pages, leading to a life-changing world of friendship and forgiveness.

I wasn't sure whether anyone would be interested in my novel which, like this blog, I wrote partly as a form of therapy, but - incredibly - it's being published in twenty-nine different languages in 2020.

If you'd like to read The Authenticity Project, it's out on February 4th in the USA in all formats (click here to pre-order), and in audio and e-book in the UK (click here to pre-order). The UK hardback is out on April 2nd, and other languages throughout the year.

A huge thank you to everyone who's followed my journey. I am so grateful to you all. And if you're new to this blog, then know you are not alone. Thousands of us have been where you are, and life is going to get so much better...

Love Clare x

Mother's Little Helper, or Mother's Ruin?

Did your family give you a present on Mother’s Day this year? Breakfast in bed maybe? Flowers? A home-made card?

In the days BS (Before Sober), my three children always knew what to give me as a present, because they knew what Mummy’s favourite hobby was: drinking wine. 

So, they’d buy me a corkscrew. A bottle stopper (ironic, since there was never anything left in a bottle of wine once I’d opened it). A giant wine glass with ‘Mummy’s glass’ etched onto it. You get the picture. 

            

This year, my kids gave me a frame, with a photo of me and the three of them inside it. This made me all tearful, as I realised that now my focus isn’t distracted by wine, it really is on them. Not entirely on them, obviously, but more so.

            

I might not have been given booze on Mother’s Day this year, but an awful lot of women in the UK were. 

Between 2016 and 2018, gin sales doubled to over £2 billion, and the sales peak – 2.6 million bottles – was in March, coinciding with Mother’s Day. 

In the weeks leading up to the big day, retailers bombarded us with alcohol based presents. I saw a bottle of wine branded ‘Mummy Fuel’, wine bangles (hollow bracelets filled with wine) and wine purses (handbags with a built-in wine pouch and a tap on the outside – yes, really).

How did we end up in a place where motherhood is synonymous with wine? Or gin? When did ‘mother’s ruin’ become ‘mother’s little helper’? Why did we all start buying into the myth that it’s impossible to be a mother without some form of anaesthetic?

I had my first child in the early days of this century – 2003. That was when the ‘mummy blogger’ first appeared, and back then mothering was all about perfection. We wanted to do it brilliantly. 

We read Gina Ford and The Baby Whisperer. We tried to bake perfect cupcakes and make home-made playdough. We bought organic vegetables and spent hours pureeing and freezing them into little ice-cubes. 

And we were knackered.  We felt like failures. Because motherhood is really hard, and perfection is unachievable. You just need to give it your best shot, and forgive yourself.

            

So, by the mid noughties, the backlash began. The perfect-mum-blogger was replaced by the slummy-mummy. 

We cheered! We threw Gina Ford in the bin and bought ready-made baby food from Ella’s Kitchen. We laughed about our failures on Mumsnet. And all of that was a really good thing, but along with it came wine-o’clock.

            

When we decided to shout about motherhood being difficult, we also started joking about how we managed to cope. And how we managed to cope was WINE. 

As social media took off, so did all the wine memes. Wine o’clock. Why Mummy drinks. Mummy juice. 

The retailers and marketing departments were really quick to jump on the bandwagon, and then start driving the train. We didn’t feel bad about pouring ourselves a large goblet of wine at the end of a long day, because it was ‘me-time’, we were worth it. And everyone else was doing it too.

The problem is that wine is a drug. 

That sentence looks really obvious to me now, but it wasn’t back then. How could something so beautifully packaged, so ubiquitous, joked about all over social media, be an actual drug? After all, you wouldn’t joke at the school gates about being desperate to get home for a line of cocaine, but everyone admitted looking forward to that first glass of wine.

But it is. A drug. And, like any other drug, your tolerance increases over time, so it no longer takes one glass of wine to help you unwind at the end of the day, it takes a whole damn bottle. And when you’re drinking several bottles of the stuff a week, it’s not just your shoulders unwinding, it’s your whole life.

I honestly bought into the myth that wine helped. I thought it made me more relaxed. When I’d had a day filled with nappies and wipes and Monkey Music, a glass of wine made me feel adult again. I thought it made me more tolerant with my kids.

The scary thing is, alcohol does exactly the opposite. 

            

Alcohol made me anxious all the time. It made me rush through bedtime stories so I could get to the fridge. It made me short tempered and grumpy with my kids. And it made me a terrible role model. I was teaching my children that grown-ups need a drug in order to be able to cope with everyday life. To be able to cope with them. 

            

So, this Mother’s Day, I looked at that photo of me with the three of them, looking relaxed, happy, present, not wishing the time away until it was wine o’clock, and I realised that sobriety is the best gift ever, for you and your children.

To read about my first year sober, and for lots of hints and tips, check out The Sober Diaries. You can find it here (UK) or here (USA).

(I wrote this article for Catherine Gray's Sober Spring campaign, in conjunction with Alcohol Change).

Love to you all,

SM x