Self Improvement Articles - Do We Drink too Much?


by SANDRA PRIOR - Date: 2010-08-13 - Word Count: 621 Share This!

Could you live without those two glasses of wine a day? Should you have to? It's time for women to face up to some tough questions about how much - and why - we drink.

When Candice, a working mother of three girls, sits down and works out the weekly budget with her husband at night, it will probably be with a glass of wine close by.

'With today's stresses, when one little thing goes wrong, we hop in the car and take a trip to the bottle store for something to ease the stress,' she says. Though she's been stricter with herself lately, often that glass becomes two or three. ‘I've had months where I drink every day and then get pretty drunk at least one night on the weekend.'

Eleven months ago Stella Martin was in the throes of a complicated long-distance relationship. Professionally successful and gregarious, she couldn't bear the pressure of keeping up a happy face when she ached with loneliness. Each night she'd stop at the shop to pick up supper and a bottle of wine. 'When I got home, I'd lock the door to close out the world,' she says. Stella is sitting by a roaring fire as we talk, the shelves behind her are stacked to the ceiling with books. 'Then I'd pour the wine and let it take my worries away.' Alcohol was her most reliable companion. 'It always did the same thing,' she says, 'without fail.'

At about the same time every evening, but over 1000km away, work-from-home mother Carmen would start preparing dinner. 'At 5.30pm I would start cooking and have a bottle of wine,' she says. 'By 7.15 I would have finished the bottle.' Carmen, a health professional married young because she was pregnant. She gave up her job after her husband insisted she help him run his businesses from their home. 'There was never a shortage of money to buy alcohol,' she says. 'It was always around. My kitchen was always full of wine racks.' Working for her husband meant she adopted his routine, which included drinking. ‘I was slowly losing myself; I was in my husband's shadow and during the day I was busy fetching and carrying kids.'

Chances are we all recognize aspects of ourselves in these three women. It's seen as entirely normal to have two drinks, even three, after a stressful day at work. As long as we can hold down a job and be a decent parent, we're doing okay, surely?

We're not hurting anyone - is it really a problem? We're expected to be social, outgoing, funny, strong, people. Sometimes we use alcohol to get us there, sometimes we use it as a reward, and sometimes we just want to have fun. But there's always the risk, like an old yogi once said, that we're no longer drinking alcohol; it is drinking us.

For Carmen, alcohol took over her emotions until she no longer knew what she felt. 'It allowed me to drown my emotions until everything was fine on the outside but inside I was the loneliest woman in the world,' she says. 'It changes my character,' says Candice. 'I don't care about the consequences of my actions when I drink.' ‘My whole character revolved around alcohol,' says Stella. 'It took the edge off a world I couldn't cope with. It allowed me to put on a mask, throw parties, have lots of friends - even think that I could fix people who were broken, when I was the one who needed to be fixed. It became an intimate relationship of trust; it did what I wanted it to: It filled the hole in my soul.'

Sandra Prior runs her own bodybuilding website at http://bodybuild.rr.nu.


Related Tags: women, glass, alcohol, wine, drink, drunk, bottle store

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