Just A Few Drinks

'Hi, Sobriety: Our Changing Relationship with Alcohol' was the title of a feature article in the Good Weekend liftout in The Age newspaper here on the weekend.

The article included personal stories of "grey-area drinkers", people who aren't fully fledged alcoholics rather they're drinkers who don't like their relationship with booze and what it's doing to their body, mind and lives.

I've never been a heavy drinker but genetically speaking I probably should be.

I grew up in a family who like a wine or beer or 10, so drinking daily and drinking heavily on the weekend was a normal way to live.

I've worked in the hospitality industry on and off for over twenty years and woven into that a decade in food media. There's plenty to drink in those worlds and the lines between healthy and problematic drinking are very blurry.

It was great to see the article in The Age raising the profile of this all too common problem, a problem that I think is the elephant in Australia's living room.

The expectation to drink in Australia feels so embedded that to not drink is viewed by some as downright unAustralian. According to the article that tide of expectation is turning and sobriety is becoming the new black but in my immediate world there is still plenty of evidence of booze causing problems in people's lives.

I'm in my mid forties, with a number of women friends for whom wine has become something they wish they could moderate or give up but on which they rely to 'de-stress' only to find it ends in a hangover, anxiety and sometimes a drunken argument thrown in.

And what scares me is I know first hand from witnessing friends and family battle the harder realities of problem drinking - the accidents, the rock-bottom, rehab, recovery and sadly people dying - that these things can and do happen all too easily.

If you're concerned - even in the slightest - about your relationship with alcohol don't ignore that quiet niggling feeling or that loud voice that yells inside your head and heart.

Listen to your thoughts and feelings, write them down, talk to a friend, talk to a counsellor,
your GP, or check out online resources such as Hello Sunday Morning that features a tailored program to support people to change their relationship with alcohol.

And if you're watching someone you love battle with booze, it's a big step to talk to them about it but for some it can be a turning point. For others your words of concern will fall on deaf ears and that's hard but if you don't try you'll never know and you don't want to be left wishing you'd said something. Believe me.

If you are going to say something, choose your moment well. Choose a time free of interruption and a time when your loved one is sober. Also choose your words well. This conversation is not about shaming or blaming, the person you love will be doing a very good job internally of that. The words can go along the lines of this, "I've been wanting to talk to you about something, it might be a hard thing to talk about but I'm concerned about you and just want to check in and see if you're ok. I'm concerned about the amount you're drinking, how are you feeling about it?"

The aim of the conversation is to show you care and to provide an opportunity for an open, honest discussion. Your friend or family may not be at all ready or interested in having the conversation and there are risks involved - your friend or family member may become angry and not want to talk to you for a while - but talking is the place to start moving us towards an Australia where drinking isn't expected, where we rethink our collective attitude to alcohol. And where people are actually happier and healthier for it.

*disclaimer I'm not an expert in counselling and every situation will be different if you are concerned about your own drinking habits or that of a loved one seek professional advice, if you have a good local doctor they can be a good starting point. And if they're not, don't give up, keep trying until you find someone you like who is helpful.

seventeen: an anniversary

I think it is only fair to warn you, this is potentially a need-some-tissues kind of a post. I'll thank you in advance for reading this part of my family story that I felt like telling.

I was washing the dishes last Friday afternoon, staring at the suds when the date popped into my head - the 15th, the 15th of November. "Dale's anniversary" I thought.

Some years I remember, some years I don't. My next thought leapt to his best friend who lives a suburb away from me, whose children go to the same school as my River and who ironically named his first born River too; I wondered if he was remembering Dale on this day.

Dale was my only sibling, my brother who died too young and suddenly seventeen years ago. I write this not with sadness but with pure love and fondness as I feel the bond we shared and in a different form continue to share. For that is how much I have grown in my grief, how far I have come emotionally, spiritually, philosophically since that initial heart wrenching moment when the words landed in my ears that he had died.

It is a fairly unbelievable tale, but they do say life is stranger than fiction. As long time readers here know, my mum died of a sudden heart attack also seventeen years ago when my brother was 19 and I was 21. We were shocked and thrown off course by our mother's death and sadly grief consumed my brother.

It is actually impossible to explain the feelings that accompany grief. Shock, sadness, missing, longing, anger, fear, relief, confusion, nausea...they are just words. No two people grieve in the same way, even when they share a common loss as Dale and I did with our mother, the way each person grieves is as unique as their fingerprint.

Dale plummeted into 'drinking with mates' 'cause that's what blokes do, right? Where I think we're going wrong with perpetuating the Aussie drinking culture that damages and kills so many Australians each year is a whole other post and whole lot heavier than I wanted to get today but sadly for my brother and our family it was his binge drinking that killed him.

On a Friday night he was drowning his considerable sorrows at a local pub, his best friend was there and did the right thing "You've had enough, I'm driving you home", they left the pub together at 7pm. My brother asked to be dropped off not far from his house so he could buy some take away food, Dale got out at the shop and said he'd walk the rest of the way home. His friend drove off thinking he'd done the right thing.

Instead of walking home, Dale walked back to the pub and continued drinking with some other friends. they left the pub around 11pm and parted ways. Before I explain what happened, let's remember that his best friend felt Dale had drunk enough at 7pm add four more hours of drinking and you get an idea of how intoxicated my brother was by the time he attempted to walk home.

Outside the pub was a six lane highway that my brother attempted to cross in his extremely drunken state. At 11.10pm on November 15th 1996 Dale was hit by a car and died at the scene of the accident, five months to the day since our mother had died.

I thought I would never recover. I thought sometimes if I didn't force myself to stop crying that the emotion would just swallow me up and I would never be able to claw my way back...back to what?

When someone close to you dies and you are in the depths of grief you keep waiting for life to 'go back to normal', in fact it is a bit similar to when you have a baby and you land on planet newborn the depths of emotion you didn't know you had in you, crack you open and you wait and wonder 'When will life go back to normal?' Well, as anyone who has grieved or had a newborn knows this is the new normal there's no going back.

My mother's and brother's lives and deaths have shaped who I am today. I have many blessings from having known and loved them, and from losing them too. I did recover. I did more than recover, I grew. And I haven't stopped.

Blessings to each of you who are grieving or remembering their loved ones xxx