I’m seven years sober, but I know with just one drink I’d lose everything

At approximately 10.30 on Monday morning, it will be seven years since I last had an alcoholic drink.

Seven years since that grotesquely warm beer, drunk out of a can, at the house of a person I barely knew.

Seven years since I came home drunk when I should have been getting ready to drive with my husband and four-year-old daughter to spend a wholesome bank holiday weekend with the in-laws in Wiltshire.

Seven years since I sat on the edge of my bed, mascara crusted in my eyes, trying to block out the bright light outside and the dawning realisation that I was blowing up my life with booze.

Seven years since I allowed myself to acknowledge an awful truth: that if I didn’t give up alcohol, I was going to die. I was going to die by choking on my vomit. or I was going to die by choosing to take my own life (at this point, thoughts of suicide were, I am afraid to say, more frequent than thoughts of brushing my teeth).

Or worst of all, I was going to die by continuing to live in this Groundhog Day existence, abandoning all of my responsibilities as a mother so I could worship at the altar of alcohol.

That moment in 2017 wasn’t the first time I had decided to give it up. I had been promising to do it since my first drink at 14 – a bottle of vodka drunk with a friend in a park and then vomited up by the temperance fountain, of all places.

“I’m never doing that again,” I told myself the next day.

But the following weekend I was back on the grog and so began a pattern that would last almost 25 years.

For a long time, I could tell myself I was just a party girl.

When I met my husband at 31 and quickly found myself pregnant, it didn’t even occur to me that my drinking would continue in the way it had during my teens and twenties.

I assumed motherhood would do for me what rehab does for everyone else: I would give birth, and then occasionally enjoy a glass of red wine with my dinner.

It was a shock, then, when two weeks after my daughter was born, I left her at home with my mum and went to the pub where I got blackout drunk.

The next day, I sat on the sofa nursing a hangover, as opposed to my baby, shamefully Googling how long it took alcohol to leave your breast milk. I looked at my beautiful daughter and realised I was a monster.

I buried this truth deep down under layers of justification for my behaviour: A drink after she went to bed made me a more relaxed mother, I told myself.

By the time she was four, I was like a duck, paddling frantically under the water to stay afloat: on the face of it a successful 37-year-old woman, in reality, an alcoholic leading a double life.

I don’t know why the resolve not to drink stuck that bank holiday seven years ago – perhaps because I had surrendered to the fact that, where alcohol was concerned, I had no resolve.

What I do know is that I am incredibly lucky: Lucky to be alive, lucky to have friends and a 12-step programme that allowed me to cobble together 2,555 days of getting my head on the pillow without picking up a drink.

Today, I barely think about alcohol. My daughter has no memory of me inebriated, and I have friends who know me as ‘Boring Bryony’, the one who never goes out in the evening.

It’s all a far cry from the woman I was seven years ago: Broken, ashamed, unable to imagine a life without a drink. Now, I find it almost inconceivable to imagine a life with it. So abstinent is my life, that ‘normies’ – that’s people who can drink normally – often think I must be cured.

“Surely you must be able to have the odd drink by now?” they say, genuinely baffled when I tell them I haven’t touched a drop since August of 2017.

But while it may be seven years since I last had booze, I remind myself every day that I am still a raging alcoholic. If I had one glass of wine now, I would be off to the races again, as if the last seven years had never happened.

It is genuinely easier for me to have none than one.

I don’t take my sobriety for granted, and every day I do a bit of ‘work’ to keep my recovery going. When I inevitably find myself complaining about this – I’m an alcoholic, after all – I remind myself that seven years ago, I would have walked through fire to get to a drink, so attending a 12-step meeting, or doing some meditation for 20 minutes, is hardly asking much of me.

Being sober is hard, but it’s not as hard as the alternative, which is losing everything because of booze. Plus, if I give an hour to my sobriety, it gives me 23 hours back.

It is only by remembering every day that I am an alcoholic that I get to be all the other things: A mother, a wife, a functioning human with a job.

It’s for this reason that I celebrate my sobriety birthday.

And like all proper sobriety queens, I’d like to use this anniversary to send a message to anyone in a similar position to the one I was in 2,555 days ago.

To let you know all is not lost and every morning presents a fresh opportunity for change.