Well,just that. I rang up my local AA today and found out there was a women's meeting with creche facilities that I could go to on Friday night (and bring my 3 y/o). Felt quite alright until about half an hour ago. I was on my way home from the shops, driving, and thought, oh crap, just think of all the awful things that I might have to deal with tonight (mainly I was thinking about my ex ringing me up and guilt-tripping me about not wanting to go back to him. I tentatively said I would have dinner with him tonight - unwillingly, and then called this morning and left a message to say I would not be making it). I was visualising myself having to deal with ex with no booze at all in the house, and felt like I couldn't handle it. So I stopped by the bottle shop and bought some wine and a pack of cigs (I only want smoke when I drink: it's a weird thing for me, if I gave up smoking, I think I wouldn't want to drink either, or at least not nearly as much).

Odd thing is that urge to drink has abruptly gone. But there sits that cask in the damn fridge. And I don't want to tip it out (I tipped out about half a cask last night) because even though my urge has gone for now, I know it will return and then I'll just be back at the shop buying another cask...and I can't afford it. Tipping booze down the sink doesn't really work (as my mother has often told me: her mother, my nana, was forever tipping out my alcoholic grandfather's port. then because that was too expensive, she took to burying the bottles of port in the back garden. where he couldn't find them...or at least, where he had to spend hours digging around looking for them!).

I feel like I'm neglecting my daughter even by WANTING to drink, since the desire to drink (although as of yet I have not had a drink) has made me feel like I have to get on the net and confess to everybody here....so poor H (my daughter) is yet again on her own watching TV. Still, it beats her watching TV by herself while I sit out on the balcony drinking and smoking, which is a common evening scenario, and which I was sure I would be doing by now when I bought the wine.   

Even so, I am thinking udnerneath all this 'roll on five o'clock' (five o'clock is my little 'moral' gesture: I never have anything to drink before five while in charge of daughter. Of course, when she goes to stay with her father, I'm usually immediately drinking as soon as I've dropped her off, or certainly within an hour or two of dropping her off. Sometimes I make a pretense of doing some work on this bloody stupid Shakespeare course I'm meant to be writing. But the whole time I'm thinking of that first sip, that first drag on the cig...)

To make matters worse....(sorry if this is not really relevant, but at least it is helping me to put off having a drink)....I seem to be in love again with my ex-boyfriend from years ago. I have known this guy for 13 years, and we have had a very tumultuous on/off (what Toni would term 'melodramatic!') relationship. I didn't see him at all for about four years, and then one afternoon (a classic scenario, this) I bumped into him at the shops. This was about six months after I had left my husband. M (My ex boyfriend) was absolutely gobsmacked that I had had a child (I had my daughter with me at the time)....the last time he had seen me, I had been pretty much a full on waster, heavily into alcohol and chaos in general....the world's least likely mother. He himself is not addicted to anything I know of, except for perhaps sex, since one of the reasons our relationship was so 'tumultuous' was that he was completely incapable of monogamy, even for a week, and would lie his stupid head off about all the various other women he was always seeing at the same time as me.

This post is now definitely becoming a 'delay the drink' strategy.

I might go and make another cup of tea.

(after tea has been made)

Anyway, M got my phone number and called me and it wasn't long before we got involved again. All of this provoked intense rage from my ex-husband, to whom I admitted the relationship. Ex husband phoned M, threatened him, etc. All great melodramatic stuff, and me sitting on the balcony drinking my wine and smoking my smokes the whole time, privately thinking myself an intensely interesting person, to be able to inspire such a fracas (men fighting over me and so forth).  Ridiculous.  

Since then I have lied my pants off (if you will pardon the pun!) to my ex-husband about M, but continued to see M. And until recently I felt quite detached from M: sort of like 'I don't really give a crap one way or another'. M was calling me lots, coming around a lot with gifts etc, sometimes even money (which I did not say 'no' to, since - not least because of my drinking/dsmoking habit - my daughter and I are perpetually indigent). But now, all of a sudden, I feel this intense desire for him and like I MUST see him, and I am terrified that I will get that old broken-hearted feeling again, only worse, because I am older now and not so confident. And of course, as if HE HAS READ MY MIND (since I have not admitted to M that I am becoming more and more dependent upon him), M is now NOT calling so frequently, and I don't even know when I'll see him next or anything, and don't want to phone him because then I will come over as 'needy'.

And in the midst of all this crap (because even though I am very wrapped up in all of this on one level, on another I know that all this melodrama is, indeed, crap) my poor little girl is watching altogether too much TV, I'm getting snappy with her, feeding her junk food...I love her more than I can describe, but it is SO DAMN HARD being a single mum of one child. It's even occured to me that (after the first couple of years) it would be easier with two kids. At least they could play with eachother. As it stands, my daughter needs my attention pretty much all day every day, and I just get really tired and desperate for time alone sometimes.

I've even wished that I'd get pregnant again simply because it would FORCE me to stop doing all this crappy stuff (the boozing, the smoking, the pills). I had no issues with not drinking while pregnant and breastfeeding, because I did not feel like the 'old me': I felt like a mother, fullstop. Not that I no longer feel like a mother, but certainly I'm freer to indulge myself than I was two years ago.

Anyway, I think I've written mself dry, so to speak. At least I have not picked up the glass, as they say. I'm sort of dreading that meeting on Friday night. I KNOW I will feel resentment. I KNOW I will be thinking oh yes, here we go again, slogans etc...

Or maybe I won't. There doesn't seem to be any other choice right now. I can't even go one day without a drink. I'm even wondering if I might have slight withdrawals, since I have been pretty much drinking at least 3 drinks a day, every day, for six months now. Most days I probably drink a bottle, to be honest. And don't even feel that drunk. Which brings me to another issue....my damned body. I rarely get hangovers. I practically never vomit. Usually if I have drunk heavily the night before, I wake up really early, feeling slightly queasy and anxious, and thinking: ugh, DEFINITELY no booze today. But by two o'clock or so in the afternoon that feeling tends to have worn off and I'm back in my old pattern of 'roll on five o'clock'!

Anyway. No drink so far. That's something. Like I said, I was sure I'd be out on that damend balcony smoking and drinking by now, so this email has bought me at least a few more minutes....