Alcohol – You Tricky Minx

Mental Wellness, Physical Wellness

I have been procrastinating on writing this post because I have a very long history with alcohol and I am not even sure where to start…so I guess I will start at the beginning!

I come from a HUGE German-Catholic family and to those of you who aren’t familiar, that means we love our booze 🍻 My grandmother gave me my first sip of beer (most likely a Busch Light) when I was about 8 years old…and I liked it. Fast forward a few years to when I was in 7th grade and my neighbor and I had a sleepover in my backyard and snuck in beer from her dad’s garage fridge (also Busch Light) and drank until we were drunk. A few months later that same neighbor and I were drinking peach schnapps and OJ and she drank to the point where she had to go to the hospital and get her stomach pumped and we were both suspended for a few games from our middle school volleyball team.

You would think that this would scare me off from alcohol and send a glaring signal to my brain that alcohol is dangerous and force me to stop, but it didn’t.

In high school, you could find me sneaking bottles of Boone’s Farm under my car seats or drinking my friends’ parents’ vodka and replacing it with water. I grew up in a very small town and it was common to have cornfield parties filled with red solo cups full of booze and a house where we could spend the night. At one point in high school I took 7 shots of tequila just to say that I could and spent the next day throwing my guts up.

Fast forward to college and the drinking got even easier because I didn’t have to hide it. From house parties to using a fake ID to get into the college bars, my weekends were filled with binge drinking, many times waking up not having a fucking clue what happened the night before. For our senior bar crawl, my shirt was self-inscribed with “My name is Audra and I’m an alcoholic.” But…through all of this, I was getting good grades, making it to class (some of the time), and holding down a part-time job with a full college course load, so life was GOOD!

I would like to say that my drinking slowed down after college, but it probably escalated! I am an equal opportunity drinker, so I love wine, beer, bourbon, and just about anything in between – and just like when I was 8 years old, I also like the taste of it. As a young professional, you could find me at any happy hour that my company hosted, binge drinking with my friends on the weekends, and waking up on Monday morning feeling like shit just to recuperate for a bit before starting the whole cycle over.

I met my now husband in 2018 and we immediately bonded over alcohol. He is a beer aficionado, had an entire home brew system set up, and could tell me the difference between a West or East Coast IPA, and I was very attracted to this! Our dates involved sporting events filled with beer and bourbon, dinners with 2 bottles of wine, and countless festivals that were entirely alcohol-themed. Fast forward to 2020 and we found out that I was pregnant a few weeks before our October wedding and I was pissed that I wouldn’t be able to drink at my wedding (looking back now, that makes me so sad). I did not drink a drop the entire 9 months of my pregnancy and I talked about missing alcohol A LOT. I bought every brand of NA beer and wine and guzzled them down. When I had Millie (my perfect little miracle) one of my FIRST thoughts was “When can I have a Guinness?” I had a very difficult time with breastfeeding and I could not produce enough to keep up with Millie’s schedule and even then, I “pumped and dumped” that precious supply on several occasions.