Hi there
I’m pleased to say I’m heading off for a bit of a rest and reset this weekend. When you read this I will be in Paris with my husband and eldest daughter. She’s living out there for a year, being chic and learning the lingo, so we’re going out to (belatedly) celebrate her 22nd birthday.
I’m planning big walks, big sleeps and big eats! I can’t quite believe I have such a grown-up child… it seems like mere seconds since she was the size of a litre bottle of water and we’d just brought her home from hospital. As they say in France – plus ça change….
Alcohol: It’s different for girls (and women)
Mothers and daughters, it’s a bit of a theme of this week. On Wednesday I hosted the November NOON Book Club, with Arabella Byrne and her Queenager mum Julia Hamilton, talking about their new tome In the Blood: On mothers, daughters and addiction. (Did you miss the event? Catch up with the video!)
It is a truly extraordinary book, all about how they BOTH ended up at Alcoholics Anonymous in the same year – Arabella was 29, Julia 53. That is quite some Queenager pivot, to finally get sober in your 50s after a lifetime of drinking.
Julia spoke about the “omerta” in families around drinking, particularly by women. She was determined to write about the shame, how the next drink trumps everything, even a child’s needs – the bottle of gin stashed by the washing machine, the glass of wine disguised in a plastic bottle next to her computer as she wrote, the never-ending hangovers, the self-hatred and struggle every day to resist the compulsion to drink.
“I now know this is an illness,” Julia told us. But for a long time she said her need to drink “was so central to my being, to my sense of who I was as a writer, a woman” that she thought if she stopped, there would be nothing left.
In the book she writes: “I was trapped between two crazy women, my mother and my stepmother, alcohol started to creep into this painful void.” We discussed how her unmet emotional needs – the huge pain of her own mother’s absent mothering and the “emotional pack ice” which grew between them meant nothing could be addressed. It led her to seek solace and comfort in alcohol – a false friend as it turned out.
A glamorous upbringing, soaked in alcohol
That’s true even when the drink arrives in a glamorous cut-class tumbler at 11am – Julia comes from a line of increasingly impoverished aristocrats whom she describes using drink to deal both with their uncomfortable social descent and the PTSD of war-time trauma. This was very much recognised within the NOON group who also talked about military – particularly naval – families where ‘not drinking was seen as very dull’ – and large quantities of alcohol on a daily basis were normalised.
Of course, Julia’s struggles with drinking – she comes from a long line of alcoholics, her grandfather died of cirrhosis, and Annabelle’s father was also an alcoholic – were a difficult legacy for her own daughter.
Annabelle, now 41, talked movingly about how she started to drink as a teenager. It wasn’t just for larks, like her friends, “I was disturbingly good at it, I could drink a lot, like I had been in training all my life.” The book details her blackouts, ending up in strange beds not knowing how she got there, bingeing. “From very early on drinking wasn’t associated with fun for me but oblivion and deep sadness.”
A terrifying scene one night
Her mother’s difficult legacy is clear. In one particularly harrowing episode, Annabelle describes coming down to the kitchen in the middle of the night, aged about 5, to discover her mother – Julia – standing by the sink with a knife to her wrist.
“Mum didn’t kill herself that night, and I went back to bed,” she says.
But the chaos of her home went deep. Arabella writes: “I carried around a grief that bled messily into other parts of my life at unexpected moments: overwhelming fear in the middle of a job interview, anger at friends.” She talks of the shame of being the child of alcoholics (she now campaigns tirelessly as an Ambassador for the National Association of Children of Alcoholics) of “not feeling held, or safe, of always being lost, late, uncollected” – of hanging around in pubs with her father as a small child, waking up in strange houses with him where he was drinking.
Nonetheless, Arabella was a high-achieving student who did a post-graduate degree in America for 5 years. She was also hospitalised with depression as a young woman, and her drinking was becoming increasingly problematic.
How they got to AA
It was her mother Julia’s decision to go to AA which prompted her to join – her mum had left pamphlets around the house. One morning after a particularly intense 2-day binge, Arabella went down to the kitchen and told her mother: “I am an alcoholic, too” and went to AA. There is a wonderful scene where Arabella is telling her story at an Oxford AA meeting which Julia is chairing…. Ouch!
I was so impressed by these two remarkable strong women. By how both of them had been healed of their family trauma and their alcohol addiction by daily attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous. Arabella writes “AA made me feel I belonged in a way that nothing else felt close to, I felt understood, held, heard, safe for the first time in my life.”
Julia also talks about the healing and structure she found at AA. Hearing them talk about the deep sharing and support they found in the AA Circles reminded me of what we see in the NOON Circle. The power and the healing in hearing the stories of others, in sharing those parts of our lives where we feel most vulnerable, most shame, the biggest sense of lack. Of how by talking about the raw bits of us, the parts where we usually choose not to go, digging into the pain that becomes a portal for the realisations we need to shift our patterns, change our lives and make us whole again.
This mother and daughter have done something incredible – they have managed to be completely honest with each other about the harm they have inflicted on themselves and each other and the family trauma each inherited.
They have written agonisingly honestly about their personal shortcomings and their failures to each other – and their different perspectives. But they have managed to come through all this pain and recrimination as a loving mother/daughter unit. Their love and joy in each other manifests completely.
There is a clear-eyed view of the issues and their trespasses against each other – but also a deep love that has surmounted everything. They have forgiven each other … and themselves.
The joyous lessons we can learn from these women
There are lessons here for all of us.
Most of us have not gone through anything so extreme, but many of us will be able to relate to these tales of a complicated maternal line, of an inheritance of inter-generational trauma and patterns of behaviour which are hard to discuss and hard to break.
What this book does beautifully is to show how when we take responsibility for our own behaviour and greet those who have hurt us – or that we have hurt – with love.
Healing and joy are possible even in true darkness.
What have you inherited?
At these Queenager years, one of the big reckonings we have is with everything we have inherited – all those assumptions, expectations, the boxes we’ve been ticking all our lives, the tricky inheritances of our mothers.
Queenagers are a pivot generation – our mothers lived in a world with less choices, no matter how hard they struggled or how feminist they were.
We often struggle with the legacy our mothers give us. But learning to forgive our mothers – and ourselves – is one of the big tasks of this time of life. This book really points the way.
So if you missed the Book Club for In the Blood, I highly recommend you watch it online.
The NOON Shop is HERE!
Wondering how to treat yourself or the Queenager in your life? We have brand new Queenager & NOON merchandise: Your favourite slogans, totes and t-shirts.
