Victoria Vanstone could hear her baby crying in the next room, but she couldn’t bring herself to get out of bed.
Sunshine was streaming through the curtains, but all she wanted was to lie in the darkness.
Her head was pounding, her mouth was dry, and as waves of nausea overwhelmed her, she knew even sitting up would be enough to make her vomit.
‘My husband would have to look after the baby on mornings like that, usually Sundays,’ she tells me.
‘Feeling overwhelmed with guilt and shame, I would often choose to stay in bed, particularly when I could hear my husband leaving with our son for the day,’ she confessed.
For a long time, being a party girl was Victoria’s entire identity.
‘From downing cheap wine in the local park to stealing gin from my nan’s cupboard, it felt like part of my personality from a young age,’ she says.
‘On my first day of university, I bought a slab of beers and hung a “free beer here” sign on my dorm room door. It was how I made friends.’
Victoria carried the belief for years that her entire identity revolved around being a ‘party girl’, feeling obligated to always be the ‘fun one’ during social outings. However, after achieving seven years of sobriety, she has come to realize the fallacy of this perception.
Throughout a ten-year period, Victoria led a carefree life with no sense of responsibility, shielded from the repercussions of her excessive alcohol consumption. The entry into motherhood marked a turning point, bringing with it a gradual realization of the need for change, albeit not occurring instantaneously.
Growing up in the UK in the 1980s, Victoria’s parents were big drinkers (‘party animals,’ she says), as were her three older siblings.
‘It was always celebratory,’ she adds.
‘Drinking was never done alone in my house, it was never about commiseration or filling some void. It was always a party – one I desperately wanted to join.’
And so she did.
From standard teenage binge drinking and boozing in university bars, Victoria went on to travel the world which was ‘a never-ending party’.
‘I could crack a beer with a different nomad every day of the week,’ she says – and she never stayed anywhere long enough to develop a reputation as a ‘problem drinker’.
By then, Victoria had started to see it as her responsibility to make sure everyone had a good night.
‘I’d walk into a party and I just feel like needed to be the “fun one” so I’d start downing shots,’ she says.
Victoria didn’t see her drinking as a problem and drunken mishaps always became funny stories to tell down the pub. (Pictured: Victoria passed out after a night of heavy drinking)
‘It was what people had come to expect from me and I felt this weird pressure to live up to that image.’
Back then, her heavy drinking had few consequences.
Hangovers were minimal – and often staved off with a ‘hair of the dog’ beer or Bloody Mary. She only worked casual jobs as she saved up for the next plane ticket; she didn’t have her own house or any kids.
‘For a decade I basically had no responsibilities whatsoever,’ she says.
Even the occasional serious consequence was quickly spun into a funny yarn to tell down the pub.
On the eve of the millennium, Victoria was at a Full Moon Party in Thailand. After downing drinks all day, she tried to light a firework.
‘I ended up blowing one of my fingers off,’ she says.
‘But I honestly just thought it was funny and dubbed my new stump my “millennium finger”.’
After arriving in Sydney at the age of 33, Victoria met her now husband. They were engaged within six months and by the time they got married, Victoria was three months pregnant with their first child.
‘My wedding day was my first ever sober social event,’ she says.
While pregnant, Victoria says she made a vow to remain “fun”.
‘I kept saying, when I become a mum, I’m still going to be “me”. And I realise now what I meant by that was, I’m still going to get drunk and have a laugh,’ she tells me.
When she fell pregnant with her first child, Victoria said she was concerned about remaining ‘fun’ once she was a mum
Like most new mums, Victoria found parenting overwhelming. ‘I’d gone from being the party girl to have these long, mundane days of baby sick and washing.’
But Victoria quickly made friends at her new mothers’ group and found she wasn’t alone in wanting an escape from the monotony.
‘Every couple of weekends, the mum group would go out for drinks, and I’d get wasted,’ she says.
‘The other mums were drinking too, but I’d find I was back at the bar for the next round before anyone else had even finished their first glass.
‘I was a fast drinker; I was literally nicknamed “the gulper”. I’d always be the last one to leave, and I’d always be the one suffering the most the next morning.’
By then, Victoria’s hangovers were riddled with anxiety, guilt and shame – and she’d often spend the day running back and forth to the bathroom to be sick.
‘But because I didn’t drink during the week, didn’t drink alone, didn’t drink before 6pm, I managed to convince myself I didn’t have a problem.
‘During the week, I was the perfect mum. I’d make the right snacks and play in the ball pit. From the outside, I was doing a really good job.’
But because Victoria’s drinking was now less frequent, it just meant she ‘went harder’ when she did get to go on a night out.
‘When the night out rolled around, I was ready to get wasted,’ she admits.
Victoria says alcoholism is a broad spectrum and often those that fall somewhere in the middle – what she calls ‘grey area drinker’ – don’t see themselves as worthy of help
After one particularly boozy night out, Victoria vomited in a taxi on the way home. When she got into the house, she asked her husband to give her the baby.
Obviously, she was in no fit state to care for a baby or to breastfeed.
‘I was covered in sick and he ended up asking me to get into the bathtub so he could hose me off,’ she says.
‘It was humiliating. The next morning was the first time I ever properly questioned my drinking.’
But it would be four more years before Victoria confronted her problem drinking head-on.
‘I’d just had my second baby and I was out in the pub,’ she says.
‘I got talking to the barman and said, “Oh, I’ve got a six-week-old at home.” I thought he’d think that was pretty funny but he just looked at me and said, “What are you doing here?”‘
It was the wake-up call Victoria needed. That Sunday morning, she walked into the loungeroom and said to her husband: ‘I can’t do this anymore. I think I’ve got a problem with drinking and I need help.’
The next day, she booked in for her first therapy session. ‘It was hard to admit I had a problem. I wasn’t your typical alcoholic, drinking in the morning or drinking alone.’
But as Victoria worked through therapy and learned she’d been drowning her insecurities with alcohol and hiding her true self behind the bottle, she realised there was no way she was alone in being what she terms a ‘grey area drinker’.
‘There is such a vast spectrum of alcoholism and so many of us are smack bang in the middle of it, not feeling great, but not feeling like it’s a big enough problem to stop.’
Victoria was surprised to learn she could have fun and socialise without a drink.
‘Life is so much better, I don’t have blame and shame about my drinking anymore,’ she says.
‘I feel like I got off the party bus just before it crashed.’
Victoria is exactly seven years sober on the day she speaks to me – and now her sole aim is to help others.
‘Everyone is deserving of feeling better and I want people who think they can’t stop drinking that this is an option for them,’ she says.
Victoria encourages anyone who is ‘sober curious’ to read her book A Thousand Wasted Sundays and listen to her award-winning podcast Sober Awkward.
