Exploring alcohol

Alcohol... that life, believe it or not, I was only nine when I decided to explore my sister’s alcohol cupboard. We weren’t just sipping the wine. We were having competitions to skull the wine.

To be fair I don’t know why I felt the need to want to explore alcohol at that age. I had a beautiful young childhood before. My parents separated at age 10. I was just a tutu and curious. However, in saying that... and a lot of reflection through my life; I had been exposed to alcohol and parties almost every weekend.

My parents weren’t big drinkers. It was just the environment around me, and potentially because there was that massive gap between my oldest siblings and myself. They were young teenagers, I was still a young toddler, so potentially always watching them unconsciously drinking and playing pool, and having swims and mates over, and barbeques.

I lost my whole foundation. And then I moved from Whangarei, which I knew only people there. I had a massive social scene there. I was doing sports, netball, tennis, athletics, touch. We had something on every night, and I left that, everything behind, to go and support mum through the divorce in Tauranga.

So, whilst mum was going through a 22-year-old divorce, and I’m ten years old trying to hold her up through that she became an alcoholic, and she almost died. She almost killed herself in a car accident. Now, again, mum wasn’t a big drinker, but that was her way of dealing with it. I got a call one night that she was in hospital, and her car had been written off.