Your first sober vacation is a big milestone. You might be wondering: can a vacation be fun without alcohol? I’m here to assure you that the answer is yes! Honestly, vacations can be even more enjoyable when you leave alcohol out of the equation.
If you’re gearing up for your first sober vacation, I’m here to help. Today I’m sharing steps to help you discover what a vacation without alcohol can be like.
You can do this!
Resources:
My Kind of Sweet – What I learned in two years of sobriety: https://mykindofsweet.com/2022/01/what-ive-learned-in-2-years-of-sobriety/#/
Huberman Lab Podcast – What alcohol does to your body: https://hubermanlab.com/what-alcohol-does-to-your-body-brain-health/
The sober drinks I had on vacation!
The 4th of July episode:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sober-mom-life/id1631208632?i=1000568719357
The Witching Hour episode:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sober-mom-life/id1631208632?i=1000583666938
The Dry January episode:
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sober-mom-life/id1631208632?i=1000591884992
Books to support you (affiliated links):
This Naked Mind:
Quit Like a Woman:
Please consider supporting The Sober Mom Life podcast by becoming a patron on Patreon! Learn more here: http://patreon.com/user?u=84021397
Join The Sober Mom Life FB group – https://www.facebook.com/groups/1542852942745657
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Transcript:
Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hi, welcome to the Sober Mom Life podcast. I’m your host Suzanne of my kind of suite and the sober mom life on Instagram. If you are a mama who has questioned your relationship with alcohol at times, if you’re wondering if maybe it’s making motherhood harder, this is for you. I will be having candid, honest, funny conversations with other moms who have also thought, Hmm, maybe motherhood is better without alcohol. Is it possible we’ll chat and we’ll talk about all things sobriety and how we’ve found freedom in sobriety. I don’t consider myself an alcoholic. You don’t have to either. And maybe life is brighter without alcohol. I hope you will join us on this journey and I’m so excited to get started.
(00:58)
Hello, happy Monday. It is another solo episode. I’m really excited to talk about sober vacation and guiding you through it, especially if it’s your first one. If you’re an early sobriety, I know that, you know, spring break is coming up and vacation can be just a time of anxiety if you are newly sober because we know that vacation is generally drenched in alcohol. It’s wild to me now knowing what I know and having lived the past three plus years sober, it’s wild to think about turning to alcohol at a time when we want to relax the most and have the most fun and uh, live our best lives. But I know <laugh> that we’ve all been tricked. And so if you’ve been tricked, there’s no shame in that. I am not judging you. And uh, we’re gonna talk about the trick. First, I want to say make sure if you want bonus content that you’re following over on Patreon, that’s where I’m sharing bonus episodes every week.
(02:05)
We are also gonna have our Zoom meeting on Friday, 11:00 AM central time. My mom will join us for that. She’s a retired therapist, so we already do a Tuesday meeting and you can get to that through the Sober Mom Life Facebook group. But the Friday meeting, I think we’ll be a really good one because it’ll set you up for the weekend if you’re feeling some anxiety, if you have a sober first that you have planned for the weekend, we’ll go over that. There’s no pressure to turn on your camera, there’s no pressure to share. It’s just a great group of women who are just so supportive and encouraging. It’s the Facebook group come to life. So yeah, we’ve been doing the Tuesday meeting for, I don’t know, has it been six months? I don’t know. And there’s been some demand to have more meetings and I’m excited to be able to do that.
(02:53)
You know that this podcast takes resources and time and I’m keeping it ad free. And so you wanna support the podcast. Patreon is the best way to do that. And you get cool stuff. So at $5 a month you get all of the bonus episodes. That includes the Sunday check-in. I’ve started doing that, just kind of framing our mind for the week. There are no Sunday scaries in sobriety. That’s pretty damn cool. Sunday scaries go away. At least they definitely did for me. And I don’t hate a Monday in sobriety. I actually love Mondays. So yeah, Sunday check-in is just where I just kind of talk candidly about whatever I’ve been thinking about a certain topic. Um, and we just get ourselves right for the week. And then so you will get access to all of that for $7 a month. You will get all of the bonus content plus access to our Zoom meetings on Fridays.
(03:44)
So four meetings a month you get for $7 a month, that’s not bad, right? That’s like my cup of coffee because I’m high maintenance and it probably does cost $7. And then for $10 a month, you get all of that. So you get all of the bonus episodes, you get the Zoom meetings, and you get discord. So it’s gonna be a chat community where you guys get to connect with each other. You also get access to polls and then we are gonna do some live q and a stuff more to come on that. So $10 is the most, that’s the highest level and you’ll get access to everything. So come over, join us. It’s a growing community and I love it. And come and follow me on my kind of suite on Instagram for what a full sober life looks like and the sober mom life on Instagram for everything about this podcast and new episodes.
(04:33)
And make sure you rate and review the podcast if you’re liking it, that gets us in front of more moms who are sober, curious and who need to hear it. So if you’ve been following me in my kind of suite, you know that we just got back from vacation. We tend to go to Florida every February. It’s not, we don’t go anywhere over the holiday and we don’t really go anywhere for spring break because of the craziness. And I don’t know, I just like to go on the off season. We started going to Florida in February when my oldest was born because I needed sunshine. I was a new mom, I was drowning. I had postpartum anxiety and O C D and I was struggling. I did not yet find my psychiatrist and therapist and I was white knuckling it, which I don’t recommend. Oh man, did I just need to get out and get away?
(05:25)
And I needed sunshine. And so we’ve been going ever since and it’s been such a special place. We go, um, near Sarasota and it’s just, just a really, really special week. So when I got sober, I stopped drinking in January, 2020, January 19th, 2020. And we always go at the beginning of February. And so I had probably about three weeks of sobriety under my belt when we went on our first sober talk about early sobriety, right? Like you guys, I’ve talked about this before. I’ve talked about not knowing and just having so many more questions than answers in early sobriety. And this is what it was like. I had no idea what the hell was happening. I was knee deep in all of the sober quit lit and the podcasts and trying to figure out what alcohol was and what it did to me and what it had taken and how I was using it to cope and all of these things.
(06:32)
And so I didn’t know. And actually I wrote about this on my kind of suite and I will link this blog post in the show notes I wrote about this last year. And I’m glad that I reread it because it kind of brought me back to that time. It brought me back to that first sober vacation. And I do remember going into it not knowing how I was going to feel and being afraid of feeling like I was missing out. Like I couldn’t imagine going on vacation without drinking that red wine at night and snuggling on the couch with my husband. And that that always feels so cozy. I always thought about it like I loved coffee in the morning and I loved wine at night because of like the cozy factor. I was worried that I would feel like I was missing out on that and I really didn’t want to because I loved that feeling.
(07:29)
So here’s what I’m gonna tell you. And this is a spoiler alert. Well, first of all, I was highly romanticizing alcohol in my mind because alcohol wasn’t the thing I was loving. I was loving the idea of being close to my husband and being cozy up for the night. And I learned on this vacation that it didn’t matter what was in my glass, I still felt that connection with my husband. I still loved the nights. I remember that I did drink kombucha in a wine glass to kind of just simulate that, if that’s triggering for some of you. I know some people are, you know, they don’t wanna fake it and they don’t I, that wasn’t triggering for me. It was actually kind of a no-brainer replacement for the wine. And that is what allowed me to see that I had been tying alcohol and I had been giving alcohol all of this like credit for the times that I felt good and connected to my husband and like setting the scene and the vibe and all of that when it was not that it had nothing to do with that.
(08:42)
I still felt that vibe. I still felt the coziness, I still felt connected to my husband even more connected to my husband Now that alcohol wasn’t a barrier to that. It was on that trip that I was able to prove to myself that alcohol was not the thing that made life fun. I remember coming away from that trip and thinking, holy shit, I didn’t even know this. I had all of this time I had been thinking that alcohol was the thing and that red wine was this thing that was like making situations feel special and helping me relax and helping my husband and I connect, making me feel cozy, like setting the tone or like achieving this vibe that I think was the first time I realized, oh wait, I’ve been tricked. This wasn’t this thing that I had in my head that I romanticized.
(09:42)
That wasn’t it. So vacation and what I loved to do, which is be with my family and be in the sun and have fun. I still had so much fun. I had more fun. I was still able to bond with my family even more. And I loved vacation even more without the alcohol. But I would not have known that if I didn’t give myself the chance to define that out. And I’m gonna talk about how I did that. It wasn’t just, uh, okay, so replace it with kombucha and we’re good. No, there were actual steps that I took that I just gave myself space to discover what alcohol was and what it had taken rather than this thing that I thought that it was providing. So I asked you on Instagram, what would you like me to talk about when I talk about your guide to a sober vacation?
(10:41)
And so many of the questions were about this. How do I have fun without alcohol? How will I enjoy vacation without alcohol? And how am I gonna relax without alcohol on the vacation? You guys right now, just from where I sit and all of the work that I’ve done, it’s such an oxymoron to me that I can’t put it together anymore. And this is not a judgment of all of those people who ask that. It’s just telling me that of course we’ve been brainwashed. It’s like saying, how do I go for a run without having a cigarette? How can I do yoga without smoke in my lungs? <laugh>. And that’s how it sounds to someone to me who now has seen with clear eyes what alcohol is and what it does and what it takes from us. But I understand if you’re not there yet. And the hard thing is, is that to get there, you have to give yourself a chance to see.
(11:45)
So you have to take that leap. It’s a giant leap of faith to say, you know what? I’m gonna try counting on myself this time. I’m gonna see what vacation is like without alcohol because I’ve never been able to see. And if I’ve never been able to see how can I judge what it’s like? How can I find out that alcohol isn’t the thing that’s making things fun like I thought it was. We think alcohol makes things fun because it’s always around when we’re doing fun things. Alcohol is always around when we’re doing sad things, alcohol is always around when we’re celebrating, when we’re crying, when we’re bonding, when we’re dating, when we’re all of these things alcohol is tied to. And so we think it’s a vital component of these things instead of when we take it away, that’s when you’re gonna have your holy shit moment is when you do all of the things that you had alcohol tied to it.
(12:48)
When you start to untie those things from alcohol and then you get to see, oh my God, not only is it as fun, but it’s more fun, it’s a more fulfilling fun that I can remember. The guilt is gone, the shame is gone. So when we still have alcohol tied to these things, to these fun things, to the idea that alcohol makes things more fun, and we have those memories and those feelings, and those times when alcohol did trick us and got the best of us and caused us to do things we would never have done if alcohol wasn’t in the picture or to say things we would’ve never said, all of that shame spiral stuff, when we lock those away and we decide not to look at those, alcohol continues to trick us and continues to make us believe that those first 20 minutes, that first drink, it continues to say, yeah, that’s what I am.
(14:00)
Yeah, see, I relax you now you don’t care anymore. Right? And for someone who cares too much, not caring anymore does sound pretty damn good. But here’s the thing, in order to really see what alcohol is and what it’s taken, we have to open those doors that we’ve long closed. And that is the work of sobriety. If someone ever asks me, how did you stop drinking? And my story I understand is rare in that I was spontaneously sober, which means I didn’t have stops and starts. I didn’t have what is like a lapse and then a relapse. And that wasn’t my story. And I’ve been trying to figure out why. And my sobriety story also isn’t one of white knuckling, and it really hasn’t ever been. And I think those two are very tied together. And so when I think about what I did on the day that I woke up with my last hangover and what I did from that point on, I made it my mission to do a few things.
(15:11)
Number one, I wanted to find out what alcohol was. I didn’t know alcohol was ethanol. I had no idea that it was the same thing that we put in our cars. What? Okay, that’s huge. This naked mind quit like a woman. Those books really help you learn about alcohol, what it is and what it does to us, and how it affects our mental health. Okay? So I wanted to learn that, and I did all these things simultaneously, and it, it takes as long as it takes for me. I, I don’t know guys, I just become obsessed with something. And then I just, I, I really was on like this quest. And so when I tell you I’m listening to this with one AirPod in all day long, that’s the truth. It was all day long. Like, I don’t wanna tell you what my, you know, that stupid, like, oh my God, talk about shame spiral.
(16:09)
That thing that pops up, that’s like, you know, your iPhone usage was up 84% last week for a total of 12 hours a day. And I’m like, yeah, you know what? Well fuck you. Cause I’m saving my life. So, okay, don’t worry about that. I made it my mission in life to find out what alcohol is, what it does to me and what it does to my mental health as someone who struggles with anxiety and O C D I had done everything else. Why was I not then looking at alcohol? Also, I had to look at how I used it to cope. I had to get real. I think that this was the hardest part. Those doors that I were talk, that I was talking about that have been closed for a long time because they’re filled with shame. And how could I, and oh my God, I can’t believe I, and holy shit, how’d I let that happen?
(17:08)
All of those doors I opened and I said, okay, let me look, let me look with clear eyes what alcohol has done and how it’s tricked me. And I use this language purposely because if I were, and I was doing this without a therapist, this was during C O V D, and if I were to open those doors and look at some of my most shameful moments, if I were to look at it through the lens of how could you and oh my God, what’s wrong with me? This would’ve gone differently. I had to look at it coming from a place of compassion for myself and seeing how I had been tricked. And this isn’t like a victim, like, oh my God, like I still had to own my shit. But when you’re opening those doors, I think that we have to take such care of ourselves and treat it with such compassion because it’s a scary thing.
(18:17)
And I think that this is the hardest part of the journey, but it’s almost the most essential because there’s no more romanticizing when you open those doors and you start to list all of the shit in your life that you’ve done that fills you with shame and guilt and all of those just horrible feelings. And if you can pinpoint that, alcohol was always a part of it. There’s something that happens once you start paying attention to what alcohol has done. When you let it trick you, when you let it in the driver’s seat, when you decided not to question it when you were head down and using it to cope, there’s something that happens that is undeniable when you do those two things. When you’re also at the same time finding out what alcohol is and how we have been tricked and how we have been brainwashed, you guys, the blinders start coming off.
(19:25)
And that’s exactly what happened for me. And that’s why it wasn’t hard for me to say, yeah, what no more I love myself too much to do that. Again, to go back to that, it’s like a toxic ex when you’re finally free of his grip and when you’re finally away and then you can look back and you can have compassion for who you were when he was tricking you and abusing you and doing all of the horrible things. And you could say, thank God I survived because I’m never going back to that. And that’s exactly how I look at alcohol. And so I did not have this all figured out before my first sober vacation. Okay? What I was starting to figure out is the third piece of it, which is, so I had figured out what alcohol was. I was in the process of discovering the truth about alcohol.
(20:24)
I was starting to, I don’t even think I was in it yet, but I was starting to open those doors of, okay, let’s see how alcohol has affected my life, and then how had I used it to cope? And the third part is, how could I cope in a different, healthier, more fulfilling way? And so it’s not just about taking alcohol out of the equation and white knuckling it. It’s about figuring out why you turn to alcohol and what you actually need instead. Oh man, I feel like that’s a whole other episode is you know, why we turn to alcohol to cope and, and what we actually need. For me, I definitely was in motherhood turning to alcohol to cope with anxiety. And I thought that it would help me relax and unwind. And once I learned the truth about that and that it does not, it does the opposite.
(21:34)
It messes with our dopamine and serotonin levels. And there are so many podcasts about that. Listen to the Huberman Lab podcast about alcohol. If you’re going on vacation soon and you don’t have time to listen to a whole audio book like This Naked Mind, I would highly suggest that Huberman Lab episode, I will link it. And also, I had Jill of sober powered on my podcast and she talked about anxiety and alcohol and how it affects us. But if you have anxiety in you’re drinking alcohol, you’re making it so much worse just chemically in your brain, in your serotonin levels, alcohol makes us less happy. That’s just science. Once I realized that, and I started to think about when I am my happiest, and that especially on vacation was an easy answer for me. I am my happiest when I’m running on the beach in the morning.
(22:30)
I love a morning beach run. It is probably when I’m back home in the Midwest in snow in March, in April, yes, it snows here in April. Don’t be fooled, you guys, if you live in the Midwest and you’re like, yeah, this weather’s awesome, don’t be fool, we’re not gonna be fooled again, guys. It’s gonna snow in April. I hate to be the bearer of bad news. Um, when I’m back in Wisconsin or wow, my God, when I’m back in Illinois and I, and I’m daydreaming about vacation and warm weather, I’m on the beach and I’m running. That’s what I’m thinking about. And so going into my first sober vacation, I decided that when my mind started to romanticize alcohol and the snuggling on the couch with my husband, and when I started to let that fear get in my head, I would just circle my thoughts back to my morning beach run.
(23:31)
I mean, it was like a constant. And I’d be like, yeah, and I, I could see myself. I’m a huge visualization person. I visualize myself doing whatever it is I’m going to do before I do it. I don’t even realize I do it. I do it with everything. And so I would visualize myself running on the beach and how it feels with the salt on my tongue. And you could feel it in the air and the breeze in the marine layer and the, oh my God, the best music in my ears and my feet pounding the sand and my breath hard and oh my God, it’s just, it’s my favorite thing to do. And alcohol has gotten in the way of that in vacations prior, even if it was two glasses of wine, I would sleep later. And then when the beach is too crowded, I’m not going for a run on it.
(24:24)
Or if I feel sluggish or if I have a headache, you know guys, I’m 42 and when I quit, I was 39. And so two glasses of wine can affect you, and I just did not want that to get in the way anymore. And so then I kept coming back to my beach run. And I’m telling you that that propelled me through that first vacation. And I think that that’s so important to find that one thing. What is your beach run? What is something that you are no longer gonna let alcohol steal from you? What is something that’s going to actually allow you to cope with your anxiety or your fear or anything that you’re struggling with? Maybe it’s yoga. Maybe it’s reading on the beach in the early morning. Maybe it’s a beach walk. Maybe it’s a bubble bath at night. Maybe it’s meditating, you know, by the pool.
(25:21)
What is your beach run? You have to decide what is going to fill in the gaps that alcohol leaves behind. I think that that’s such an important piece because sobriety for me is not deprivation. I think that that’s really, really important to remember and to note. And that was by design. I did not wanna feel like I was deprived in sobriety. I didn’t wanna look at it as an absence of alcohol and where I could see alcohol missing. So I decided what was gonna fill in those gaps and how I was gonna cope in ways that would actually help me. And for me, still today, three years later, exercise is a huge part of that. It’s where I can just escape. I think the idea that we don’t escape anymore in sobriety, I don’t think that’s true. I know I still escape. I still need an escape.
(26:18)
Feelings get to be too much. Kids get to be too much. And where alcohol seemed like a good escape, we know that’s a trick. We know it catches up to us tenfold. And so what is actually a good escape for me is exercise. I’m able to just shut my mind off. I’m able to be in my body, all of that anxious energy. It’s like I can feel it in my body. And then when I go for a run or I go to a shred class or I do yoga, it releases. And so find out what that is for you, especially if you’re going on vacation and this is your first sober vacation. This is a huge first for you to check off the list. We talk about not counting days. I don’t count days. I never have. I think if counting days works for you in sobriety, if it motivates you and it feels good to tick off that day, I think that that’s great.
(27:15)
But if you’re feeling that counting days feels punitive and like there’s some negative self-talk around, why don’t I have that many days? And why can’t I make it to 40 days? And why can’t I make it to 100 days? And if you’re finding that it doesn’t feel motivating for you, then don’t count days. There are no rules in sobriety. It’s what works for you. And for me, when I look back at my first year of sobriety, it was the firsts, the sober firsts when I got through those and just allowed myself a chance to see that alcohol didn’t make those things better. Cuz guys, a lot of us, we haven’t even allowed ourselves the chance of that. It’s just always been alcohol. Alcohol has always been invited on vacation with us. And so we don’t even know. We don’t know what a sober vacation could feel like.
(28:13)
We don’t know that alcohol doesn’t make it better or more fun, or us more connected. Getting through those firsts for me, propelled me. And that made those days and weeks in between the firsts so much better, so much better because it just is the way leads onto way kind of thing. And it’s these building blocks of sobriety. It just felt so much better to me than white knuckling just to get another day for me, that is just not what my sobriety’s about. So find your beach run. Keep coming back to the idea of that. I would say, you know, I, I’m big about deciding and so decide that you are going to give yourself a chance to see what sober vacation feels like. And don’t wait. Don’t wait until you get there to see how you feel. Also, you know, I talk about sober vacation feeling so much better.
(29:14)
And it’s so much better than drinking vacation, which it is 100%. It is better. I’m going to tell you, and I’ve noticed this in our group and just with some dms I get, I think sometimes we have this idea that in sobriety, you know, we’re gonna master our problems and our feelings and we’re gonna really be able to know what we’re feeling and know what we need. And everything’s gonna be easier. And while I say yes, everything will be easier than if alcohol were invited. Everything’s not going to be easy. And so if there are times of discomfort, if something feels hard that’s not a assigned to you, that this isn’t for you or that it’s not working, or that you’re doing it wrong, that’s just a sign to you that you’re awake and you’re here and you’re feeling, and it’s okay, you can feel those feelings without numbing them.
(30:17)
I promise you, you can. You are strong enough to feel the feelings. You’re strong enough to be uncomfortable, confused, frustrated, pissed off, scared, anxious. You are so much stronger than you think you are. And using alcohol to numb those feelings only makes them come back stronger. And then you never give yourself a chance to see that you are strong enough. I wanna tell you a story about <laugh>, about just you guys. I, I love sober vacation. I shared a lot of it on my kind of sweet. And I always say I glamorize sobriety on Instagram because come on, between sobriety and alcohol, if one is glamorous, it’s sobriety. I promise you that it is not alcohol. That said like it’s still life, right? And it’s still has its challenges and it’s still hard. It’s just not made harder by a highly addictive toxin. So I was cleaning, I was cleaning the kitchen and I was like feeling so good.
(31:31)
The kids were outside of the pool. My husband was doing something, I don’t know, I was just alone in the kitchen. My mom was like taking a nap maybe, and I was feeling good. We had like three more days left of vacation. It had gone so well, great weather. I’d gotten some runs in on the beach and I’m just like, man, I just am feeling super grateful. I’m listening to my AirPod. I think I was listening to watch What Krens, of course, because um, if you’re a Bravo fan and, and if you don’t listen to watch what Krens get on it because Ben and Ronnie make life better and they’re hilarious. And then the family comes in, you know, we’re talking, I take my AirPod out and we’re just like talking, getting ready for dinner. And I continue cleaning the kitchen and I turn the garbage disposal on <laugh>.
(32:17)
And I’m like, what is in there? I’m like, what is that noise? I look down and I see it. Oh my God, I see my AirPod that I just ground up in the garbage disposal. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Oh fuck. I’m like, are you kidding me? And I pull it out and it’s got its sad, little wires all hanging out all everywhere. And my mom’s like, do you think you could still use it? And I’m like, okay, I know you’re not great at technology, but no, this guy is like donezo. So we still had three days left my mind, of course, went to my beach runs and I’m like, how am I gonna do this with one AirPod? And that stupid ocean is so loud. I’m kidding, <laugh>, but how am I gonna run with one AirPod? Yes, I know princess problems, but still at first I was just pissed, right?
(33:11)
You’re just pissed. Like you put your AirPod down the garbage disposals, you’re fucking pissed. And then I kind of was able to reframe it pretty quickly. I’m kind of proud of myself. I did not spiral. I was like, you know what? This is just the perfect metaphor for life still happens. I still am going to accidentally put my AirPod in the garbage disposal. Like I’m still gonna do that. The thing is, if alcohol were involved in that situation, not only would that have happened, but I would have felt such shame and that would’ve been the spiral. I would’ve felt like, oh my God, how could I do that? The negative self-talk would’ve started, and I know I would’ve beaten myself up. It’s because of the alcohol. How could I have drank that much? Oh my God, what is wrong with me? All of this stuff, right?
(34:12)
And it would’ve happened in like a split second. I could have had all of those thoughts. Instead, I just thought, oh my God. And I, after I was done being pissed for like a minute, I laughed and I was like, oh my God, there was no shame. It was just like, oh, damn, it <laugh> out why? It was that. But there was no negative self-talk. Like how could you do that? No, it wasn’t that it was a mistake, it was an accident. It was a good story later. So it’s that I think about sobriety is that <laugh>, especially in motherhood and sobriety, it’s, you know, life still happens. Like shitty things will still happen, mistakes will still be made. Things are not always going to go my way. But alcohol is not gonna make it harder. I don’t have that extra layer that makes things exponentially harder for my mental health, for my environment, for my relationships, for just me and my heart and soul.
(35:21)
And so if you know, I don’t know, say you put your AirPod down a garbage disposal on vacation, it’s okay. It doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong path. It just means you probably have to order a backup AirPod thing so that you are prepared. And so when you start to struggle in sobriety, when those obstacles come, because they will, it’s okay. And so even if they come on vacation, it’s okay. Don’t let that derail you from your mission and your quest to find out what alcohol is, find out what it’s done to you and how it’s tricked you and what it’s taken. Find out how you were using it to cope and what you can use to cope that will actually help. That is your mission, that is your quest. You will do it. I hope that this helps. I have a lot of other simple tips.
(36:25)
I would make sure that if your husband still drinks, that you have a conversation before you go. And while you’re there, you know, boundaries are an ongoing thing and an ongoing conversation just about what that looks like, what you need from him. I’ve talked about my husband, if he’s with me, it’s no more than two beers and I feel okay. Anything more than that, I don’t like, it feels unsafe. It feels like we’re not on the same level. Like we can’t connect. So I would make sure to figure out what that is for you, what you need. Sometimes that takes some time. Sometimes you don’t even know. And so if you don’t know, I would say that too. I would have an open and ongoing conversation with your husband if he’s still drinking or with your partner about what that looks like and what you can say to him if you’re feeling unsafe, if you are not feeling good about being around the drinking.
(37:25)
That said, I think that if you, if you’re going with other families who drink or another couple or your family and their big drinkers, it’s okay to leave the party early. I mean, I highly recommend it. I leave a party when I’m tired. I think that that’s the glorious part of sobriety is that I know when I’m tired and I know what I need. And so I don’t know, nothing great happens after 10 probably, unless you’re sleeping. Sleep is great. And so don’t feel like you have anything to prove like, oh, I need to prove my sobriety by going out to the bar with them or going here. No, you don’t have anything to prove to anybody right now. You are nurturing yourself and you’re early sobriety and that is right where you need to be. I would say have a plan on what you wanna drink.
(38:20)
I just posted a reel on my kind of suite. I’ll link it in the show notes about all the things that I drank on our sober vacation. And this isn’t even all the things. I had many more things that I drank that I didn’t get a video of. But it hit me on this trip that, you know, when I was drinking alcohol and I always liked red wine, I would just always be drinking red wine. If it was time to drink, I was gonna drink red wine. Generally the same kind, because that’s what I liked. And now in sobriety, I drink so many different things that I’m like, God, how boring is it that we drink the same drink over and over and over and over without thinking, how did sobriety get branded as boring? So I shared, I don’t know, maybe eight or nine drinks that I drank on our vacation.
(39:10)
I also have mocktail Monday over on my kind of sweet on Instagram. So follow over there where I just share all different kinds of mocktails that you can have. Yeah, I mean, sky’s the limit. There’s so much you can drink. So I would make sure you decide what you’re gonna drink, decide what you’re gonna say when somebody asks you why you aren’t drinking, which mind your own bees wax. First of all, someone said they were worried if they would be judged that they’re not fun anymore. Oh man, guys, this is where sobriety needs a rebrand because I, I just how we get this idea that drinking alcohol is makes us more fun is a lie. It makes us not care. And so not caring. While it might start fun, I promise you it doesn’t end fun. I don’t know if it’s because I’m 42, but I don’t care what people think when I’m not drinking.
(40:07)
The thing I can just say is just remember that anyone’s reaction to your sobriety is about how they feel about their drinking. And so if you get pushback on vacation from family members or friends, just nod and smile. Walk away, give ’em the bird. Just kidding. Just try to remind yourself that it’s about them. And you know, an an easy thing to say is, I feel better without alcohol. Leave it at that. But if you want some more support, I have a lot of tips in the 4th of July episode in the witching hour episode and in the dry January episode, there’s a lot of tips for events and sober firsts. And I’m just so excited for you. If this is your first sober vacation, I’m so excited for you. I think that a sober vacation feels like how a vacation should feel and how we think that it’s supposed to feel.
(41:06)
I know if you have kids that can be a little bit different, but a sober vacation, I now look at it and I’m like, why would anyone drink through this? And the only reason why is because they’ve been tricked. So we are no longer tricked. We are giving ourselves the chance to see that alcohol was never the magic. The magic is you and who you’re with. You can have so much fun on a sober vacation check in here. I want to hear how your sober vacation went. Leave me a comment over on my kind of suite or in the in the ratings here. Come and join on Patreon. Make sure that you come and join the Sober Mom Life group on Facebook and you are continually checking in. Community is key in this, and we have the most supportive moms over there. Come check in with me. You’ve got this. Keep going. I am so proud of you. Okay, until next week. Bye guys. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Silver Mom Life. If you loved it, please rate and review it wherever you listen. Five stars is amazing. Also, follow me on Instagram at the silver mom life. Okay, I’ll see you next week. I’m gonna go reheat my coffee. Bye.
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