I will never forget the day I found out I was pregnant with my first daughter, I was desperate to start trying, convinced that we would struggle to conceive, but alas, we fell pregnant immediately.

I had just finished my last cigarette, had done a pregnancy test that I thought was negative, I was about to leave the house but thought I had to pee first. I saw the test, and there was a faint positive line, I was pregnant. Instead of buying cigarettes, I went and purchased every brand of pregnancy test I could find, all of them came back positive.

Despite wanting to have a child, I had ignored all of those ‘prepare your body’ blogs, warning signs etc. and I drank every single night right up until that positive pregnancy test. But I struggled immensely every evening. When I engaged with an obstetrician, he said a small glass of wine once a week was ok, and I made sure to have this, much to my husbands dismay.

By the end of my pregnancy, I was so proud of myself, I had survived 9 months of sobriety, however when I was in hospital, they had a dinner menu and on that dinner menu, there was wine, and so began my first drink back into my alcoholism.

Because I had been sober for so long, that first drink tricked me into a binge and I spent the next few months drinking very heavily in the evenings. The boredom, stress and isolation of motherhood fed my addiction. I went to the doctor and tried getting a script for campral to stop me drinking as well as seeing a counsellor, but that didn’t work. So I kept drinking until I fell pregnant again.

With my second pregnancy I felt so sick that I couldn’t stomach alcohol, but of course, the day I gave birth I managed to get a couple of glasses of wine into me and like the first time, I went back to heavy drinking.

My youngest daughter 20 months old when I finally admitted to myself that I had a problem and started AA, this was the first day of the rest of my life.