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Belinda Stark had one hand on a full glass of sauvignon blanc and the other holding her head as she sobbed at the dining table alone. Her blue eyes were bloodshot and her nose was blocked as she tried to remain quiet while her sons slept in their bedrooms.
It wasn’t an especially sad occasion. Nothing catastrophic had happened. It was just another weekday night for the mother of two from Melbourne.
‘I’m not good enough. I hate myself,’ the voice in her head would say on repeat.
She’d done it again.
‘I loved to drink. Alcohol was my best friend. I’d go through this vicious daily cycle of telling myself I wouldn’t drink, but then by 4pm I would know I’d be having a couple of glasses of wine that night. But I was in denial about my problem, burying my head in the sand,’ Belinda, now 55, tells me.
Belinda would stumble to bed drunk most evenings after finishing a bottle to herself. Then around 3am she would jolt awake, racked with anxiety over being unable to recall what had happened the night before.
It wasn’t always this way. She could go long stretches of time without drinking to excess. And she was able to keep this ‘on-and-off’ relationship with alcohol a secret for two decades, mainly because she only drank at home or at acceptable social events and always managed to avoid that dreaded reputation as a ‘party girl’.
The cracks showed only briefly in 2003 when she got divorced. The other mums at children’s parties noticed her fondness for boozy singledom and nicknamed her the ‘real-life Bridget Jones’.
It would take almost 20 years for her to hit ‘rock bottom’ – a term alcoholics use to describe the nadir of their drinking. It happened over Christmas in 2022 when she woke up with ‘the shakes’ that were so severe she had to race to the nearest hospital.
While waiting to see a doctor, she sent a text to her son, husband and best friend that read: ‘I know I have a drinking problem. I need your help. I’m sick of feeling like this. I’m so scared, but I know I need to do this. Please help me. I love you so much.’
Instantly her son Mitch, who was 27 by this point, replied: ‘Mum, I’m so proud of you. I never thought you’d admit that you had an issue with drinking. I love you very much and of course you’ve got my support 100 per cent.’
The heartfelt response came as a shock. Belinda had never once considered that her son had noticed her drinking, let alone had been concerned about it for so long.
Belinda’s bad drinking habits started in the early 2000s following a bout of depression after the birth of her first child. Drinking to cope with her sadness, she would again turn to alcohol when she went through a divorce from her first husband.
This coincided with the birth of what some now call ‘mummy wine culture’, where mothers normalise drinking – sometimes on a nightly basis – as a way to cope with the daily struggles of parenting.
Sex and the City and Bridget Jones dominated pop culture and it was perfectly normal to see women on TV with a cocktail or wine glass in hand.
Belinda even recalls some kids’ play centres had a fully stocked bar for parents to indulge in while their children ran amok.
‘Drinking was really cool and I was drinking every night as a reward,’ she says.
For years, Belinda would drink most days but life was still good: she even pursued a lifelong dream of buying a fashion store and running her own business.
She continued to drink after meeting her now-husband Andy, but stopped before falling pregnant with her second son, Max, who is now 18.
Once again, she suffered from postnatal depression and found herself in and out of hospital for 12 months.
Amid the fog of depression, Belinda starting drinking again, describing a glass of wine – or two, or three – as ‘a release’ and a ‘reward’ during this difficult time.
‘I was struggling and I didn’t have much support, which you really need during postnatal depression,’ she says.
Flash forward to 2014 and her whole world came crashing down with her breast cancer diagnosis.
She did not have any symptoms – she only went for a check-up after a speaker at a business lunch recommended it – but she did have a family history of the disease. The screening detected early signs of cancerous cells in her breast.
‘I’ll never forget sitting in my car and getting a call from the nurse telling me they had found something. I cried instantly. I went straight to the radiologist who then confirmed it was cancer,’ Belinda says.
‘I rang my husband and best friend to tell them. Then went home and my oldest son could tell straight away something was wrong.
‘I remember just holding him and saying, “Look, I don’t want you to worry at all, but I’ve been to the hospital and they think I might have breast cancer.” And to this day I will never, ever forget the guttural crying and sorrow.
‘The day I found out I had cancer, Andy came home with two bottles of wine and we all sat in the lounge room sobbing. I told him I wasn’t ready to die.’
Looking back, Belinda says her drinking habit was worse then being diagnosed with cancer because ‘with cancer I knew what I was dealing with – it wasn’t a bed of roses but it was something that had a timeframe on it.’
By contrast, alcohol was a 20-year albatross around her neck.
‘It’s a habit and an escape for so many people. It’s a legal drug. I turned to it when life was tough and when I was going through rough patches,’ she tells me.
Belinda underwent cancer treatment, miraculously experienced no side effects, and would remain on medication for 10 years.
Life was good for another five years, right up until 2019. She was busy running her fashion label and was in a good place with her mental health.
Then Covid hit.
When the pandemic shut down the world, Belinda started drinking heavily again. It was easy then – the bars and restaurants were shut so the idea of drinking at home was suddenly normalised.
‘I thought since everyone else was doing it so it was okay, and the whole “I deserve it” mentality played a part too,’ she says.
But the drinking soon impacted her mental health and relationships.
Alarmingly, during this period she would drink so much she could not recall anything from the night before – from what television show she had watched, to if she had picked a fight with her husband, or what – or how much – she had eaten before bed.
‘I crashed pretty hard at night then would wake up at 2am feeling thirsty or needing to go to the bathroom. Then I always struggled getting back to sleep and would lay there feeling anxious because I couldn’t recall what I had done,’ she says.
‘In the morning I would wake up feeling like crap with no energy so I would cancel any gym class, get through the day and the cycle would repeat.
‘It got to a point that I was so sick of beating myself up every morning saying, “You’ve done it again, you were going to try stop”.’
That Christmas morning when her shakes brought her to hospital was the wake-up call Belinda needed to get her life on track.
She took her last drink on January 12, 2023.
Now 55, healthy and sober, she is on a mission to help Gen X women overcome their problematic drinking before it tilts into full-on addiction.
Belinda knows she wasn’t the most severe kind of alcoholic, but considers herself a grey-area drinker – someone who would regularly drink too much but was not physically dependent.
Looking back through the lens of sobriety, she now recognises the ways she would try to rationalise her drinking.
‘I would play little tricks on myself by drinking a whole bottle of low-alcoholic wine and justify it because it wasn’t full strength. Or I would share a bottle with my husband – even though he would only have one glass.’
Now Belinda helps others by becoming a sobriety coach – and her key advice is to have self-compassion and self-love.
‘To anyone considering changing their drinking habits, start with small steps and be kind to yourself,’ she says.
‘For the first couple weeks, don’t go out too much and gradually cut back. And if you slip up, that’s okay. The next day, just get back on the bike and try your best.’
It comes as research by the Australian Bureau of Statistics shows Gen X women in their late forties and fifties are among the heaviest drinkers – and it’s a health catastrophe waiting to happen.
