This is Annie Grace and you're listening to this naked mind podcast where without judgment,

pain or rules, we explore the role of alcohol in our lives and culture.

Hey, it's Annie Grace and I am answering Reader's questions and today I have a question and that is it's a simple one, but it's intense.

It says, what, hi Annie, what can you say about drinking as a mother of an infant loaded I know?

So first of all, I just, I just want you to know that you're totally not alone. It's not something we talk about so huge kudos to you for bringing this up and bringing it out to the open and having a conversation about this because I think that really it's just very, very common, but we're not talking about it because it does feel loaded and it does feel shame inducing and guilt inducing and and wrong and stuff like that.

I can tell you in my experience with my second son, I actually had my dad smuggle me wine in a water bottle into the hospital, which he agreed to do for me because I told him that I was just so anxious and I needed it and of course I hadn't been drinking pregnant, but as soon as he was born, I was, he was sleeping right next to me.

He was not even six hours old and I was drinking my water bottle full of wine and my dad bring me wine in sushi and I think that's just almost normal, you know, not that maybe everybody is smuggling it into the hospital that like I was, but I think that it's really normal for especially when you've created a sense of deprivation.

So here's what happens is that we go into pregnancy and it was, it's very interesting because the contrast for me between not drinking now and not drinking during my first two pregnancies and even we could say like the contrast.

So I was a drinker during my first two pregnancies. I was not a drinker during my third pregnancy.

So my feeling during my third pregnancy of giving a bowel call was non-existent because I already didn't drink and the work I had done around my mindset around alcohol was such that it wasn't that I didn't, you know, I was not drinking, but I really wanted to.

It was that I felt like I didn't have to drink anymore. I was so thankful that I felt like I never had to drink again.

And so from that perspective and that point of view, I was really just, it was a non-issue, I was really relieved.

Whereas my first two pregnancies where I was a drinker, it was one of the biggest bummers for me. I was also very nauseous for nine months, but like aside from that, not drinking was literally one of the biggest bummers for me.

There would be lots of events that would get invited to that I just didn't want to go to because I felt so sorry for myself that I wasn't drinking. I mourned it the entire nine months. I felt bad for myself the whole nine months.

I felt left out the whole nine months. I felt deprived the whole nine months. I felt, you know, really miserable. And a lot of that obviously was my thinking. I was thinking that I was not going to have as much fun without a drink.

I was not going to enjoy the things that we were doing without a drink. I wasn't going to enjoy the barbecue that we were going to where the friends birthday party or going to drink.

I was just really feeling sorry for myself and that perpetuated into me feeling really what I would classify as the forbidden fruit syndrome where you can't have something in the pressure and the desire for it builds up and builds up and builds up to where when my babies were born, I was drinking a lot.

I was very intentional about it. You can buy these strips that you can test your milk to make sure that your milk is an alcoholic. And then you can pump and dump. And I was doing all sorts of things like that.

I remember going on business trips, pumping, testing the milk, dumping the milk to that alcohol in it, waiting six hours to let my body process the alcohol so that I could pump again, you know, literally jumping through hoops so that I could be a drinker again.

And a lot of that had to do with me depriving myself during pregnancy without the rights out of beliefs. You know, I was depriving myself of something I really believed I wanted.

Something that I thought was like the elixir of life and it was really helpful for me and it was something that I thought added joy to my life and added peace to my life and all of these things.

And when I was pregnant with my daughter, my third pregnancy, I dealt with all those beliefs. I knew that alcohol wasn't actually the answer to my stress or the answer to my social life or the answer to my anxiety or it wasn't the thing that was bringing me joy actually the things in my life were bringing me joy.

...