I may need to revise my own advice about choosing wine over food, after last night. Let’s just say that my memories of ‘Vivid Sydney’ aren’t quite as ‘vivid’ as they should be.
Hangovers can be a b*tch when you’re middle aged.
The Middle-Aged Hangover Part Middle IV
Middle aged hangovers are one of the more tedious symptoms of getting older. While it might seem unfair to gather age-defining lines on your face and extra weight around your middle, not being able to console yourself with more than a few glasses of wine, is plain evil.
My excesses of those innocent-looking bottles of horribly cheap wine began to haunt me the minute I first opened my fetid mouth this morning, when the dog actually rolled away from my breath.
There are certain days in your life when you simply have to ignore the nagging need to cram as much into 24 hours as is humanly feasible, simply to fulfill some perverse notion of needing to achieve something every day. It’s as though once you reach forty, you need to treat every day as if it were your last, (in case it is) and so wasting a day (and relaxing, say) seems the height of decadence.
Today was one of those days, when the effects of alcohol damaged my whole raison d’etre and I was forced to concede the day for the purposes of recovery.
I am a loser. I admit that I achieved a whole lot of nothing today.
Hangovers are bad news; middle aged hangovers with kids/teenagers are brutal.
Of course I couldn’t admit to my still-evolving, adolescent brood (to whom I am normally preaching about the effects of alcohol over-consumption), that their primary role model was hungover. I couldn’t explain the real reasons for my lethargy, pallid skin-tone, need to remain prostrate on the sofa, nausea at the foul stench of dog food and inability to communicate effectively.
Fortunately, a pre-existing lower back pain issue seemed a reliable cover for my excesses as I planted myself in front of the tv, dog at my side, and erased all plans of ‘living’ for the day.
‘Are you hungover?’ asked Kurt with a sly grin plastered on his face as I began to explain the symptoms of Sciatica in depth.
I did manage to achieve a few things: I increased the level of the old man’s contempt for me, slept through Jack Reacher for the third time, devoured my Maccas cure in five minutes flat (and without drawing breath), upset both my children and gained 2 kgs.
Am I disappointed in my juvenile behaviour? Do I think that other women of a certain age are still going out and getting sh*t-faced on occasion? Don’t judge me – I’ve already been punished.
Perhaps it is finally time for me to grow up.
I admit that I am guilty of still refusing to acknowledge my intolerance to cheap white wine on an empty stomach. Unfortunately, noisy bars where you can’t hear yourself speak (or anyone else for that matter) make me nervous and to allay my anxiety I tend to drink very quickly – the simile ‘like a fish’, springs to mind.
I never have days off. Even when I have a cold, I push on through coughing and spluttering, spreading my germs; stoically. There is little compassion in our house for illness – it is seen as weakness (or worst case, ‘neediness’) and in our family ‘strength’ is requisite for survival. I came from the school of ‘you only have a sick day if you need to be hospitalized’ type of parenting.
By midday, once I had accepted that the 2L bottle of orange juice and three cups of coffee and Panadol weren’t going to cure the hangover from hell, I sought a man fix.
Which is where those restorative powers of a good old-fashioned quarter pounder with cheese meal came in – my final attempt to cure the insatiable hunger (scientifically recognized as ‘the munchies’). Sometimes a girl simply has to do what a girl has to do – Darwin called it ‘survival of the fittest’ – and I needed that dose of cholesterol to survive today. I did mention in my last post, The ‘Replacing Food With Wine Diet’ For Women, that sometimes blowing the diet clear out of the water at the weekend is necessary for success. Today was one of those days.
Of course, the family folded completely without the nagging matriarch to organize them. Where was mum? Why was she lying on the sofa? Was she pretending to have a bad back again? You might think you get taken for granted as a mother, but only until you go down and all those on board go down with you.
On occasion, in order ‘to live’ you have to ignore caution and refuse to cow-tow to the effects of aging. Because when you are finally forced to surrender to old age, you want to know that you went out fighting.
‘Wine’ courtesy of Andrew Borodin at http://www.flickr.com
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#hangover #Wine #middleaged #WomensHealth #Alcoholicbeverage #alcohol
Louisa Simmonds 
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