Never did I pay as much attention to drinking as I have in the last year and a half.  Listen, I come from an Irish family.  Let’s be honest…I like a bevvie.  There is not an occasion celebration, or in memoriam for that matter, that does not have dranks as a central part of the event planning in my world.

I’ve gone plenty of time without drinking.  But when planning a girls weekend, or meeting friends for a happy hour, or watching a football game, it would certainly be odd and noticeable for me to not partake in beveraging.  I keep asking my husband, aka lifelong designated driver, if I’m an alcoholic.  His response is always, “No, but you definitely just like drinking.”  Haha.  Not to make light of alcoholism, it’s a real thing, and I know many in recovery.  But my drinking, or lack thereof, has been a real topic of conversation in my household the past year.

When drinking is a regular part of your social life, it is apparent when it is suddenly not.  It would be cool if what people suspected were true.  But it is substantially less fun when they are wrong.  When you are not drinking because you had to get two sets of methotrexate injections in your cheeks to kill the rapidly reproducing cells currently located in the wrong part of your body, and that gets processed through the liver, so you need to abstain.

For the first time, it was actually fun to pretend to be drinking, when I got the positive test in Arizona.  Because it felt different.  And we had been doing lots of interventions to support the process; baby aspirin, progesterone, acupuncture, etc. So, I was like OK, this is it!  I made a fake mimosa with club soda at my cousin’s birthday party, and secretly ordered a virgin margarita at the Tex-Mex restaurant.  Kind of a fun secret to keep.  But, by  about 5 day later, I had spotting and my hormone levels weren’t rising to normal levels, so there was already suspicion from my previous experience that this wasn’t good.  So, pretending to drink beer at my cousin’s engagement party…not nearly as fun.

I know that at this point in my life; recently married, 34, etc., when there is a drinking scenario and I am clearly not participating, I know the assumption is #knockedup.  Unfortunately, as much as I would love to be keeping that secret, and truthfully understanding why most people wait until after 12 weeks to share, because you really just don’t know, I just hate knowing that is what people are thinking.  Because in my case, it’s been either wrong, or right, but short-lived.

I just sometimes wish I was just a tea-totaler from the start and then know one would have anything to speculate about!