🤫 Confess💬 General
I Drank Garri Water for Dinner So My Children Could Eat. Alcohol Took Everything Else.
Q
Quick Mamba from Osogbo
about 2 months ago
I was 44, a building contractor in Kaduna, and I had a wife and three children. By 2019 I was drinking two bottles of ogogoro every night, sometimes more when the day was bad. I did not see it as a problem because I still went to site every morning. The problem was that I was not really there. It started small. One bottle to help me sleep after chasing contracts and debtors. Then it became a bottle before I could face the site. I would hide the empty bottles inside cement bags and throw them in different bins so my wife would not count them. She knew anyway. She just stopped asking. By 2021 I had sold my father's land in Zaria to cover what I called business loans. I had sold my wife's gold earrings. I had borrowed from three different cooperative societies and defaulted on all of them. The day my youngest son asked me why we were eating garri and sugar for dinner, I told him it was because of the economy. That was a lie. The low point was a Tuesday in March 2022. I had collected 180,000 naira from a client for roofing sheets. I never bought the sheets. I drank and gambled it at a betting shop near Ahmadu Bello Way in two days. When the client called, I told him the supplier disappointed me. He shouted so loud my wife heard everything from the kitchen. That night she packed her things and took the children to her sister's place in Zaria. She did not cry. She just looked at me like I was a stranger and said, "I cannot watch you kill yourself and call it work." I stayed in that empty house for three weeks with nothing but the smell of my own sweat and the sound of my own breathing. I could not even drink because I had no money. That was the first time I realized I had never stopped drinking because I wanted to. I stopped because I had to. I joined a small fellowship at St. Gerard's in 2022. Not because I suddenly became holy. I joined because an old friend from my secondary school days dragged me there and would not let me disappear. One man in that group had been sober for eleven years. He did not preach to me. He just gave me his number and told me to call him every morning before I did anything else. I called him for eight months. Some mornings I lied and said I was fine. He knew. He still picked up. I am four years sober now. My wife came back after fourteen months. We are not the same people. We are quieter and more careful with each other. My children still look at me sometimes like they are waiting for the old man to return. I do not blame them. What I want to say to anyone reading this is simple. Addiction does not announce itself. It moves in slowly, wearing the clothes of stress relief and hard work. By the time you notice, you have already sold things you cannot buy back. If you are hiding bottles, hiding receipts, hiding yourself, please talk to somebody today. Not tomorrow. Today.
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