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COCAINE'S CLUTCHES
I went on a three-day cocaine bender when I found out I was pregnant – I’d snort lines at home while son was at nursery
AFTER using cocaine for more than a decade, mum-of-one Sarah Ibrahim, 40, from Essex, outed herself as an addict on social media in a bid to get clean.
Here, she tells Eimear O'Hagan about her addiction and recovery . . .
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After tucking my son into his cot, I crept out of his room with just one thing on my mind – cocaine.
I chopped up a line with a bank card on my bedside table, inhaled and laid back on my bed.
The anxiety and stress of another day in lockdown as a single parent began to fade away.
It was May 2020 and I was in the grip of addiction, using cocaine while my then one-year- old son slept in the next room.
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By day, I was exhausted, snappy — and broke. By night, I was high.
When I think back to that dark time, I feel ashamed, guilty and embarrassed, but also deeply relieved that today I am clean and determined never, ever to be that mum again.
I started dabbling in drugs as a teenager, first with weed, then speed and later ecstasy.
In 2008 I got a job in a bar which was popular with cocaine dealers. I soon started using the drug every day — it made me feel confident and fun.
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In 2009, I enrolled at university in London as a mature student, studying for a hospitality degree.
But I was still sniffing coke daily and blew my entire student loan of £3,000 in three weeks on the drug.
It did not cross my mind I had an addiction. I believed addicts were down-and-outs, passed out on park benches.
Even though I looked terrible — my skin pale, huge bags under my eyes, my moods erratic — and was totally unreliable, calling in sick to work and even missing my mum’s 60th birthday, I believed I was in control of the drug.
Of course, it was the other way around. Life revolved around just getting through the week at work before I could get back on it, hard, again.
Becoming pregnant in early 2018 should have been the turning point, and for a time it was.
It had not been planned, it happened on a coke-fuelled one-night stand, and my immediate reaction was to have a termination.
Even though I was 36, I didn’t feel ready to be a mum. I went on a three-day bender at five weeks pregnant, something I still feel enormous shame about.
But when I sobered up I realised I couldn’t go through with an abortion. I couldn’t be someone who chose their party lifestyle over a life.
From that moment, I loved my baby, and that gave me the willpower to go cold turkey.
My pregnancy was a happy time. I felt healthy and I was never going back to cocaine.
But sadly, I did. When my son, who was born in late 2018, was three months old, I took him to a friend’s house one evening.
I was offered a line there, and I said yes — a decision I would bitterly regret.
After months of sleep deprivation, recovering from a traumatic birth and getting to grips with single parenthood, I told myself that I deserved a treat.
For a year, it was just that. Something I did every few months with friends, and naively I thought I could just dip in and out when I wanted.
Then the pandemic struck in 2020. Around the same time, I’d started my own personal coaching business, called Sarah Ibrahim — Your True North.
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Working from home with a toddler in lockdown was gruelling. I needed a release. And the voice of addiction persuaded me cocaine was that release.
While other stressed mums were having a couple of glasses of wine in the evening, I was having a few lines while my son slept.
Too high to sleep, the next day I’d be shattered, grouchy and remorseful. So I would use again the next evening to escape those feelings.
I was back in that awful, vicious cycle and it continued even after lockdown ended, with me dropping my son at nursery in the morning then going home for a line with my coffee before starting work.
By May last year I had had enough. My son was getting older and I knew cocaine was stopping me being the mum to him I desperately wanted to be.
I did not want him to grow up thinking his mum was a waste-of-space druggie.
I was not even enjoying the drug any more. I felt disgusting when I took it, there was no longer a feeling of escapism. I took my last line in May 2021, and declared that was it.
I started a course of sessions with a clinical hypnotherapist, before confessing everything to my mum.
She had her suspicions I was a drug user but had no idea about the extent of my problem.
She promised to support me, which I felt so grateful for because I had hurt her so many times with my selfish behaviour.
Life so much better
To make absolutely sure this was it, I decided to make myself accountable.
I posted on Facebook, admitting I had been a drug user for years — even as a mum — but I was now in recovery.
It was terrifying opening myself up like that, but I knew if I told everyone I was going to get clean, I would do it.
To my relief, friends and family were so supportive. I had more hypnotherapy sessions, and almost a year on I am still clean.
The voice of addiction is still in my head.
It gets louder when I am feeling low or stressed and also when happy and in the mood to celebrate. It tells me I deserve a line. But now when I hear it I think of the consequences of that line. And that stops me.
Life is so much better now. I feel healthy and rested, I have the energy and headspace for my business and motherhood, and I am the mum my son deserves.
If I had not quit cocaine, I am not sure I would even be alive any more. I fear I would have accidentally overdosed.
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I look at my son and feel so grateful he came into my life.
He saved me and pulled me out of cocaine’s clutches — and I will never go back into that darkness again.
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