And by drunk mom, I don’t mean the fun mom who starts dancing with her kids after she’s had a margarita or two at a backyard barbecue or the mom who might need to Uber home after a three-glasses-of-wine dinner on a Saturday night to relieve the babysitter.
I’m talking about a bottle-hiding, pill-eating, Tylenol-taking, Visine-using, pregaming, airplane bottles in her purse-having kind of mom. A mom who wants to stop drinking for her kids’ sake but can’t. A mom who is spiraling down into an addiction so utterly evil that it consumes her entirely. That kind of drunk mom.
After my two sons were born back-to-back in 1998 and 1999, I immediately knew something wasn’t right. When I timidly told my OB-GYN of my symptoms: sleeplessness, anxiety and bouts of unexplained sadness, he casually suggested a glass of wine at night and gave me a prescription for Ambien.
Instead of seeking a second opinion, I started treating my symptoms as he suggested. In my mind, I drank the wine and took the pills in order to show up for my life and my family, not to escape them. Pills and booze seemed to be a fantastic solution for what I now understand was undiagnosed postpartum depression.
After talk show host Wendy Williams dropped the bombshell last week[1] that she had been to treatment for an undisclosed addiction and was living in a sober house, news outlets rushed to cover her story.
All the major networks started playing clips from her previous shows: her 2017 Halloween fainting episode (which is really horrifying); her to-camera statement that she was dealing with Graves’ disease, a condition that affects how the thyroid is regulated; and her recent apology statement about needing to take time off because of a shoulder