Wife Mother Drunk

by Emily Redondo

Overview

Wife Mother Drunk is an intergenerational memoir recounting the author's harrowing struggle with alcoholism, tracing it back through her ancestry to the times of the pioneers when the seeds of trauma were first planted, long before they overtook her otherwise loving life.

Wife Mother Drunk is a rare feat in the now infamous genre of "quit lit" - it eschews much of the usual rhetoric around rock bottoms and happy endings to offer a far more stark and realistic view of addiction and the road to healing. After having her fourth and last baby, Emily Redonodo found herself in rehab with a breast pump and a five-week old at home. On the surface, she looked like every other suburban mom, replete with dance bags and mini van, but inside, she was in a harrowing dance with alcoholism, drinking from morning until night, stealing alcohol from liquor stores, and finding herself arrested for a DUI with a four-year old in the backseat.

Wife Mother Drunk tells the story of Emily's decades-long battle against her disease while also confronting generations of inherited trauma and addiction. As she writes, "I come from pioneers." In this incredible book, Emily investigates those dusty-earth roots to understand how women process trauma, heartbreak, and centuries of putting their children before their own well-being. As Emily untangles the web of female addiciton in her own family line, she uncovers all the ways her life has become the ultimate consequence of others' unhealed trauma.

This is a book like few others on addiction, in that Emily doesn't just wake up sober one day. After twenty institutions, all while being a stay-at-home mom raising her children, Emily walks an awkward yet gentle road towards recovery, even as she is forced to face the consequences of her own trauma, through heart-breaking diagnoses and her long-term neurolofical damage caused by alcohol.

Wife Mother Drunk is a searing, heartbreaking portrait of a woman caught in the grips of addiction but also a mother whose greatest hope is the love for her children.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781959524076
Publisher:	Rise Books
Publication date:	03/11/2025
Pages:	304
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Emily Redondo is a writer whose articles about recovery and motherhood have been published in Love What Matters, Genius Recovery, and Legacy Launchpad. She lives in Dallas, TX with her husband Pete and their four children.

Read an Excerpt

Wife Mother Drunk

Introduction

February 2011

“And how much would you say you were drinking, on average?” asked the woman standing across from me, a nurse, as she leaned against the counter and looked at her clipboard. God, I hated that question. It was worse than being asked the first day of my last period, as if I ever kept track even on my best day. And a morning start with an intake interview was a best day.

“I don’t know exactly. A lot,” I said, flatly.

For close to an hour, I sat in a sterile exam room getting asked in fifteen different ways about the alcohol problem that brought me to the inpatient rehab in February of 2011. With each question- what type, how often, how long, with or without a side of pills or powder- she took a hammer to my head and pounded me like a railroad spike made to get run over. That’s how I felt. No one’s going to be able to pull me out of this, I thought as I rehashed my secret drinking life out loud like I was confessing my worst earthly sins to a priest. And I’m not even Catholic.

“Do you have any treatment goals you’d like me to add to my notes on your behalf?”

Come on, Lady. I wanted my life back. I wanted those doctors and nurses to give me back my years of sobriety and erase the horror stories that replaced them.

“No, I can’t think of any right now,” was all I said until something caught her eye.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing to a bag on the floor next to me.

“It’s a breast pump,” I said, and the woman looked confused.

“For you?” she asked, giving a little point at my chest. I hated admitting it. The nurse wasn’t stupid, and neither was I as we looked at each other doing the math. No one gets to my level of drinking in a matter of days. It had been going on for months. Snip-its of scenes from my relapse began trickling into view behind my eyes, and the pain was excruciating. I can’t do this, it’s too much, I kept thinking. But there was no pain reliever, no alcohol to numb me.

“We aren’t set up for that here,” she said.

“Oh, I didn’t know,” I told her, fighting back the avalanche of emotions. “Sorry. I have a 9-week baby at home, and I don’t want my milk to dry up.” She didn’t say anything when I started to cry. “Please? I want to nurse him when I get home,” but I couldn’t get more words to come out. I sat there hunched over wiping snot off my nose with my sleeve- the first person to show up at the facility as a nursing mother. By a miracle, the breast pump stayed.

The first thing I noticed about my room assignment was the silence. All the other “clients” were off in classrooms or groups, and I just stood there in a maternity top and a sloppy ponytail feeling worthless. While my belongings were being searched for forbidden contraband like hairspray or pride, I sat down on the edge of my assigned twin bed and started to wonder what my newborn, my toddler, my preschooler, my daughter in elementary school, and my overworked husband were doing in that precise moment. How were they doing? Better yet, how were they doing without me?

What I would have given to be with Spenser, to see him, touch him. A few weeks prior, I was doing just that- holding him close on the couch one afternoon. I lifted him up with his full little tummy after nursing him and watched his tiny back arch in a stretch the same way his three sisters had done before him. I pulled him in nose to nose with me so I could smell his sweet baby’s breath. I was caught in the perfect moment when I took that deep breath near his lips. I smelled a faint smell of wine, and my heart stopped dead. My life froze.

If somehow I could have sunk down and vanished into that couch down to the ground below me I would have. But I sat there in a moment I couldn’t escape as I stared at him. What got into me? Who the hell was I? I begged to the silence that surrounded me to let me disappear into a cloud of nonexistence, so that those who loved me would have never crossed my path.

“Luggage,” a man said with a knock then walked away. I decided to use the pump before my afternoon schedule began. The rule clearly stated I couldn’t close my door, so I hid on the floor behind my bed and hooked up tubes with cups and funnels like a mad scientist. As soon as I flipped the switch on my 2008-model breast pump, I knew I was screwed. The machine was too loud.

One thing about rehab is people look for drama as a distraction. We can’t help it. It’s almost like a pre-programmed coping skill where we sniff out anything to talk and gossip about because God forbid we have to talk about ourselves. So I wasn’t all that surprised when random voices called out from my doorway.

“The fuck?” said a 20-something male voice at my door. I ignored it.

“Are you, like, diabetic or something?” someone else asked.

“Don’t worry about it, keep walking please,” I said, getting slightly paranoid because people were in the hallway.

“She’s the wine mom,” someone muttered right before I switched to breast pump off. I wanted to whip my head around to see who said it but flashing my freshly squeezed jugs wasn’t the drama I wanted. In my mind those words were the same as saying, she drinks for fun with all of her snobby mom friends while the kids play around by the pool. It pissed me off.

The insinuation that wine was something innocent was what sucked me back in the first place. Maybe because it looked easier, maybe because it’d be quick. All I knew as I sat there on that dirty carpet holding warm bottles of liquid gold was hole I dug for myself was too deep to even see light at the top anymore. I’d gone missing. No one really knew me at all anymore.

I buttoned my bra and adjusted my shirt before I walked into the small bathroom connected to my new bedroom. A surreal emotion crossed over me as I watched the milk meant for Spenser swirl down the drain. I looked at myself in the mirror with familiar disgust. Both sides of the reflection hated each other. It was the collision of my two separate lives.

On one side was the stay-at-home mother and wife doing just fine after a cross country move that separated me from family and friends. You could catch me tootling around in my minivan with a pretty smile, struggling with typical insecurities that came with the pressure of raising four young kids. We went to parks and played with sidewalk chalk. We grew a garden and played hide-and-seek. We had dance parties in dress-up clothes after dinner. I asked the same questions every mother did- Am I doing this right? Do the kids feel loved enough? Are they getting what they need?

But my other life was a private hell as an alcoholic so sneaky that even her own husband never saw her drink. Taking chugs of wine at 4am from hidden bottles stashed all over the house just to make it through the night, shoving it into my diaper bag at the grocery store the next morning, trying to sober up around dinner time in front of Pete then passing out reading bedtime stories only to wake up and do it all over again. That’s what wine did for me, right before it almost killed me and my son.

Was it asking too much to want a do-over? Four times a day I hooked myself up to the breast pump only to toss out the purest milk I ever produced for the baby I barely knew. My eye was on the hope of one day nursing him, but those maternal hormones wandered aimlessly in fits of uncontrollable sobs, searching for the missing piece to hold, to smell, to see. It reminded me of what I couldn’t have. I never knew grief like that.

I laid in bed at night replaying the last good-bye with my husband when we embraced before he drove back home. I wanted him to feel me saying, I’m sorry I ruined your life. I’m sorry I did it again. I’m so sorry I ruined our kids. And when we let go to say our I love you’s, what I really wanted to say was, I will fix all of this. I will get better, and when I come back, I will be me again. But I said everything on the inside, so used to feeling like the outsider.

How did I become someone so unbearable that the simple act of closing my eyes to try and sleep bolted me up every night in a terror? What the hell happened to me? Reality of who I was felt like a nonstop freight train running over me, and as insane as it sounds, I wanted alcohol to come save me and buffer all the pain.

All of it had to stop. I had to go home and get it right this time. Work harder. Get organized. Make a schedule. Make some friends. Do the steps. Clean the car. Start a scrapbook. Go to church. My entire existence depended on my decisions over the weeks to come.

But it’s hard to stay sober, no matter how much I love my kids, if I still hate myself.