Secret Life: Mom Confesses to Alcoholism

April 29, 2010— -- To fans and readers, Los Angeles-based comedian and author Stefanie Wilder-Taylor was a breath of fresh air. Her laugh-out loud books, "Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay," and "Naptime Is the New Happy Hour," and her blog, "Babyonbored," seemed to champion a little liquid courage to help moms through their day.

"I wasn't saying, you know, go out and just get trashed every night, and who cares if you have kids," Wilder-Taylor, 43, said. "It was just about having fun and still maybe maintaining a little edginess to your personality."

Wilder-Taylor did just that -- keeping up a busy social schedule in Encino, Calif., while balancing her marriage to television writer husband, Jon Taylor, and her new role as mom to daughter Elby.

But the one-time cocktail crusader came to a crossroads last year when she realized her drinking was no longer just for laughs.

"There were definitely times when I felt overwhelmed, 'OK, I've got to make lunch,' at the same time I'm thinking about kindergarten," she said.

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The stress of motherhood was actually driving her to drink more and more each day.

"I always wondered if I was, you know, doing enough, being responsible enough, being nurturing enough," she said. "I think that I drank at night when the kids went to bed kind of to ease the anxiety."

Her anxiety only increased a few years later with the arrival of twins, Sadie and Matilda.

"My life went crazy. ... I had the hormones; I had three kids now at home. Well, I started drinking again with a vengeance," she said. "It spiraled really fast for me. I realized very quickly I'd gone from not drinking at all to drinking a lot, every night."

To her husband, the drinking didn't seem excessive -- even when Wilder-Taylor polished off a full bottle of wine after he had one glass.

Mom's Wakeup Call, Stunning Secret

"I rationalized it definitely to a degree," he said. "You tend to think of the extremes when you think of alcoholism when that's 3 percent of the cases. Ninety percent of the cases are people who have a hidden drinking problem. ... I think I fell into that same category where I thought alcoholism is people who are running around with a Jameson's bottle in their back pockets."

Wilder-Taylor agreed that while she didn't look the part, she knew she had a problem.

"I woke up one day and I was like, 'I'm hung over. I have three children. I'm in my 40s. This ridiculous. I'm a mess, and I need to stop,'" she said.

That hangover, which was ultimately her wakeup call, she admits, sent her to the ER.

But when that hangover subsided, she had another problem -- facing the women she once encouraged to kick back and sip martinis. Last May, she exposed herself in a blog post, entitled, "Secrets."

"I drink too much," she wrote. "It's become a nightly compulsion and I'm outing myself to you; all of you: I have a problem. I quit on Friday."

"I was crying when I wrote the post," she told "20/20." "I was thinking I was going to get judged, and that people were going to, you know, go, 'Oh my God, I can't believe you wrote books that were glamorizing drinking, and now, you know, you're an alcoholic, you know, what a hypocrite.'

Instead, she found the exact opposite. E-mails and posts poured in from moms saying they, too, suspected they had a problem, but didn't have the courage to get help.