The next time you’re on the freeway and see an otherwise well-put-together woman driving a bit erratically, it could very well be that you’re witnessing a high-functioning alcoholic. Moms who get together for social activities may be secret imbibers – and you’d never know it to look at them. At home, alone or with family, wives and mothers may tip back way too many drinks and see nothing wrong at all with their behavior.

These examples could easily describe Brenda Wilhelmson, the author of Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife.

It isn’t that Wilhelmson ever specifically did any of these things while under the influence of alcohol. In other words, this isn’t an indictment of the author. But reading her diary or memoir, you get the idea that if something calamitous didn’t happen during her days of drinking, it was sheer luck.

Wilhelmson takes the reader on a journey of when she made the decision to quit drinking or, rather, to cut down on drinking, to take a break from drinking. Whatever she chose to call it, the fact remains that Wilhelmson found herself getting tanked far too often – like every day – and the kind of irresponsible behavior she exhibited toward her husband and children finally started to gnaw at her conscience.

Good thing she sort of got religion.

But Wilhelmson didn’t go in for treatment. She took the route that many daily drinkers take who don’t really believe they have a drinking problem. She went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. And she didn’t start going right away.

There’s an awful lot of denial that goes on when someone first sets foot in the rooms of 12-step groups. If it’s the first visit, and not following rehab but just because a person wants to see what this is all about and maybe they can get some tips on how to curb their drinking, the tendency is to want to run right out of there.

After all, these are meetings for a bunch of losers and weirdoes – at least, that’s what Wilhelmson told herself on many an occasion. To be honest, and she is, Wilhelmson says that she didn’t feel that way at all meetings, just some meetings.

To her credit, and this is something that everyone who starts going to meetings should keep in mind, Wilhelmson had the good sense to mix it up. When one meeting turned her off, either due to the combination of people or what they had to say or someone continually harping on a certain theme, Wilhelmson found another meeting. She didn’t stop going to meetings.

While reading through Diary of an Alcoholic Housewife, it’s very easy to come to the conclusion that Wilhelmson didn’t really have it all that bad. She escapes disaster – fortunately – and gradually begins to feel more comfortable in her chosen life of sobriety.

Like most people new to sobriety, however, the cravings and urges don’t stop just because Wilhelmson decided to give drinking a break. Any little thing could set her off, cause her mind to tempt her with the possibility that just one drink couldn’t hurt, having just a little wine with her husband and friends over for one of their frequent dinner parties probably would be okay. Sometimes it was a particularly frazzling day with her kids, or when her husband, a workaholic, left everything at home for her to do and it just didn’t seem fair. Why not take that drink?

Over and over the reader finds little snippets of how Wilhelmson managed to make it through yet another day without resorting to drinking again. Getting ready to go on a trip to Budapest with her husband, Wilhelmson tells herself that she’ll probably drink over there. She’d always kept it in the back of her mind that drinking was going to be part of her routine while traveling. She’d teetotal again on her return home.

Curiously, what happened turned out to be anything but drinking in Budapest. As Wilhelmson told her fellow 12-step group members at a meeting prior to leaving, she’d had eight months of sobriety and didn’t want to have that feeling of starting all over again. She also didn’t want to experience the hangovers and nastiness that goes along with drinking too much. There! Just voicing her thoughts made her feel incredibly better. It was as if a huge weight had been lifted. Now, she didn’t feel at all reluctant to keep to her pledge of abstinence. In fact, she felt great.

Once in Budapest, Wilhelmson was able to travel about with her husband, enjoy great dinners and still not partake in any wine or sherry or liquor. A revelation came, however, when the waiter at one fine restaurant was about to pour her some sherry and her husband’s hand shot over her glass and he blurted out, “No.” Wilhelmson hissed to her spouse that she could handle it. From then on, when the waiter came by, he was not told to stop and he poured white and red wine for Wilhelmson and her husband. She was able to leave it sitting there without being tempted in the least. What this experience taught her was that while she had told her parents and her sister she was in recovery, she hadn’t told anyone else. This was still something she had to deal with – and it was uncomfortable for her.

But it wasn’t all roses for Wilhelmson for the rest of the book. She’d been dealing with the emotional roller-coaster of her terminally-ill father, along with her own feelings of depression every now and then. Sometimes, she just wanted a drink. Here’s Wilhelmson on one occasion, describing her feelings: “I felt depressed and went to a meeting. The guy who spoke said he drank because he didn’t want to grow up. I can totally relate. Drinking allowed me to cut loose, feel free, forget my responsibilities. I still fondly remember feeling that way.”

But she didn’t have a fondness for the hangovers, loss of memory, the bouts of dangerous driving, and her abdication of responsibilities that became so apparent once she sobered up. Wilhelmson says, simply, “It’s funny how easily I remember the good times and have to work hard at conjuring up the bad. I can love sobriety one day, then think about drinking the next.”

And that is it in a nutshell. Recovery isn’t a straight line. Just because a person is in recovery – even for a year or longer (and Wilhelmson made that milestone, by the way), it doesn’t mean that he or she is going to be free of the unexpected and perhaps overwhelming urge to take a drink again. Sobriety is an ongoing deliberate choice.

It does get better. You do become more practiced in your coping skills and techniques over time. All it really takes is working the steps of recovery one day at a time – starting today, here and now.

If it’s one thing to take from this book by Wilhelmson, it’s to live in the moment and work your recovery today. After all, we live in the here and now. The past is gone and the future has yet to arrive. This seems like excellent advice.