Drink, and leave the world unseen.

—JOHN KEATS, Ode to a Nightingale

By the time my maternity leave ended and it was time to go back to ABC, I was beginning to slip back into my habit of drinking a glass or two of white wine every night. I had to manage it carefully, since I was still breastfeeding. I would only have a drink after I had nursed Sam and had enough milk pumped so that I had the whole night to sleep. I had been assured by my doctor that any alcohol would dissipate by the morning, when I would nurse again before going to the office, my breast pump and empty bottles in tow.

I was happy to get back to work, even though I felt that same guilt I had with Zachary each day as I left for the office. But once again, I had no choice. There were bills to pay: a mortgage, child care for both children—all these expenses were my responsibility. I was beginning to feel resentful having to carry that financial burden alone. But I couldn’t seem to find a way to talk to Marc about it. The topic of money had become a third rail in our marriage—untouchable. Deadly.

I was incredibly lucky to have my job as co-host of 20/20. I loved it, and I was well paid. Perhaps the tension over money was a symptom of bigger issues in the marriage. I no longer felt safe and taken care of. I felt alone, and frightened of all the responsibility on my shoulders. Like so many working mothers, I took on a heavy load: working all day, running the household, breastfeeding a baby, being present for my three-year-old, and taking care of the finances. And at the end of each day, I felt I had earned my glass of wine as my reward.

Returning to work also meant adjusting to the reality of my new, diminished role at ABC. By now it was clear to me that relinquishing the anchor chair to Charlie was the best thing for me and for the network. But it didn’t make it any easier as I kept bumping into constant reminders that my status had changed. When I asked to interview the president, I was told the network would no longer put my name forward. “Charlie will be doing that,” they said, or, “That one is going to Diane.” My brief tenure near the top of the list for the big interviews was over. I wasn’t even on any list any longer. I had lost my front row seat to history, and I missed it terribly. I tried to focus on doing the best work I could, but now that the shock of my demotion had worn off and the excitement of giving birth had mellowed, the sting of what had happened took over.

I personalized it. I forgot that nearly everyone in television news has had a ride on the wheel—up and then down, and then perhaps up again. I felt like a failure, and it was my fault. I wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t tough enough. I didn’t work hard enough. It was unfair. The thoughts played over and over in my insecure, anxious psyche.

I didn’t tell anyone how inadequate I felt—how much like a loser I believed I was. I kept it hidden inside. The only thing that could hold back the bad feelings for a while was alcohol. For a few hours each night, things would be all right. The anxiety and resentment would soften and recede just enough to make it bearable. But the cocoon of a white wine buzz can only take you so far. I was isolated in it, and outside it, my untended problems festered and grew. Alcohol robbed me of the ability to see others—like Marc—and understand what they might be feeling or going through. Drinking to escape was profoundly selfish, and all those unresolved resentments and worries metastasized while I drank to ignore them. My lifelong habit of running from whatever made me anxious or hurt was beginning to backfire. Because now I was running to the refrigerator to pour that glass of wine—sighing with satisfaction as I took that first sip. It was a pattern of escape that would continue for the next three years.

For the most part drinking quieted my emotions; drinking didn’t make me loud or angry, except for a few occasions, like the Nanny Crisis of 2009…

It was nine p.m. Sunday night in late November, Thanksgiving week. The boys were in bed, and Marc was on the road. I was getting everything ready for work the next day, packing my research into my big bag, setting out the cereal bowls for breakfast, and oh yes, sipping my third massive glass of chardonnay. By this time, I was counting my glasses because Marc had begun to notice and protest again that I was drinking too much. So each glass I poured was really more like one and a half—filled to the brim. I had nearly drained the glass when I checked my email and noticed a message from the new nanny, who was supposed to start work the next day. “I have changed my mind about working for your family,” it read. “I think I would like to work as a governess instead of as a nanny, so I will not be there tomorrow morning. Thank you anyway for the offer.”

I nearly dropped my wineglass. In just a few hours I had to go to work. The sitter sleeping over that night needed to leave in the morning, and I had no one to watch my children. I had no plan B, no family to call—they all lived on the west coast—and no one I knew who could help me out. I know this was a luxury problem—I was lucky to be able to afford a nanny to help me juggle a demanding career with two young children. But this everyday crisis nearly every working mother has had to face completely threw me. All my carefully laid plans were out the window and my husband was out of town. I started to panic, and started to get really, really angry at how out of control my domestic three-ring circus felt. I reached for the phone and called the agency that I had paid a handsome sum to screen and vet this “governess.” I let loose with my wine-fueled fury. “Are you fucking kidding me?? What kind of agency is this? This woman is canceling on me less than twelve hours before she is supposed to arrive—this is unacceptable!!” I screamed into the phone. “Fix this now!”

I was beyond reasoning. Underneath, I was anxious, stressed, and overwhelmed—what was I going to do? But my three jumbo servings of wine made it impossible for me to handle this maturely or thoughtfully. All I could do was yell at the poor, apologetic woman on the other line. Zachary heard me and twice got out of bed to walk into the kitchen. He was frightened. “Mommy, is everything okay?” I am ashamed to admit that I didn’t comfort him or hug him. I just turned and told him to go back to bed so I could continue my rant on the phone.

That night was my first binge. I waited for several hours for the woman from the agency to make calls and find someone who could show up the next morning to work. As I waited, I drank more. Seething, sipping, fuming, pouring. By the time I got a call around midnight telling me that a nanny named Beverly would arrive the next morning at seven a.m. to work, I had consumed six large glasses of wine. I went to bed drunk that night (thank God my children were not home alone with me) and woke up so hungover I could barely show our new nanny around.

For the first time, running to the gym and sweating out the alcohol was not an option. There was no way I could make it. I tried drinking Gatorade, but I was too nauseated. My head was pounding, and I had the shakes. I had never felt this bad before. I could barely function at work. When I finally got home Monday night, I walked straight to the refrigerator and, with trembling hands, poured myself a glass of wine. It finally steadied my hands and stopped my pounding heart. This must be what they mean when they say “hair of the dog,” I thought. Something shifted for me that night, in a dreadful way. I lost my footing and skidded on my backside down a dangerous slope, down into a ditch where drinking more was the only solution I could find to easing my hangover. It would take me years to claw my way back out.

When Marc came home the following day, in the morning, I was still in bed, and he could see that I was very sick from all the alcohol. I went to my doctor, who promptly admitted me into the hospital. I spent a day and two nights that Thanksgiving week in a private room, under a pseudonym, getting IV rehydration and Ativan. Once the wine wore off, I was shocked and horrified at what I had done. When the nurse came in to check my vital signs, I could barely make eye contact. Marc came to visit with the boys, who knew only that Mommy was sick. When Zachary walked in he had tears in his eyes—he was scared for me. I felt so profoundly guilty as I hugged him and reassured them both that I would be home tomorrow.

I had failed at the most sacred task assigned me—being a good mother. You would have thought that enormous guilt and shame would have led me to swear off alcohol forever. You would be wrong.

I went on to spend the next two years on a campaign of mostly controlled drinking, sprinkled with bouts of sobriety and a handful of terrifying binges. The biggest problem was that I still did not believe I was an alcoholic. I was deeply steeped in denial. I have a drinking problem, I thought. I sometimes drink too much. But I am not an alcoholic. It’s so crazy that as I write it, I can’t believe I thought that. But I did, and that kept me from ever seeking help or advice from the very people who knew best how to deal with it: other alcoholics.

Instead, I lived with my secret. I kept doing my job—usually to everyone’s satisfaction. I was leading a double life: one as a network news anchor, traveling the world, reporting stories, in front of an intense and unforgiving television camera lens; the other as a woman who was sneaking drinks and hiding it from her husband and her friends. I would be able to string together a few days, sometimes a few weeks, without drinking, and then one night, the thought would pop into my head that it sure would be nice to have a glass of wine before going home from the office. Next thing you know, I was off to the races—perched on a tall stool in an elegant bar, ordering a drink. But try as I might to recapture the amber glow of sipping chardonnay, secret drinking wasn’t quite as nice. What used to be luxurious now felt faintly pathetic. I worried that people would notice me sitting and imbibing alone, so I would pretend to be waiting for someone, even feigning a phone call from my phantom friend. “Oh that’s all right,” I would say gaily into the dead cell phone pressed to my ear. “I just sat down. Take your time. I will meet you there!” I would also take great care to vary the places I went, fearful I would see someone I knew or that the bartender would notice I had been there a few too many times and tip off the gossip columns. WHAT NETWORK NEWS ANCHOR DRINKS ALONE EVERY NIGHT BEFORE HEADING HOME TO HER FAMILY? The possible headlines made me shudder. But what is astonishing is that the fear of being exposed didn’t make me stop. It reminds me of something I read in the book of Alcoholics Anonymous: “However intelligent we may have been in other respects, where alcohol has been involved we have been strangely insane.” Instead, I would usually order a second glass, check to make sure I had some breath mints, and then head home… my self-imposed isolation growing, along with my lies. My sister tells me it was around this time that I began to disappear from their lives. My secret life—my drinking, my anxiety, my unhappiness, my insecurity—wrapped me up tight. I was caught in a straitjacket of my own making. I did not tell anyone what I was feeling. I did not tell anyone that I was drinking too much to escape those feelings. I didn’t call my parents and seek their comfort. I didn’t visit my brother or sister to confide in them or ask for their help. I just kept drinking and let everything, and everyone, slip away.

It wasn’t until the summer of 2011 that my sister realized there was a problem. She came to visit us in New York, where we were renting a house for a few weeks near the beach. When she arrived with her children after their long trip from Seattle, she knew immediately something was wrong. I was sleepy, and seemed out of it. She was baffled and hurt. She tells me I was a shell of a person, so deep in my own misery I was oblivious to her and everything that was going on in her life—her recent, painful divorce, her struggle to adjust to her new reality, even the eight-hour trip she had just taken with three young children. I took Aimie upstairs and cried and told her how unhappy I was in my marriage, and that I was worried I was drinking too much. Then, exhausted by my confession and the wine I had been drinking steadily that afternoon and evening, I went to sleep. Aimie was shaken. She went downstairs and confronted Marc.

“How long has this been going on?” she demanded. “How long has she been drinking like this?” When Marc told her it had been happening now for a few years, Aimie was distraught.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you say anything to us?”

Aimie says Marc replied, “I didn’t think it was my story to tell.” I don’t know why Marc never reached out to my family. He was certainly telling his own family and friends about my drinking. Perhaps he just didn’t know how to help me and never thought to enlist their support. It is easy to look back with critical eyes. It’s not so easy to be in the middle of it all, as he was, wondering how on earth to make it better. Either way, I was not yet willing to admit I needed help, at least not out loud, and you cannot force someone to get help if they are not willing to get it.

Aimie called my mom and dad, and my brother Chris to tell them what was happening. Chris and my parents began to reach out. But I still didn’t want to hear their suggestions or seek treatment. Once I sobered up on that trip with Aimie, I didn’t want to talk anymore about my unhappiness or my drinking. The small opening I had allowed that first night was now closed. I didn’t want to share anymore, and I did not want anyone lecturing me about drinking.

Looking back, it is clear that somewhere along the line, some switch had been flipped. While I had been able early in my marriage to control and cut back my drinking, now it was a struggle. Once I started, I didn’t want to stop. I looked upon Marc—and his well-founded criticism of how I drank—as my enemy, someone to be thwarted, certainly not someone in whom I could confide my worries that something was wrong with me—namely, the realization that I could not seem to find another way to ease my stress and calm my anxiety. I drank to escape my unhappiness in our marriage, the loneliness I was feeling in it. And drinking just made the marriage even worse, driving the wedge between us deeper, making it impossible to fix our growing isolation from each other.

Any attempts at controlled drinking went out the window completely when I traveled overseas for work. Then I would find myself liberated by the anonymity of hotel bars in different countries, and I would once again find myself drinking to excess. There was a trip to India to do a story on gendercide—how some families there are rampantly aborting or abandoning baby girls because having a boy brought money and prestige, and having a girl would cost the family an expensive dowry. I drank the entire trip. It was a tremendously important story, and we worked hard at bringing it alive. We visited a village where there were no young women, only men, wondering who they’d ever find to marry. We confronted an operator of an illegal ultrasound clinic, who had a brisk business telling mothers the gender of their unborn baby, so they could then terminate the pregnancy if it was a girl. I grilled government officials on the halfhearted attempts to enforce the laws against gendercide. And yet, when I watch that report, I don’t feel proud. I cringe. I look puffy and pale in several of the interviews. I explained it away—it was a grueling shoot in 100-degree temperatures. We all had jet lag, and everyone had food poisoning (actually, I was the only one who didn’t; maybe all the booze killed the bacteria).

I was sure my producer and crew must have known I was drinking every night, but no one said a word. I drank the whole long flight home from Delhi. By the time I landed, the combination of too much wine and too little sleep left me unable even to answer the customs agent’s questions. “How long were you in India, ma’am?” I stared at him, mute, wracking my foggy brain. How long had I been gone? The agent looked at me closely, then sighed, stamped my passport, and waved me through. I went home, walked in the door, and went straight to bed to sleep off the trip. No hello hugs for the boys, who were eating dinner in the kitchen; no exciting stories of my trip far away. Just another hangover to sleep off, another important moment with my family that I missed. There are so, so many of those moments, and I will never, ever get them back.

If there is any doubt in your mind that alcoholism is a disease, know this: I would die for my children. I love them more than anything in the world. Yet I could not stop drinking for them. I could not stop as the look on my husband’s face morphed from dismay to disgust as he saw what I was doing. I could not stop to fix my marriage. I could not stop to save my life. I would not accept that I needed to do something dramatic to change this devastating trajectory. Not until spring break 2012.

That year we took the boys to West Palm Beach, Florida. Warm weather, soft air, gentle waves, family—what could be nicer? I arranged five glorious days of sun and sea. We boarded the plane, and I stowed the tennis rackets and the Frisbees in the overhead compartment and settled in for a few rounds of the card game Rat-a-Tat Cat with Sam, who was sitting next to me.

Suddenly, a thought occurred: I have worked hard to pay for this vacation. Wouldn’t it be nice to have an afternoon cocktail on the way there? And so it came to be that the orange juice I was sipping was spiked with vodka by the accommodating flight attendant, up in the galley, where no one could see. By the time we landed and checked into the hotel, I was no longer planning games on the beach; I was plotting how to get another drink. In the process, I ended up actually drinking more than I intended—gulping down mimosas while Marc played tennis, swigging a glass of wine before he and the boys returned from a quick swim. I even resorted to drinking a beer, which I detest, because it was the only alcohol left in the mini bar. (By day 3 I had consumed every alcoholic beverage in there.)

My fantasy family week descended into a hellish few days at the end where instead of feeling close to my children and husband, I felt—in whatever passed for more lucid moments—terribly sad and apart, lying all by myself in bed in a darkened room, drinking, drinking, drinking.

Sam would bound in from the beach, smelling of sand and sunscreen, heat radiating off his little body. “Mommy, Mommy!” he would say, standing next to my pillow. “When are you going to get out of bed?” Not even my intense love for him and Zachary could save me from the consequences of all I had consumed. I was exhausted. When I drink, I get sleepy… so sleepy I simply cannot stay awake. Most people would call it passing out, but it wasn’t like I dropped to the floor. I would say “I need to go to bed now,” and then nothing—nothing—could get me up until I had slept it off.

Marc was furious, and he had every right to be. Thank God he was a wonderful father to the boys—he spent hours with them at the pool and on the beach, distracting them for a little while from wondering why I wasn’t with them. And he had his hands full taking care of me. I wasn’t eating, and once again, I was sick from all that alcohol. He arranged through the hotel concierge for a nurse to come see me and make sure I was hydrated. By the time the vacation I had longed for—and then ruined—was over, I could no longer deny that I had a big problem. I was beginning to grow afraid, deep down inside, that I really was powerless over alcohol, that I was losing myself and everyone I loved to it.

When I got home, I summoned up all my courage, called my friend Dana, and told her I needed help. She works in the music business and has known plenty of people who had struggled with addiction. Most importantly, she was the only person in my life at that point who passed no judgment on my appalling behavior. “I love you,” she said. “I know a great place for you to go. I will make a call. No matter what you decide to do, I am here for you.”

Within days, Dana called back and told me about a treatment center in Utah called Cirque Lodge. She said it was very discreet and highly recommended, and it had an opening for a twenty-eight-day stay. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Twenty-eight days? I can’t get that kind of time off from work.” This is how crazy I was, how deep my denial ran. I was finally willing to get help, but I didn’t want to tell anyone what I was doing. I somehow convinced Cirque that I could only come for two weeks, because I could not tell ABC News where I was going. In my mind I had an alcohol problem. I wasn’t an alcoholic, so I didn’t need the full program. I was dipping my toe into recovery, when I should have been jumping in like my hair was on fire (and figuratively, it was). I told my bosses I needed some surgery—nothing life threatening, but definitely requiring a couple weeks off. I told no one where I was going—only Marc, Dana, and my parents, brother, and sister knew. At the end of April, just weeks after our disastrous trip to Florida, I packed my bags and headed to Utah for my secret stab at sustaining sobriety.