Redneck Woman by Gretchen Wilson & Allen Rucker

Author:Gretchen Wilson & Allen Rucker [WILSON, GRETCHEN]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO005000
ISBN: 9780446506779
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2007-09-01T04:00:00+00:00

Then another life-changing event occurred, one probably as important as any before or after, with the obvious exception of the birth of my daughter, Grace. If I hadn’t gone through this change, though, I might never have gotten to the point where I had either a career or a loving family.

One bleary-eyed day, I woke up after another hard night, probably around two or three in the afternoon. Not for the first time, I couldn’t remember what I’d done the night before; I had blacked out. I knew that I had been very mean and verbally hurtful to my husband the previous evening, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why if you put a gun to my head. I just knew that he wouldn’t look at me or speak to me, a pretty good sign that I had stepped, or stumbled, over the line again.

It wasn’t a big, traumatic event like a car wreck or falling down a flight of stairs that made me come to my senses. It was a look in the mirror. I went into the bathroom, washed my face and brushed my teeth, then just kind of stared at myself in the mirror for probably two or three minutes. I was more than a little disgusted. I was fed up with myself and the sorry way my life was going, and decided then and there to do something about it.

I was going to quit drinking.

I got out the Nashville phone book and started looking for a place where I could get some help. I landed on a recovery center called the Serenity House. It had a kind of AA-type walk-in (or outpatient) program and it was not that far from my house. So I started going to a meeting there at seven o’clock every morning while still bartending at Bourbon Street at night and not getting home until three or after. Needless to say, after years of working and singing in bars, I was not used to rising before the Today show went on the air. It took some getting used to.

I knew I was playing a dangerous game—in fact, I was committing the unforgivable sin of AA. I was trying to get sober and stay sober while I still worked behind a bar! All the other recovering alcoholics in the room told me that I was crazy and would never stop drinking under the circumstances. I needed the job, desperately, and I needed to quit drinking, desperately, so I had no choice. I had to do both things at the same time.

I chose the early-morning meetings for a particular reason. Many of the later meetings would either get too religious for my tastes or would often turn into giant whine fests. Listening to someone else talk about their miserable life didn’t seem to give me much encouragement to turn mine around. If anything, it only brought home how messed up my own life had become.

The early-bird seven A.M. meetings were where the old guys, the lifelong recovering alcoholics, would congregate daily.

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