I'm a 36-year-old woman and a mother of two, and alcohol has played many different roles in my life. First, when I was young, it was a way to be social and cut loose. Like a lot of college students, I spent a great deal of my college experiences drinking at bars and house parties with friends. When I graduated, it was tough to break those patterns that had become ingrained for years.
Slowly, over time, I started drinking less. When I became a parent, my drinking habits definitely cooled down for a while. Not only was I nursing a baby, but I didn't have time to go out with friends all the time, or hardly ever.
But during times of stress, I started to notice that as a mother, alcohol began to take on a new role in my life, slowly but surely. It crept in quietly and almost instinctively. I started drinking for a very different reason, and rarely was it to have fun or be more social. I started drinking when I was stressed or overwhelmed.
The good news was, just about every mom I knew did the same thing.
Truthfully, I didn't think much about it at all. When I had a rough day at home with the baby, I'd down a bottle of wine in an evening without a second thought. At 25, I was a young and active mom, though, and I didn't feel the effects of my alcohol consumption much, minus maybe being a little slow in the morning.
Years went by, and I was always drinking when I was stressed. But the thing is, I was always stressed. By the time I was 29, I had two young kids at home with me all day and was also trying to work part-time. For me, being a work-at-home mom never felt like a great fit. It was so demanding. So constant. I never felt like I had a break. But being constantly weighed down meant that I was pretty much always drinking.
It didn't help matters that my marriage wasn't in great standing, either. But because my husband also enjoyed his wine and beer, at least we had something to do together. But I started to realize that drinking was pretty much the only thing we enjoyed doing together anymore. The truth was that after a couple of glasses of wine, I cared less about all of the things I was really feeling — frustrated, sad, lonely, and maybe longing a bit for a different life.
All of the moms I knew drank, though. We all talked about how stressed we were on the regular. And plus, during the most stressful parts of my parenting journey, I noticed something happening on social media — something that made me feel completely and totally normal. It was mommy wine culture. And it was everywhere.
At the time, mommy wine culture was a new thing. There weren't that many critics of it out there. Or if there were, I certainly wasn't listening to them. Each day, I'd plop down on the couch after running all over the place with the kids, and I'd crack open a bottle of wine, which I knew I'd finish, and at the same time, I'd be scrolling through drunk mom memes or posts about drinking from friends. It just made me feel understood that other moms were drinking on the same level. And I appreciated the fact that I had comrades.
Over the years, no matter how much I drank, I realized that I was truly unhappy in my marriage. Alcohol can mask the truth for only so long. My husband and I either fought or simply powered through. But there weren't times when we were happy together, even when we were drinking. We made the choice to end our marriage. It was enormously painful, of course, but once it was all said and done, I noticed that my drinking began to slow down.
The slowdown, which happened naturally, gave me the opportunity to step back. It made me realize what I had been doing and how much of a crutch it had become.
When I didn't have as much to escape from, instead of drinking a bottle of wine a night, I could manage to drink far less. I could enjoy a glass or two when I was happy. Sometimes, I wouldn't drink at all and was still perfectly content. And because I also had time away from the kids — a break I could've used while I was married — I was less stressed and enjoying life on many different levels. I had more personal freedom, more space, and just more time for me. It was a bit like drinking, only better.
Drinking was a far easier solution than leaving my marriage. Or at least, I thought it was, so I kept up my unhealthy drinking patterns for years before reaching my absolute breaking point. But the habits that I formed during the early days of motherhood and during my marriage — drinking during times of stress and self-medicating with alcohol — are never far from me. They are incredibly easy to fall back on.
Pretty much any time I'm struggling with something, alcohol is my go-to. The fact that mommy wine culture is still everywhere doesn't help me avoid the pattern, either. It's too easy to think "everyone does this" than actually address what is wrong. Sometimes, the problems are too hard to fix anyway. Sometimes, it's just life with kids. It's being a single mom. It's PMS. It's breakups.
The big difference now is that I have a real conversation going on in my head — one that tells me that sometimes I need to take a step back.
I haven't given up drinking, and I'm not sure that's something I'll ever do, though I'm not ruling it out whatsoever. But I do think about my drinking differently now. It's hard to laugh it off as "moms love wine" when the truth is, most of the time, I'm not drinking for fun. I'm drinking to avoid something. I'm drinking because I'm hurting in one way or another, big or small.
The way that I have used drinking as a form of stress relief over the years is something I think about now all the time, and I don't need to avoid it. It's something I see other people do, too, but just because so many people do it doesn't mean it's not a problem. It just means we've normalized it so that we don't have to address that problem.
These days, when I see mommy wine memes, I kind of cringe (even if I have a glass of wine in my hand) because I know how that mentality impacted me. I know that it helped me to avoid things things that I should've been brave enough to confront. And while sometimes I still use alcohol as a crutch, I also know that noticing what's wrong with our collective acceptance of alcohol abuse is a pretty important step. It's also one that helps me to look right in the eye of what's plaguing me and stop running when all I want to do is drown my sorrows.
