By Madeline Holler.
This spring, writer Stephanie Wilder-Taylor dropped a
bombshell: she had quit drinking.
A mother of three daughters — 4-year-old Elby and twins toddlers,
Matilda and Sadie — Wilder-Taylor wrote on her personal blog
Baby on
Bored:
"… I really like to drink. I like the way wine softens the
edges, smoothes out the line between "their time" and
"my time," helps me to feel relaxed, helps me tune out.
But I drink too much. I drink seven nights a week. Sometimes just a
glass of wine but usually two or even three. I always seem to have
some sort of excuse like "today was an exceptionally stressful
day so I deserve an extra glass now that it's all done … For
me, it's become a nightly compulsion and I'm outing myself
to you; all of you: I have a problem."
Moms with a drinking problem are nothing new (Joan Crawford, Betty
Ford, Courtney Love, I could go on), but Wilder-Taylor's
announcement was such a shocker for four very specific reasons: her
two published and one forthcoming books Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay; Naptime is the New Happy Hour; and
It's Not Me It's You (subtitled:
Subjective Recollections from a Terminally Optimistic,
Chronically Sarcastic and Ocassionally Inebriated Woman),
and her blog for MommyTrack'd
Make Mine a Double: Tales of Twins and Tequila.
Wilder-Taylor liked to drink and had built a reputation on a stiff
mix of booze and babies. By giving up alcohol, she was dropping a
key ingredient of the persona she had created. She was also
exposing the darker side of this parenting generation's
signature drink — the always-appropriate cocktail.
This new generation of parents had defined itself, a drink in one
hand and a teething ring in the other. Earlier this
decade, Wilder-Taylor had been part of a welcome revolution, one in
which moms and dads, rather than big publishers, puritanical
doctors and unimaginative magazine editors, were writing the last
word on motherhood.
With my first pregnancy and birth in 2001, the go-to information
for pregnant and new moms was all What to Expect When You're Expecting
directives, such as eating toasted wheat germ on ice cream or
asking my husband to sit in a closet to eat a pudding parfait. That
and the Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy, whose author
insisted a necktie and my husband's dress shirts made for kicky
maternity wear.
Glossy magazines like Parents,
Parenting and American
Baby wrote "sleep when the baby sleeps" a
thousand different ways. Editors featured page after page of
pictorials demonstrating how to do yoga poses with a newborn
balanced on my knees. Helpful? I suppose. Relatable? Not in the
least.
Flash-forward to my second pregnancy in 2004. Whoa! Now who was in
charge? Moms. Swearing, grousing, eye-rolling, totally imperfect
moms, who, if the book jackets and titles meant anything, were
nursing babies and cocktails — often at the same time.
Wilder-Taylor's Sippy Cups wasn't the first writer
to bring parenting and drinking together in an aggressively blasé
way. Two years before, Christie Mellor published The Three-Martini Playdate, soon followed by the
Three-Martini Family Vacation. The cover of Brett
Paesel's 2006 Mommies Who Drink: Sex, Drugs, and Other Distant Memories
of an Ordinary Mom, copied Goodnight Moon's line-drawings and color
scheme — only the quiet old lady whispering hush was loaded and
wearing a lampshade. Somewhere in there, Robert Wilder wrote
Daddy Needs a Drink.
So Daddy had a drink. Or two. Mommy did as well.
Alcohol-spiked words flowed, especially online in the most revolutionary form of parental expression: blogs. The "momtini" was coined. Blogger parents went on the Today Show to defend knocking back adult beverages at the end of the day. In "Cosmopolitan Moms," the New York Times featured an affluent suburban Philadelphia playgroup, which met weekly for wine and gross motor development.
This new generation of parents had defined itself, a drink in one
hand and a teething ring in the other. The What to Expect books were now oversized coasters,
keeping a dozen sweating cocktails from ruining the
furniture.
So what does it mean that a defender of drinking-mom culture was admitting she had a problem? Did this casual attitude about parenting and drinking convince new parents they could raise the next generation completely sloshed?
If it did, then readers missed the point, the Three-Martini's Mellor says. Drinking, one of
the few enjoyable grown-up activities that parents legally
can't share with their young children, is a metaphor.
"No, I am not encouraging my readers to down a fifth of vodka
at their toddler's playdate, it's about reclaiming our
lives as adults," Mellor wrote in an email. "It used to
be that when we had children they became part of the family. Now
children are the shining center of the family's universe. I
don't think it's helpful to the children, and I don't
think it's good for parents either."
Tinkling cocktail parties represented adulthood for Mellor.
"At the time I wrote my first two books, it seemed to be the
right metaphor; then suddenly bookstore shelves were groaning under
the weight of amusing alcohol-themed parenting books. And now those
authors who took their own advice too literally are jumping from
the bandwagon to the wagon. The fact is, my books aren't about
drinking; they're about not centering your entire life around
your children."
Talking about drinking became an easy way to say "parenting is
hard and exhausting." The new mom-lit's
trademark parenting juice turned into a dependency for other
writers, too. Former Strollerderby blogger Rachael Brownell spent quite a
bit of bandwidth preoccupied with drinking and defending parents
who drink. She blogged about drinking and parenting, and drinking
while parenting, all while she was drinking and blogging and
raising three young girls.
"Getting loose makes writing feel rebellious and assures me
I'm part of a revolution, where we talk and write about our
kids but aren't afraid to assert our artistic, sexual,
authentic selves over the din of our old lives falling away,"
she writes in her forthcoming memoir Mommy Doesn't Drink Here Anymore. Nearly two
years ago, like Wilder-Taylor, Brownell joined a 12-step program
and gave up alcohol.
In an interview, Brownell said that writing about drinking made her
feel a part of a group for the first time as a mother. Not only
were writers like Wilder-Taylor talking about drinking, they were
talking about being less-than perfect.
"All that language — 'mommy needs a drink' — all those
books and blogs — that was someone coming in and letting some air
out of this balloon of perfectionism. It wasn't just 'mommy
needs a drink,' it's 'mommy needs a drink because the
toddlers are talking about rubber bands again.'"
Talking about drinking became a quick and easy or less personal way
to say "parenting is hard and exhausting," she said.
"But that's not socially acceptable to say. What is
acceptable to say is, 'I need a
drink.'"
If more high-profile parents come out as problem-drinkers will this
change how we talk about parents and drinking? Can we expect to
read Mommies Who Abstain? The Three Mocktini
Playdate? Maybe. Still, the stressed-out, swilling mom meme
continues.
Consider the recently published coffee-table book, If You Give a Mom a Martini: 100 Ways to Find 10 Blissful
Minutes for Yourself. The cover of Chris Mancini's new
parenting memoir Pacify Me: A Handbook for the Freaked Out New Dad
features a six-pack, a baby bottle and a pacifier.
Nearly 71,500 Facebook users have become fans of "OMG I so
need a glass of wine or I'm going to sell my kids." Then
again, most of us can just check the streaming status updates,
which, if you're FB friends with enough parents, starts looking
like a drinks menu toward the later part of the day as everyone
starts openly pining for a little "mommy medicine."
Read more here.
