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Don't Touch Mommy's Wine

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I originally thought I’d just hop on Instagram and find a link to an article like this or this, but it looks like the mommy bloggers on Scary Mommy (my personal favorite) have caught up to the dangers of the mommy-wine narrative that’s been imbibing America’s mothers with its sweet reassurance that good mamas are allowed their wine. Their children are alive; they deserve to enjoy a bottle, right? And I mean, who uses corks to save some for tomorrow? Just drink the whole thing, might as well. Diaper changing is tough shit, guys.

Therefore, may I present to you an article originally posted on Ravishly that made its way to my favorite mommy-blogger site, Scary Mommy by author Sarah Hosseini. In her article, she talks about how she lets slip a mommy-wine joke to some colleagues she’s met at a book launch and  the immediate regret she experienced upon learning that the women she spoke with were sober.
The rest of her article is spent breaking down the narrative that a great deal of mommy bloggers and moms have bought into: that mothers deserve wine in excess. Although she does not specifically use the word narrative, she uses the word culture, and I think that in this context they might as well be the same. We’ll come back to this in a second.

I knew I’d be coming to this narrative because I too have bought into the narrative, told myself the “story,” if you will, and during divorce season no less. You can imagine how well that worked out for me.

Culturally, narratives like this one (and ones like racism/sexism, etc.) look more like excuses than they do anything else. Because we tell ourselves these stories/excuses, we have a place to reference when asked about our behavior. Take, for example, the second link in the first sentence. It’s literally just a list of times it’s appropriate for moms to have a glass of wine. A few of my favorites are:

6. You are making dinner. Quesadillas count. So does mac & cheese. Actually, anything with cheese. Cheese stick: wine it up.
7. You had to go to work today. Working from home counts. And in case you even need to ask, being a stay at home parent absolutely counts as working from home.
12. It is after 5 p.m. in a major city within five time zones from you. Unless it is the weekend. Then don’t worry, it’s fine as long as it has bubbles.

So, at the very least, I’m proud of Hosseini for breaking the cycle with her article. Additionally, I’m very interested in how she approaches it. She grabs our attention with a personal story (after all, as a mommy-blog reader, I’m dying for confessions), then ties it in to a larger narrative, something larger than her or any of us, but something that many moms have relied on for reassurance that we aren’t being totally horrible moms. And believe me, every mom I’ve met thinks they’re a horrible mom. From where I stand, as long as you’re not microwaving your child or leaving them unattended in a hot car with no windows down, you’re good with me. But I digress.

It’s interesting to me that she somehow uses a narrative structure (by this I simply mean using personal stories to teach us something) to break down another narrative structure, a culturally accepted conversation of joking acceptance of alcoholism in overworked, super-stressed moms. She goes on with another personal anecdote, her own struggle with alcohol when she was in a dark place. This helps further illustrate how powerful the mommy-wine narrative has been in our culture or at least the culture of suburban moms who read this stuff. She gives great statistics about moms, alcoholism, and the current state of affairs of being a mom in a country that doesn’t recognize the true struggles of motherhood.

“The challenges we are up against as women and mothers are not funny, they’re scary” she says.

And I don’t know if she knows it or not, but she’s written a great article that will help break down the former narrative that suggests that wine is the easiest way to escape your hell of a life, even if it’s just for a moment. Because there is no escaping reality. And your child shouldn’t wonder what he or she has done to make you reach for the wine. Motherhood is hard, believe me, but who the hell said it was supposed to be easy?

Comments

  1. AlexisFebruary 4, 2019 at 3:09 PM

    I see some connections between your analysis and my own regarding the danger some of these cultural narratives cause - hiding alcoholism behind mommy-wine jokes and creating excuses because so-and-so had opportunity. I can think of so many American narratives that are low-key damaging. The opportunity narrative, the American Dream, the mommy-wine, the perfect life on social media, the One True Love....

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