Hitting the Bottle
The rise and fall of the tipsy mommy blogger.
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 blas’ 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.
A Philadelphia bar, Memphis Taproom, found such success in its Monday afternoon “Mommy and Me” Happy Hours, they expanded to their sister bar Local 44, where owner Leigh Maida said the bar looks like a stroller parking lot.
Turning Leaf Winery practically equates wine to oxygen in its new ad campaign, which curiously asks mothers, “How do you breathe?” The print ads and website feature four blogger moms (three of whom are or have been connected to Babble) who write a few lines about how they get through the day.
The drinking parent metaphor hasn’t even lost its power on the now-sober writer moms.
Wilder-Taylor, who declined to be interviewed for this article, blogged about not only missing drinking, but missing what drinking said about her, the person behind the parent. Being the drinking mom, she writes, made her cool and gave her the edge.
From MommyTrack’d:
“The most difficult thing that stands in my way is my ego. “Hey, I’m the Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay mom! I’m cool, edgy and those are synonymous with drinking right? Well, fuck my ego. At forty-two years old I’ve come to realize that for me it’s not cute or cool or edgy or any adjective but pathetic. So here’s to finding fun that doesn’t come in a bottle. I guess I’ll have to take the word tequila out of the title of my column. Well, not today. One day at a time, right?”
“I still think the moms who do the cocktail playdates are good.” She concludes this in her bombshell blog post:
“I’ve had a lifetime of hurt and some pretty awesome reasons to drink but those days are long gone and the yet the alcohol is still here. And so, although it’s never gotten me into trouble, why wait for that?” Brownell, sober nearly two years, admits she is still drawn to women who drink. And while cocktail playdates are not on her calendar, she doesn’t condemn them either.
“But [drinking] still kind of informs who I still think is fun to hang around. Which is kind of sick,” she said. “I still think the moms who do the cocktail playdates are good.”
What about Three-Martini Mellor? Will she set down the glass to take a personal inventory? Nah. Drinking is just not a problem for her.
“I love the whole cocktail culture. I grew up in San Francisco, which is the home of the three-martini lunch. : On the other hand, a certain currently-on-the-wagon author once accused me of not “walking the walk” because I didn’t want to drink a few martinis before we went on stage to discuss our books,” she wrote in an email. “If I had a drink every day, I wouldn’t get much done the next day, so sadly, I cannot indulge in martinis every night.”
So maybe we’re looking at this once radical-seeming genre a little differently, but one thing still holds true: parents who wind down in the evening with a drink are not alone.
Now, from these new confessions of dependency, we know moms who quit aren’t either.
I read “Sippy Cups” and I have to say the quasi-alcoholism was evident from page one. Any time you have to “make a statement” about a behavior I think the moderation part goes out the window. I do appreciate how these types of books make it more a part of the norm to raise your hand and say “I’m tired, not perfect, and I don’t think I can do this one more day.”
To me, the red flag is the idea that drinking makes a person “edgy” or “cool.” It’s a beverage, not a bass guitar. If you are feeling that way, alcohol is waaaay too important to you. And/or you are in the tenth grade.
I’m incredibly offended to be included in this article. I love Babble and love the writers and topics covered here…
But the misinformation presented here is exceedingly dangerous, and downright mean:
This article opens with this statement…” Moms with a drinking problem
are nothing new (Joan Crawford, Betty Ford, Courtney Love, I could go
on)” and right here, mothers with “drinking problems” are compared to
Joan Crawford? Courtney Love?? Betty Ford??” which sets just the right
tone of patronizing, condescending judgment the pervades the remainder
of the article.
Please give us more than a child-beater and a heroine addict to compare ourselves, us fallable sober mothers, to…
1st. Christie Mellor’s assertion that we “miss the point” by
associating drinking with parents time off, is disingenuous. Her book
IS about drinking (martini recipes anyone?)
2nd Christie Mellor’s statement that “… those authors who
took their own advice too literally are jumping from the bandwagon to
the wagon” implies that a. alcoholism is a choice and that b. it’s a choice
calculated and driven by a cultural zeitgeist rather than a need to
quit drinking.
3rd. The opening paragraph introduces this articles favored whipping
girl: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor… who is very newly sober and who most definitely did not agree to be
interviewed for this article and whose inclusion here is mean spirited
and unnecessary.
NEWSFLASH:
Someone who admits they have a problem with alcohol is a brave person,
especially brave if they’ve written publicly in support of the drinking
and the mommying….such as Ms. Wilder-Taylor
… Can you imagine being a mother with a secret
drinking problem reading this? Would it make you proud or ashamed? I
think the latter.
And Redsy Darling is me, Rachael Brownell…
Who are you to tell the rest of us what is or is not “relatable”? Hey – newsflash – some mothers really DO relate to performing yoga positions with baby on their belly. And I’ll wager that some non-alcoholic moms can relate to “tipsy mommy bloggers” while still others, maybe too ashamed to admit it, will relate to being closet alcoholics.
Thank god that these SUCCESSFUL authors have come forward with their own struggles and shined some light on the DISEASE of alcoholism.
Your bias and judgement are clear not only from the title of your piece, “The rise and fall of the tipsy mommy blogger” but from two of the three women that you choose to use as examples – poor bipolar Courtney Love and child abusing Joan Crawford.
I applaud the brave authors you choose to pillory in your article for standing up and exposing themselves the the unfortunate scorn of women like you. These are the women that are going to help others to seek help. These are the women that are going to help change lives. These are the women that are going to save lives.
Do I maybe detect a little jealousy?
I don’t believe Madeline was saying drinking mommy bloggers are the Joan Crawfords and Courtney Loves of the world. Was it an unfair comparrison, but I think intended in a tongue-in-cheek sense of hyperbole. If these mommy memoirists can exaggerate and speak of swilling cocktails in front of the kids with disregard, I think Mrs. Holler is allowed a little irreverence.
“favored whipping
girl: Stefanie Wilder-Taylor”
Hmmm, someone who made a lot of money glamorizing alcohol should expect a little backlash. Are we to understand that we need to take it easy on Wilder-Taylor because she had the bravery to stand up to her alcoholism? I have alcoholics in my family and it’s a fact that the journey toward sobriety doesn’t end with facing the problem. Atoning for the actions one committed during their drinking time is a pretty big facet of the 12 steps. No one owes it to Wilder-Taylor to over look her past actions or give her a break just because she’s sorry. One can appreciate the knee-jerk defence of one fellow mommy blogging/recovering alcoholic for another–but recognize it as that: a hypersensitive knee jerk reaction.
“Someone who admits they have a problem with alcohol is a brave person,
especially brave if they’ve written publicly in support of the drinking
and the mommying….such as Ms. Wilder-Taylor”
No, I smell a whole new bunch of book deals for Wilder-Taylor in the newly minted genre of Recovery Mommy memoirs. Drinking is the new “edgy”. Sobriety is the new drunk.
Announcing you have a problem isn’t brave, dealing with it is.
“Can you imagine being a mother with a secret
drinking problem reading this? Would it make you proud or ashamed?”
Are they supposed to be proud? Is that all you have, a polar argument? Either one or the other? If “mothers with secret drinking problems” aren’t going to come out of the closet because they’re afraid people might be upset with them then they’re not strong enough to tackle the problem. Only once they’re ready to face the problems they’ve created are they ready to make a real go at sobriety. Shame and regret are what make a person see they need to change.
Is alcoholism a disease? Yes. No one said you chose it, but you’re entire argument is self-centered and sanctimonious. Because of the disease, alcoholics are naturally self-centered–it does little good to hang onto that now you’re trying to stay sober.
Kudos to the moms (and dads) who recognize that they have a problem with alcohol and are taking the hard 12 steps to make better the lives of themselves and their families (both those “famous” ones mentioned here and the many non-famous around the world).
I’m sorry that some of those people who could benefit from their example will get lost in all the bickering that will go on here about this opinion or that point the author made.
My point: if you are a parent with a drinking problem, get help! It’s best for you, your marriage, and most of all your children! If all those reasons aren’t enough, I guess you could consider yourself a trendsetter – it’s patently clear that that’s the new “hip” thing to do – recover.
I worry that this backlash means we’ll just head back to judgy condemnation of the moms who do drink in moderation, without being alcoholics. Because they do exist, and I think the popularity of the drinky mummy books was evidence of that. The desire to maintain an adult identity, some sense of self beyond “The Mother”, is important and natural… and people will address it in their own ways.
How to guess if you might have a problem: you find youself claiming you NEED a drink. No one NEEDS a drink, there are no curative powers contained in a glass of wine.
You WANT a drink. Which is totally valid and healthy in moderation and done out of want of the taste of a nice glass of whatever, not done out of stress or anger. If you WANT a drink in order to “deal”, you most certainly need to take a look at yourself and the state of things in your life. If one drink turns to many in the course of a night or whole day, you, my dear friend, are what is termed a “maintenance” alcoholic… I’ve watched my Nana and her sisters do that their whole lives, I have yet to see how this differs from women relying on “Mommy’s Little Helpers”. Booze isn’t a coping mechanism. Get a real one, ASAP. Therapy helps in this department, honestly and truly. they have all kinds of wonderful ideas of how to be functional independent of chemical poisoning there. Not trying to sound snarky, but I think it’s imperative that people learn knew ways to cope… not like many of us learned healthy ones from OUR parents.
I can totally understand what the Three Martini author is talking about when she claims to use drinking as a methaphor for not losing your TRUE self in the wilds of minvans and capri pants and those funny rubber coated baby spoons. As an artist and a bit of a wild child, it was a hard adjustment for me as well. It’s hard to continually “reclaim” your ADULT status. Alcohol was a poor and touchy choice of metaphor for her writing, perhaps. People tend to deal much more literally than one would assume. Not that it’s her fault, but still. Le sigh.
(I am aware of red wine’s purported cancer-preventing blah blah blah, I’m saying alcohol or any other neuro toxin is not the awesomest choice when what you are actually seeking is a REAL way to deal with your life and its challenges)
I find it surprising that having 1-3 drinks a day is being termed alcoholism / a drinking problem. I agree that it’s a bit too much, and not the healthiest habit, especially if the alcohol is being used as a crutch or coping mechanism. But a glass or two of wine a night = alcoholism? Really?
Adults who drink recreationally, moms or not, don’t really need to blather on about it and make any case for it, do they?
Remember, moms: no matter what you do – drink, don’t drink, write, don’t write, someone will find a way to tell you you’re a bad person for doing it. Remember that you can’t win, put your head down, and accept that having babies means you will never do anything right again.
GP, one could argue that moms don’t really need to blather on about all the topics of these essays… school choices, what they eat, how many kids to have, how far apart to have them, names, clothes, toys, etc. Effectively, your one sentence could be applied to the entire sphere of mommy blogs and books, couldn’t it?
The point is, adults don’t have to answer for normal, every day behavior, which is what drinking in moderation is. It’s childish to carry on about drinking…like a teenager or something. Just have your drink. If its more than that, then it’s a problem.
Frankly +1
Effectively, GP’s one sentence could be applied to the entire sphere of blogs and memoirs, period. Lots of people write intimate accounts of / reflections on their personal experiences, including addiction and recovery, and lots of people enjoy reading them. Why is it suddenly frivolous and self-indulgent if a woman who is a mother does it?
I’m not getting the feminist angle here…? The people who are taking issue with this, are you gleaning that from the article, the comments, or just general cultural slights against women? I didn’t get that from the article or the criticisms therein. The comments, meh. They’re interweb comments.
GP, what the authors who wrote these books described was not “normal, every day behaviour” in terms of how much they drank. Yes, they tended to go on and on about it like a 15 year old after a kegger where she drank three half-beers. I think the greater issue is these women are flailing at times and this is how they choose to dismiss it or deal with it… if you turn to any sort of chemical for that, I don’t care if it’s one glass or whatever, it’s ridiculous and a terrible coping strategy. No, they don’t have to answer for their behaviour, but I fail to see where anyone’s trying to make them…? Interesting take on it though, if not somewhat out of context and seemingly fatigued with culture and mommyhood and the combo of the two.
I guess my comments were in response to the comment
“I worry that this backlash means we’ll just head back to judgy
condemnation of the moms who do drink in moderation, without being
alcoholics. Because they do exist, and I think the popularity of the
drinky mummy books was evidence of that. The desire to maintain an
adult identity, some sense of self beyond “The Mother”, is important
and natural… and people will address it in their own ways. ”
I don’t think it is noteworthy in any way that an adult woman, be she a mother or not a mother, drink in moderation. Certainly not worthy of “judgy condemntation” and I guess I find the drinky mummy books silly for that reason. So you drink. Big whoop. It shouldn’t have to be a point to maintain an adult identity. It should be a given.
I am so naive. I had no idea it was commonplace to sip a martini during the day with my best friend around our kids. ARE YOU KIDDING ME??? I have a new title for a book: Whine with Wine.
Good grief. I do not deny that I enjoy a glass of wine every now and then. But I think it’s very sad when mothers (and fathers) use parenting as an excuse to enable their problem. And I think there is nothing wrong (or socially unacceptable) with admitting that being a mom (and dad) can be difficult and exhausting. I feel one doesn’t need a drink to deal with that. Sleep, a supportive spouse, and healthy, stable friends fill my glass.
I’m interviewing Rachael tomorrow on Babble Talk Radio, Friday August 14 at 12:30pm EST, 9:30am PST. If anyone wants to continue this discussion on the air, please call in.
http://blogs.babble.com/strollerderby/2009/08/13/rachael-brownell-on-babble-talk-radio/
This issue all comes down to identity. Like a teenager who is trying to seem grown-up by partying and hitting the bottle, it seems like many parents try to reconnect with their former adult selves through implementing the cocktail hour. I think that a much more productive way of feeling like oneself is continuing to do the things that you loved before children. The cocktail mommy seems to spring more from those who are SAH or WAH parents-those who are still involved in the workplace don’t feel the disconnect from their previous selves. If one was able to create a balance and still maintain a life outside of the household, alcohol wouldn’t be the only adult thing to look forward to and maybe their wouldn’t be the underlying depression that leads to alcoholism.
Someone who thinks that drinking makes them ‘edgy’ and ‘cool’ have greater problems than drinking. Like, not having matured past high school. Who, past their early twenties, drinks to look edgy and cool? And who are you trying so hard to impress? Don’t you have something better to do than worry about impressing other people? Or is the need to be part of a clique still there?
Look, a drink or two after a long day of chasing the kid(s) is one thing. It’s a way to unwind. Drinking only because others are doing it? That the mentality of a kid. Finding excuses or reasons to drink, especially as a reward to yourself, that’s the warning signs of a real problem.
And when one has a real problem with drinking, getting help shouldn’t be about announcing it to the world and expecting everyone to give you kudos for it. To keep oneself in the limelight. And that’s the impression I’ve gotten by those who have stopped drinking and been “oh so wonderful” for getting help. Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong or whatever. My dad was a major alcoholic, and it messed up his life. He drank not because it was the cool thing to do, or to be edgy, or because others around him were drinking. And it was nowhere close to some identity crisis after having a kid (I was 13 when he started). He drank because he was having some real serious pain and depression. I went to AA meetings with him and met the other people there, and the stories were all the same. They drank to stop the pain they were feeling. And, here’s the kicker, they never expected any type of praise or glory for going to AA. They only wanted to get their lives together.
So to try and make those who point out the ridiculousness of these books and the authors who are now realizing that being a sheep isn’t all it’s cracked up to be ashamed or like we’re trying to repress any mom with a legitimate problem is useless. It’s not “brave” to write about drinking in excess and then publicly write about needing help for it, it’s attention seeking. Drinking excessively and having it turn into a problem is a bit of a ‘duh’ situation.
Why not just be truthful about it? “I wrote these books, I practiced what I preached, and now I’m down shit creek. Damn, what a stupid moment in life I had!” Instead of something like, “Oh, I wrote these books to be cool and edgy and have people like me, and I drank because it was cool and edgy and people liked me, and now I have a problem. Oh poor me. But look at how wonderful and brave I am for talking about it despite having put myself here and possibly encouraging other women to have drinking problems too!”
To those authors: Ladies, you made your beds. Yes, you’re going to be criticized for it because it was a plain dumb situation. I just hope there aren’t women who were predisposed to have an addiction issue who read your books and now have major problems themselves.
I like this article. I was hanging around a group who felt drinking & having kids playdate was normal. These women would get into there cars after drinking with their kids and drive home. What is the point of being a mom’s group? We are suppossed to be supporting each other in a positive way.
Girls stop acting 25 and grow up and be moms put down the alcohol the xanax and all those legal relaxation pills you tell the doc you cant live without and deal with life.thanks