Hitting The Bottle

This autumn, writer Stefanie Wilder-Taylor dropped a bombshell: she had quit drinking.

A mother of three daughters — 4-year-old Elby and twin 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."

Mums with a drinking problem are nothing new (Joan Crawford, 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, 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.

Earlier this decade, Wilder-Taylor had been part of a welcome revolution, one in which mums 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 mums 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 cool maternity wear.

Glossy magazines 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 and, woah, who was in charge? Mums. Swearing, temper-losing, eye-rolling, totally imperfect mums, 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 book to bring parenting and drinking together in an aggressively blase 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 colour scheme. While, somewhere in there, Robert Wilder wrote Daddy Needs a Drink.

So Daddy had a drink. Or two. Mummy did as well.

Alcohol-spiked words flowed, especially online in the most revolutionary form of parental expression: blogs. The "mumtini" was coined. Blogger parents were forced to defend knocking back adult beverages at the end of the day.

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 did it mean that a defender of drinking-mum 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 hammered?

If it did, then readers missed the point, 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 onto the wagon. The fact is, my books aren’t about drinking; they’re about not centreing your entire life around your children."

The new mum-lit’s trademark parenting juice turned into a dependency for other writers, too. Former 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,"

Nearly two years ago, like Wilder-Taylor, Brownell joined a 12-step programme 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 — ‘mummy 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 ‘mummy needs a drink,’ it’s ‘mummy 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 Mummies Who Abstain? The Three Mocktini Playdate? Hmmm. Maybe. Watch this space…