I could write a thousand things about how motherhood has changed me, and they’d all be true.
I could write about how my kids inspire me, or how they make me examine parts of the world I’d never considered. I could write about what it was like to hold my newborns for the first time, the struggle of breastfeeding, or the unyielding sense of responsibility. I could write about watching my babies turn into preschoolers, or the frustration of not having time to myself while also not knowing what to do with myself when I’m alone.
I could write about all of those things, and I have written about a lot of them.
But the other day I woke up thinking about my relationship with alcohol. It’s something that makes me feel separate from other moms and infiltrates motherhood for me–and I’ve hardly ever talked about it.
I’ve had a grand total of about eight drinks of alcohol since my first kid was born, more than four years ago.
That’s not because I’m a recovering alcoholic, or suffer from a health issue, or because I don’t like drinking—actually, I do like it. I like wineries, breweries, cocktails before dinner, and margaritas on vacation. With the exception of a few wild nights in college, I was never one to drink too much or lose control; I typically had a few drinks when I went out with friends and a couple of day drinks on vacation. I always drank lightly, to the point where (male) college friends joked I was no fun, and one ex told me, “The only problem you have with alcohol is that you don’t drink enough.”
Then I had a son. A year and a half later, I had a daughter. In the weeks after each of them was born, I craved Earl Grey tea with vanilla creamer because it was a comfort drink that tasted disgusting while pregnant. I ate tacos because pregnancy hormones had made me averse to Mexican food, and I was making up for it. But I didn’t pop champagne after I delivered my babies, and I only craved yellow Gatorade in those early postpartum weeks, when the sun would set and anxiety about the sleepless night ahead would set in.
When I gave up breastfeeding after four months with my son and about four seconds with my daughter, the desire to drink without pumping and dumping had nothing to do with it; I quit simply because I hated it. When the kids went to bed at night, I didn’t want a huge glass of wine to wind down—I wanted a romance novel.
So what’s the problem? Well, as that ex-boyfriend said a decade ago, the problem was that I didn’t drink enough. It made me feel different from other moms. I felt like I wasn’t fun, like I was disappointing people when I declined a drink, like I had to have a socially acceptable excuse—pregnancy or antibiotics—if I was sipping on club soda at a gathering or afternoon play date. I felt judged, even though I probably wasn’t being judged.
I felt awkward going to the brewery where daycare parents gathered on Friday evenings and ordering just a bag of chips, so much so that I stopped going, even though the kids had a blast. I felt socially awkward when we invited people over, offering them hard seltzer and not having any myself. I felt disconnected from the wine mom culture that’s all over social media: I didn’t put wine in a Stanley cup to go to the playground, but it seemed like everyone else was.
In my head, it became a Thing. Now my son is six and my daughter is closing in on five, and I would love to have a beer at the brewery and sip hard seltzers in the pool on mom/kid trips. But I also don’t want to. If those two sentiments sound contradictory, it’s because they are. That’s why drinking/not drinking messes with my head.
The half of me that DOESN’T want to drink in this mom-with-little-kids era has a few reasons that sound small but take up a lot of space in my mind:
- I hate hangovers. Who likes them, right? But also, I get hungover easily, to the point where I probably either have an undiscovered alcohol allergy or I’m so scared of hangovers that my mind manifests them. I’ll have two sips of an Old Fashioned and wake up with a headache, or drink one White Claw at 2 p.m., feel absolutely no buzz, and wake up nauseated. Like most little kids, mine wake up around 6 a.m. Hangovers are bad enough when you can lounge in bed, but they’re hellish when you’re playing hide-and-seek before the sun comes up.
- I hate hang-xiety, too. Of course the shame of waking up after a super drunken night, unsure who you talked to and what you said, is uniquely terrible. But as a mother, even waking up feeling slightly uneasy with a dry mouth makes me feel bad about myself: I worry I’m somehow not going to be a good mom that day because maybe I won’t have enough energy, or maybe I’ll be irritable with my kids. In a way, that’s typical ridiculous mom guilt I sometimes successfully eradicate. I know I’m human and some days I’ll feel more energetic than others; I know some days I take them to the park and feed them apple slices and other days I put on Little Mermaid and feed them Lucky Charms, and both are okay. But it’s harder to erase when the guilt stems from a choice you made the day before.
- I hate feeling anything other than 100 percent myself when I’m with my kids. Or perhaps, more accurately, I hate the anticipation of feeling unlike myself when I’m with my kids. What if I drink a beer while watching football at a friend’s house and my son notices my cheeks are flushed, or I stumble over my feet, or my kids somehow FEEL that mom is a little…off?
I don’t know how to explain all that to fellow moms when they offer me a glass of white wine. I don’t know if I should try to explain it. If I simply say “no thanks” every time, will they assume I’m a recovering alcoholic or pregnant? In either of those scenarios, will I stop being invited to playdates and parties—and by extension, my kids stop being invited—because I’m no fun? Will they see my minimal drinking as problematic, like that ex did?
I love being part of mom culture. I love the part where my kids give me an entirely new group of friends, where our kids give us endless excuses to get together, where we bond with our friends’ kids partly because they remind us of our friends when THEY were kids. I love the part where moms complain to each other about how hard it is to parent little kids and humble brag to each other about how they throw a lot of tantrums, but it’s “probably because they’re so smart.” But it pains me that mom culture is so heavily related to drinking: to escape, to make kid things more fun, to bond.
Let’s normalize book clubs where La Croix is offered alongside wine, and moms day out instead of moms night out. Let’s normalize not expecting moms to give a reason why they’re not drinking, and not asking if they’re pregnant when they decline wine.
I love to see the rise of sober-curiousness and the infiltration of mocktails onto every restaurant menu. That’s not because I never want to drink again, but because it makes me feel seen. Not everyone drinks, not every mom drinks, not every mom drinks all the time. And we’re normal too. We’re fun too!
by Celeste Yvonne 
by Kimberly Kearns 
by Vanessa France 
