It is a cold Friday morning. Outside, rain soaks yesterday's clean laundry. Lovely Husband coerces the children out of bed with the lure of hot chocolate. War breaks out over, variously, who gets to wear the pink hair clip, who gets to eat breakfast with the good purple spoon (as opposed to the other purple spoon), and whether or not Big Girl is, in fact, a smelly bum head.
By the time I've fought the daily hairbrush battle, and Lovely Husband has constructed a packed lunch from leftovers ('Look, it's sausage salad with...well, let's call them croutons', he says brightly), it is time to go. Little Girl spills her hot chocolate over her outfit and bursts into tears. Big Girl joins in.
Lovely Husband sighs. 'Is it too early for a drink?'
We both know it's a joke. Even in the depths of my alcoholism I didn't drink in the mornings. But quips about alcohol are part of the parenting lexicon, so much so that there are products like 'Mommy's Time Out Wine' for sale. On Mumsnet, we've got a 'glass of wine' emoticon, proffered to posters struggling with toddlers or teens, and the staff joke about needing gin to cope.
And here's Honest Toddler's view on the booze:
“'Wine o'clock', as parents call it, varies based on time zone and number of children in the house.
1 Child: 5pm or final school pick up.
2 Children: 4.45pm or final school pick up.
3+ Children: 4.30pm or final school pick up.
Teething Child: your call.”
At the end of my drinking, before my recovery, that joke was my reality. I was pouring my first glass of wine when I walked in the door at 4pm after the school run. And I could no longer ignore the fact that I was in trouble.
For whilst I knew for years that I had a problem, I also worked very hard in those years to ignore it. That's what addicts do - we deny to ourselves that our behaviour is abnormal, and in the furtherance of that aim, we seek out people and scenarios that reinforce our normality.
Social media is a powerful ally, then, for the alcoholic in denial. Whisky tumblers on Tumblr, gin jokes on Twitter, elaborate cocktails raised to the camera on Instagram, and memes about mummy's special juice on Facebook. The ubiquity of alcohol references sends a message in itself, but the lure of social media is far greater than that, because it allows us to carefully curate our lives so that we're bathed in the most flattering of lights. This means that the jokes about 'wine o'clock' are coming from people who, the evidence suggests, have lovely, glamorous lives crammed with happy family moments. Drinking becomes not just normal, but desirable. ‘Look, it's what the good mothers do’ - 700,000 followers of the Facebook group 'Moms need wine' can't all be wrong!
But maybe, they are. Alcohol Concern UK estimates that 1.6 million Britons are dependent drinkers. That's people who fit the diagnostic criteria for alcoholism, not merely those who drink above government guidelines, of whom there are vastly more. And the cost of alcohol abuse on the national pocket is huge; the Centre for Social Justice puts the figure for alcohol-related costs at £21 billion per year. Many of us have condemned Peaches Geldof for exposing her children to the tragic effects of her heroin addiction, whilst championing our right to drink around our own. Almost three million British children live with adults who drink hazardously.
So with statistics like that, why is there such strong cultural support for parenting and drinking? I was laughing about a glass of Friday night wine, even as I was hiding boxes of wine in my spare room and struggling to parent my children. I was rolling my eyes about how parenting can drive one to drink even as I was calculating, frantically, how much wine was left in my house and how I could get more. There were many nights when, a bottle of wine down, I wouldn't have been able to drive my children to A&E if required to, and I am grateful to this day that I was lucky enough not to bear the brunt of that bad decision. Marketing, of course, is the obvious answer: alcohol is the last legal drug that can be advertised freely. But why is it targeted at mothers? Why do we joke about something that can have such serious consequences?
We joke about wine because we need, somehow, to acknowledge that parenting is hard and we deserve some help along the way. When a friend wails “My three-year-old has eaten one of the buttons from the TV remote and I can't get Frozen to play so my five-year-old hates me, the baby slept for 34 minutes in total last night, and if I have to look at, let alone cook, serve and then clean up one more plate of sausages in my life I may actually die”, our reaction is: “Oh, no. Sounds like you need a glass of wine!”
She doesn't need a glass of wine. She needs somebody to take the children so she can nap. She needs her body to herself for a while, a clean house, a dinner that she didn't cook. She needs somebody to ask her opinion on Gaza, whether or not she actually has one. And, damn it all, she needs progressive maternity leave policies, earning parity with her husband and a chance at self-actualisation. But Ocado doesn't deliver those, so instead we content ourselves with camaraderie - and a bottle of Chardonnay.