When Michelle Smith gave birth to her first child, a girl, there were eight gifts waiting for her — all of them alcohol-related. “I never needed alcohol in my life,” says Smith, now a mental health and addictions counselor and virtual recovery coach in Washington State. She was 29 when she first became a mom, not a drinker. Her own father, a physician, struggled secretly with alcoholism before dying of a massive heart attack, just two years after he got sober.
What Smith learned from that experience was that drinking was bad, but that you could stop — nothing about the true nature of addiction. In 2009, Smith, a brand-new mom, married to her high school sweetheart, and working a job she loved, thought she had passed the threshold for developing a drinking problem. “I thought that I was in the clear,” she says. “But any of us can become addicted to anything.”
With those eight bottles, her well-meaning friends were unwittingly initiating Smith into a club she’d never heard about and didn’t really understand. “My friends were telling me, Oh, you’re gonna need this. Motherhood is really hard.” The same friends brought cigars for her husband. Smith didn’t think much of any of it at the time, and threw the gifts in her going-home bag.
Over time, Smith opened those bottles — typically because someone came over. Then her new mom friends were inviting her to a special barre class — at night, with mimosas. “I thought, Aren't we supposed to feel inward and be with ourselves — not numb out and disconnect?” she says. And then it was mom trips to the vineyard, Taco Tuesdays with plenty of margaritas. “Slowly, every connection was associated with alcohol. That was what we did,” she says. “At a meetup in the park, it was like, Don’t you have Bailey’s in your coffee?”
Motherhood had changed Smith, to be sure — but not just motherhood. Her husband, who had been deployed, returned from Afghanistan with an injury. She worked two jobs in mental health and substance abuse at a correctional facility to support the family while he was launching a new career. In 2012, Smith had a second child, a boy, and returned to work within weeks. Smith’s own mother was in hospice, dying — just as she was trying to figure motherhood out herself. If working moms' plates are full, Smith’s had overfloweth.
And it wasn’t just life that Smith was struggling with — it was also her identity. “I was the woman who showed up for everybody, and I couldn’t do that anymore,” Smith says. “I couldn't be the person I was before kids — and my expectations never were adjusted. I had the same expectations for my house, my appearance, my everything.”
I was the woman who showed up for everybody, and I couldn’t do that anymore. I couldn't be the person I was before kids — and my expectations never were adjusted.
And she, like so many moms, found motherhood surprisingly isolating.
Alcohol started to slip into all those little cracks — providing relief after a grueling day, or as the social glue with a new community of moms. “It filled a void it never needed to fill before,” says Smith.
After a couple years of not-so-problematic drinking, things turned. Public drinking became private drinking. One day, Smith slipped wine in her Mama Bear mug while she was volunteering in her child’s classroom. Another time, she was sneaking upstairs to drink boxed wine hidden in a closet, before rejoining her family downstairs. Later, a binge-drinking episode landed her in the emergency room of the hospital where she worked, with a blood alcohol level of .43.
How had it come to this?
The birth of the wine mom
Today, “wine moms” are everywhere. You see their shirts and mugs and farmhouse-chic placards in the aisles of Target, and in memes all over your social media feed.
There’s “Rosé All Day” and “Wine O’Clock,” of course, which are equal-opportunity messages for women who drink, but there are also messages aimed specifically at moms: “Mommy Juice,” “They whine, I wine,” “Surviving motherhood one bottle at a time,” and onesies that read, “I’m the reason Mommy drinks.”
It’s cheeky. It’s supposed to be funny. And because it’s so pervasive, it also normalizes what is technically problem drinking.
“‘Rosé all day — it’s not a real thing. If you're drinking rosé all day, think how much you are actually drinking,” says comedian, author, and mother of three Stefanie Wilder-Taylor. “How sad is that, actually?”
Wilder-Taylor didn’t invent the wine mom, but her explosively popular blog and her books — notably, Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay and Naptime Is the New Happy Hour, which came out in 2006 and 2008, respectively — helped usher in a certain refreshing honesty about having a drink because, let’s be honest, this motherhood thing is bananas. Moms were overstretched. They were bored. They missed their old lives. And what’s with all this abstemiousness anyway? Aren’t we all adults here?
In the 2000s, at the heyday of mommy blogs, it was still a little edgy to “admit” you were drinking — much less wearing such a thing emblazoned across your chest, with your Lululemons.
By the 2010s, “wine mom” was already a recognizable part of the culture, so much so that in 2011, two rival wine companies fought in court over whether one wine called MommyJuice infringed on the trademark of another, called Mommy’s Time Out. In the end, the two companies settled out of court, and could both use “mommy” in their labels — because wine mommys were, by then, generic.
Mommy’s little helper is nothing new
Moms didn’t suddenly grow tired, overwhelmed, overworked, isolated, and anxious at the turn of the 21st century — and self-medicating is as old as time. But the sedatives of post-war American surely changed the game for women — and moms.
In the ‘50s, it was Miltown — America’s first psychopharmacological Wonder Drug. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was Valium. These pills “became the treatments of choice for the pressures of motherhood,” writes Jonathan M. Metzl, in the journal Gender & History. Mommy’s Little Helper, as these pills were collectively known, somehow managed to symbolize relief for women, anxiety about women’s roles in the culture at large, and a powerful marketing opportunity for the drug companies, all at once.
It’s not so different from mommy juice, today. After a dip from the 1970s through the 1990s, wine culture, as a whole, began to rise in the U.S. (Some attribute it to a 1991 episode of 60 Minutes about "The French Paradox" — how red wine helped the French stave off cardiovascular disease). At the same time, women were making strides in the workplace, but still facing backward gender dynamics at every turn. (Today, even in homes with equality-minded, involved fathers, working mothers do 21 additional hours of work every week once a baby is born — a 70% greater increase in workload compared to men.) We’ve got that same perfect storm of exhausted moms, cultural anxieties about gender roles and “bad moms,” and of course, a major marketing opportunity.
“Tonight’s forecast: 99% chance of wine.”
The pandemic doesn’t exactly help
Enter: the pandemic. Once lockdown and homeschooling became the norm in the U.S. in mid-March, the wine memes just kept coming.
“25 years from now, kids everywhere will be like, ‘I remember the spring of 2020, that’s when I learned how much liquor it takes to be a parent.’”
“In 20 years, our country will be run by people homeschooled by day drinkers.”
The memes mask a more serious reality, of course. A research letter posted on the JAMA website in September 2020 stated that women reported drinking alcohol 17% more frequently in 2020 than they did in 2019, and they had 41% more heavy drinking days. Men also drank more, but, by comparison, not as heavily or frequently. (And, to be fair, as a culture, we’ve never been as up-in-arms about men’s drinking).
I’m no scientist, but from my focus group of one, it suggests that the pandemic has hit women harder — a lot harder. All of a sudden, working moms had a lot more on their plates: working (if they were lucky enough to keep their job), cleaning up after a household of people who never left, cooking every meal, and homeschooling. If being the default parent was an overwhelming everyday reality before spring 2020, women have become the default pandemic parent — exponentially harder and weirdly more retro, with respect to gender dynamics. With the skewed demands, women have dropped out of the workforce at record numbers — and at four times the rate of men. Would you really blame anyone from having that cocktail at 4 p.m.?
And yet, this was all underway long before the coronavirus.
Alcohol use overall — in particular, binge-drinking — has grown alarmingly since the 2000s. Although problem drinking rose among racial minorities, the elderly, and the poor, among women in particular, the numbers are sobering: High-risk drinking, defined as having more than three drinks a day or seven in a week, was up 58% from 2002 to 2013 — and alcohol dependence, up 83.7%. A study of ER visits between 2006 and 2014 found that the most significant increases in admittance because of alcohol were middle-aged women. And between 2007 and 2017, the number of deaths attributable to alcohol spiked 35% overall — a whopping 85% just among women. And according to The Washington Post, it's college-educated white women, in particular, who are drinking themselves to death. (The rate of alcohol-related deaths fell for Black women over the same time period, and rose only slightly for Hispanic women.)
The numbers don’t lie. More women of all backgrounds were drinking — some were drinking problematically. And the results, while not surprising, weren’t pretty.
The new sobriety
On November 24, 2016, Smith called it. It was Thanksgiving Day. She had previously gotten sober while pregnant with her second child, but was back to drinking within weeks of that birth. She had been to the emergency room — twice. She had been to AA. She had been to treatment. She had quit before, but this time was different. She was ready to stop drinking.
“I don’t blame wine mom culture for making me an alcoholic,” says Smith, pictured above. “But it was the perfect breeding ground for my alcoholism to flourish.”
Now Smith is wielding her own set of memes: “Sober AF,” “Sober vibes” and “Recovery is the new black” — which is also the name of her online recovery community. There, and as host for the virtual recovery group Sober Mom Squad, she coaches women just like her — counselors, teachers, nurses — who have drifted into problem drinking and alcoholism. And those women who gifted her booze when she gave birth? “They say birds of a feather flock together,” she explains. “The majority of the people that I associated with are now sober. Probably half of them are going to treatment, or have done the work or are in AA.”
Stefanie Wilder-Taylor, too, got sober. In May 2009, she posted on her blog, “I drink too much… I quit on Friday.” Her announcement made headlines: “A Heroine of Cocktail Moms Sobers Up,” wrote The New York Times.
It felt like a reckoning.
Now, 11 years sober, she sees the era differently. “When I wrote Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay, I was an alcoholic who had no idea,” says Wilder-Taylor. As a writer and comedian, one of her go-to tropes was alcohol, because it was funny and relatable to a certain kind of mom. “I did drink too much. I wasn’t, in my mind, drinking alcoholically. I wasn’t drinking all day. I wasn’t having a drink in the morning.” But in a period of about three years, the truth became obvious. “I figured out that I don’t do well with alcohol. I’m not a safe drinker. So I made a decision," says Wilder-Taylor.
Still other, less famous women have made less dramatic decisions to cut back or “pump the brakes,” questioning when, why, and how savoring a glass of wine with dinner became an entire bottle, maybe two. How moderate drinking — defined as one or fewer drinks a day, for a woman — slipped so easily into binge-drinking, which is defined as four or more drinks in one two-hour sitting — which then slipped into heavy alcohol use, which is binge-drinking five or more days per month.
“It’s a progessive disease,” explains Smith. “It is very sneaky. My drink in the evening after my kids went down became rushing to finish bedtime so I could get to my wine, or a drink with dinner became the first thing you do when you get home. That’s the progression.”
In Smith’s practice, she asks women and moms who are sober-curious or interested in recovery to look at that progression — and to be curious, to ask questions, without judgment or shame. “When did your relationship with alcohol change? You’re a detective and this is an experiment. What happened in your life? What’s that timeline? You drink for a reason. What is that reason? What solution is at the bottom of that bottle of alcohol?”
The answers will tell you a lot about yourself — whether you have full-blown alcoholism or just a relationship with wine or beer or vodka that doesn’t feel the way it used to.
“Forget labels and forget the idea of forever,” says Smith. “Get curious.” And go from there.