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LAST UPDATE | 1 Apr
IF YOU’VE BEEN around long enough, you soon learn that most fashions are cyclical and will come back to either elate or haunt you.
One trend I thought we’d well and truly put to bed was the promotion of toxic mummy wine culture, but it seems like there’s still life in this worn-out ‘mummy needs a drink’ trope yet.
On a recent visit to a homewares store, a fun-size yellow warning sign caught my eye. I had to take a second look to make sure I hadn’t read it incorrectly. Rightly enough, it depicted a female stick figure chugging a bottle of wine with the slogan- “Caution, Mum’s wine time in progress,” slapped on the end.
Cringe didn’t cover it. Had I gone back in time a decade, or were we still happily pedalling this type of reductive, out-of-touch messaging promoting the necking of wine to survive another day of motherhood?
On the surface, it may have looked like just another piece of harmless jokey tat, sure wine not, eh? But it brought back memories of a time when mum’s wine culture felt insidious and even harmful.
I do have to hold my hands up here. There was a point in time, about seven or eight years ago, when I would have looked at this product and giggled, found it relatable and maybe even purchased it.
In the early days of motherhood, I bought into the whole mum wine narrative big time. I shared the memes, bought the merch, laughed at the messaging and even slapped a few slogans on coffee mugs myself.
Mainstream TV show characters like Claire Dunphy in Modern Family and Karen Wheeler in Stranger Things, all written to uphold the ‘mommy needs her wine’ pillar. The viewer can sympathise with the pressure these mom characters are under, and the fact that their daily sloshing of wine seemed to be pretty much the only option available to them for stress relief.
At the time of my early motherhood, I felt seen, and it seemed like a harmless and light-hearted way to connect with other mums who were also in the trenches of early motherhood, desperately trying to find their feet and feel like themselves again, grasping at something that might help.
Cracking open a bottle of wine at the end of a tough day or week became this loud, hard-to-escape message aimed at mums, telling us that daily wine consumption was the perfectly acceptable coping mechanism for the pressures of motherhood.
Through social media memes, mugs, wine glasses, t-shirts and even baby grows, the story being sold to mums was that the healthy way to unwind from the daily stresses of motherhood was to have a glass of wine.
I’m not trying to be the wine police, either, it has to be said. If you want to have a glass of wine at the end of your day, you do you, and I still do from time to time, but it’s on my own terms, not because it’s being positioned as a way to beat full-bodied burnout.
The problem is when that glass, or more, of wine is constantly positioned as a crutch to get through the day. It’s then that it crosses into potentially damaging territory, and at times, the messaging for mums has felt insidious.
Bad day? Have a glass of wine. Good day? Have a glass of wine. You deserve this, it’s your reward or consolation for simply getting through another day of carrying the mental load of the family, which we know tends to fall disproportionately on women, in a society which can expect mums to parent like they don’t have a job outside of the home and work like they don’t have children.
But nothing about using wine as a regular support mechanism for the pressures of motherhood ever made me feel better or feel like myself again. Nor did drinking coffee out of a mug that said I wished it were wine do anything but make me think that I might need wine as some kind of prop at the end of the day/week.
The funny memes and merch may have had me believe I’d find my mum tribe in a wine glass, but if anything, it made me feel more tired, burnt out, unhealthy and even guilty for being stuck in this cycle.
Mummy wine culture in a lot of ways feels like the evolution of the doling out of Valium to housewives in the 1960s as ‘mothers’ little helpers’, to stop them complaining about feeling stressed, rather than the health profession actually validating their concerns and addressing them.
Today, what many mums could really benefit from are tangible supports, like access to affordable childcare or the Government making good on their promises to cap childcare costs for every family. They need a more even distribution of maternity and paternity leave so the mental load can be shared equally from the get-go.
New mums need better access to perinatal mental health supports, and we’re still waiting for a dedicated mother and baby unit for those going through the worst of perinatal depression.
Women have shown an appetite for change and a desire to close the chapter on this reductive messaging, with many now taking stock of their relationship with alcohol. An Irish examiner survey last year found women want to reduce their alcohol consumption, with four in 10 women consuming less alcohol or no alcohol, and 27% indicating they wanted to reduce the amount of alcohol they drink.
Still, according to Drinkaware’s latest research, one in three adults who drink now drink at home alone at least once a week. So, as much as we see a change in the messaging for mums, centred around tangible supports, a greater emphasis on gender balance in the home and prioritising mental health and self-care, the narrative around mum wine culture being the legitimate coping mechanism still has the potential to do harm, as long as these products are pushed in our faces and legitimised.
A quick search on Amazon for products with the words ‘mum’ and ‘wine’ yielded thousands of results, such as a ‘mum’s medicine’ wine stopper. A wine glass with ‘single measure, double measure, mum’s measure’ printed on it. A mug that said, ‘secretly wishing this was wine’.
A wine cooler with the words ‘mama juice’ on it. Fluffy socks with, ‘if you can read this, bring me some wine’ on the sole. A book called ‘Mum… Wine is good for you’. A tote handbag with a hidden wine dispenser. A wine glass with ‘surviving motherhood one sip at a time’ printed on it.
What once felt like a bit of harmless fun today feels like it’s just plain old harmful messaging. I’m pretty sure I still have one of these mugs in the back of the press somewhere, but like the message that’s slapped on it, I think it’s high time toxic mum wine culture got chucked in the bin.
Niamh O’Reilly is a freelance writer and journalist.
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