I Don't Want To Be A Wine Mom

Me & alcohol go way back... but is it time to reassess things?

I’ve recently decided to reexamine the role that alcohol plays in my life. Nothing bad happened. Nobody got hurt. But I’ve been doing a little napkin math, and it turns out I’m not 25 or even 30 anymore. I’m counting out the decades between the age I am currently and how old my grandparents were when they died, and I’m realizing that it’s not enough time. I can’t live in denial: I’m getting older, alcohol is not a health food, and the “wine mom” to “problem drinker” pipeline is robust. 

Even though me and drinking go way back, I always filed the Wine Mom aesthetic alongside other stuff that was aggressively Not For Me, like Rae Dunn housewares, posters of Audrey Hepburn from Breakfast at Tiffany’s (Holly Golightly is not aspirational! She’s hanging on by a thread!) or fake eyelashes that are meant to be stuck to car headlights (the truck nuts of the eyes, for girls).

Nothing about wine mom culture was offensive, it just was not my thing. But now that I’m trying to suss out when I’m drinking for the “right” reasons versus the “wrong ones”-- and if there even are “right reasons” for me, right now, in my life– my thinking has evolved. I’ve started to read the entire “wine mom” thing as a symptom of something dark and sad that we as a society aren’t ready to talk about.