There is a reason moms love wine. And love to write about how much they love wine. It's because wine is the only thing the kids can't take from us.
Humor Parenting

The Rise of the Wine-Soaked Mom Blog

There is a reason moms love wine. And love to write about how much they love wine. It's because wine is the only thing the kids can't take from us.

By Stephanie Pappas of snackdinner 

Ditch the boozy blogging, moms.

That’s the closing advice of Rachel McClain in her recent Parent.Co piece about bad behaviors of many parent-bloggers. Most of the mom-wine memes circulating online, she argues, just aren’t funny, but even those that are should give us pause because they valorize unsafe or addictive behaviors.

There’s nothing new to this mommy wine craze–only lots of new moms and significantly easier-to-use meme-makers. Stephanie Wilder-Taylor, of Sippy Cups Are Not for Chardonnay fame, famously built her brand on mommy drinking, only to shed that image–as well as the booze–when she revealed her alcoholism to her readers. The last wave of writing about why mommy drinks saw the start–and mercifully the end–of a a wine label called MommyJuice.

The staying-power of the alcohol-soaked parenting blog is hardly surprising. So many new parents live in a world where nothing–their clothes, their furniture, their dinners, their bodies–are their own, but alcohol, save a curious sip here or there, is not. for. the. kids. So I get all the odes to mommy drinking. That glass may be the only time she gets to herself all day, the only thing that is completely hers.

But why is it always wine?

It’s easy to understand why beer isn’t the mommy drink of choice. If you’re trying to cut calories to reach the ideal pre-baby weight, you probably aren’t drinking beer, which can run you up to 300 calories. A serving of wine is about half the calories of a beer with equivalent alcohol content.

Cocktails are out, too, because they require work. You need ingredients, some of them fresh and thus more likely than not molding on your PB&J-crusted counter top. The sound of ice cubes in a cocktail shaker will strike fear into the heart of any parent who has just gotten a child to sleep.

So wine seems a good choice, both for calories and quiet. Neither of these issues is really a deal-breaker. You can pour half a beer. You can have a cocktail on the rocks. But wine, a new acquaintance recently shared with me, is not just about having something to ourselves. A bottle of wine is a shared experience. No matter how many people are around, you can divide the bottle amongst them.

Drinking wine is deeply tied with a sense of community, so much so that, even if you’re just sitting at your computer typing away a few stray thoughts about parenting, that glass next to you connects you to others all over the world struggling to put thoughts to paper after an especially arduous day.

So a toast to all of you this evening: congratulations on making it through another day. Let’s share a bottle in person soon.

This post was originally published on snackdinner.

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About the Author

Stephanie Loomis Pappas is a professor turned stay-at-home parent committed to debunking all of the bad parenting advice on the internet. She started snackdinner.com to remind Googling parents that whatever they’re doing, they’re doing just fine. You can find snackdinner on Facebook @snackdinner and Instagram @trysnackdinner.