mommy juice in the time of the coronavirus

what led to mommy wine culture, and how has the pandemic changed this?

At this point, I’d bet good money that anyone who has birthed a child from 2010 to present day has come across the swirly pink cursive “Mommy Juice” wine glass at least once. Maybe you chose to purchase it after your toddler threw a litre of tomato soup all over the grocery store, or your cousin’s ex-girlfriend gifted it to you because you looked like you needed it, or perhaps it was proudly displayed in an Instagram story from a middle-class fancy Barbara while she was on her back deck. Regardless, the cup of the North American Wine Mommy has been a persistent force in maternal social lives.

For those uninitiated, the Wine Mommy is someone who likes to take the edge off after a hard day. She balances multiple roles, jobs, and tasks on any given day. She’s run to the liquor store in her yoga pants and messy bun before it closed at 6 on Sundays, and maybe - just maybe - she has a Bless This Mess quote hung up on the walls. She’s always a meme, mostly a white woman, and sometimes a saviour for those who don’t want to take on traditional house-maker roles in their burgeoning families. One way or another, she’s played a role in the lives of many maternal caregivers in the last decade.

Before I go any further, I also want to stress that the Wine Mommy is inherently one of the most gendered feminine women on the internet. She maintains the Western gender tropes of women as maternal, nurturing, and caretaking. She doesn’t always reflect the queer and non-binary parenting world. (Perhaps there is some overlap in how queer families structure parenting dynamics, but I’m not the right person to explore that). What I speak to in this essay is that hyper gendered cis-woman mother that has somehow come to represent the state of mothering in a weird decade-long joke about contemporary family structures.

So today, I’m looking at how the Wine Mommy has gained such a following, and what her continued presence says about pandemic parenting dynamics in 2022.

Modern Mothering Meltdowns

One of the foundational parts of the Wine Mommy is that the idea of her has almost always started with a tired, burnt-out woman wanting to escape the sole identity of Mama™ on the wanton cheerio-laden toddler days. The two words – wine and mommy – always go hand in hand. Jokes then solidify the identity of a mother who needs a drink. There’s a lot about mothers that we miss in our cultural reflections on maternity - mostly that mothers are multidimensional and complicated, and giving birth to a human does not always mean that their sole purpose and focus will just be childrearing. Just ask Claire Vaye Watkins about that.

There has been some focus on multifaceted mothers, though I would argue that film and television continue to fixate on just one additional dimension: mothers that work. From the 1980s power shoulders of work force mothers to the milk-stained blouses of Workin’ Moms and The Letdown, we’ve seen hints of how mothers balance the heavy demands of a full career with the early years of parenting. I’ve sat through countless academic brainstorming sessions about how you could have a kid and be an academic, though the consensus is always that it’s probably too hard and you really shouldn’t. But none of these events or depictions touch on the realities of motherhood when you stray outside of the linear path of cis-woman mothering (that of married by 30, child by 35, well-salaried, and house-owning). What happens when mothers are poor, single, young, working multiple jobs, without childcare, or all of the above?

Canadian census data from 2016 demonstrates that there’s been an increase in people living alone in their household, as well as couples living without children in certain regions of the country (particularly the Maritimes). At that time, there were 51% of households comprising a typical “mom, dad, and child” scenario, though this may have shifted with more recent 2021 Census data. More recent Canadian household data shows that “lone-parent” families (either a single mom or single dad to children) have risen between 2010 to 2021, with 1.83 million lone-parent families in Canada in 2021 compared to 1.56 million in 2010. Statistics on their income found that in 2021, lone-parent families were less likely to leave low-income tax brackets than couple families, averaging 1.8 years longer in low-income roles than couple-parent families with children. Pre-COVID, employed lone-mothers were on average older, with higher educations and older children than stay-at-home lone mothers. These proportions were comparably lower in coupled-mothers, with both employed mothers and stay-at-home mothers having lower education than employed lone-mothers. Lone mothers were also less likely to be employed than those who were in a couple, with 69% of lone mothers not employed in 2014. Those that were employed were more likely to work in sales and service than women in couples’ families.

Having been the woman in the lone-parent scenario, I can attest to the difficulty of maintaining any sort of employment while being low-income. If you’re working a 9 to 5 in person job, you somehow have to drop your child off at school or their bus stop by 8:30 or 8:45 AM, get to your job by 9 AM (hopefully in a smaller city where there’s less traffic), and then either attempt to find an open after school childcare spot (few and far between) and pay hefty monthly fees for that, or figure out a way to leave work by 3:15 pm to pick your child up for 3:30 pm. Or if you work part-time jobs, you have to constantly schedule shifts that only fall in school hours, or in evening hours where you maybe can ask your parents or a friend to watch your child. It feels nearly impossible.

Enter Wine Mommy. The perfect caricature to hide all the challenges that come with contemporary parenting.

I Don’t Know How She Does It – The Perfect Mother and The Wine Mother

Most thought pieces on the Wine Mommy conclude that she is the embodiment of the very real, very specific isolation of modern parenting. I think often about the terrible 2010s Sarah Jessica Parker film, I Don’t Know How She Does It. That mother - the supermom who is accelerating her career - has a fight with her husband and ends up apologizing for prioritizing her work over her family, ultimately baking a pie for the school bake sale to prove her maternal worth. I think that the consensus sometimes is still that you can either be a really good mom, or a really good worker, and there is no reward for either of them because it means you gave up one to have the other.

Yet parenting demands have changed, and resources to succeed have been increasingly limited. Child raising styles that sound like a farm to table movement (but with Legos) are considered the norm: gentle parenting, hands on parenting, attachment parenting, and other similar styles. Yet to practice these and to access affordable childcare while working, even pre-COVID, was challenging. There are always social values ascribed to what defines a good mom or a bad mom, placing heightened expectations on women and using a standard to measure and compare ourselves against.

Good mothers include (but are not limited to): those who dedicate their lives to their children, who juggle their work demands but maintain the importance of doting and mothering their families, those who have children and then have more children, who’s breastmilk is sent from angels or fairies for the good of all humanity, and those who are always able to manage their own emotions even when their children have decided to make a snow globe with extra glitter and throw it at each other.

As for bad mothers? Those who dress inappropriately, use drugs and alcohol, have piercings, have tattoos, have purple hair, and who despite most of their striving, remain in poverty or have situations that would be associated with poverty stereotypes. Notably, these standards remain different for white mothers than Black or Indigenous mothers – there’s a degree of cosplay associated with bad white moms, and a privilege afforded that allows white moms to get away with an additional amount of liberated behaviour before really crossing any social lines (think Bad Moms). Meanwhile, Black mothers and Indigenous mothers face the heightened and harmful stereotypes of bad mothering in more inescapable and highly surveilled daily ways.

Alcohol’s role in maintaining this dichotomy has a strong relationship with advertising trends over the last thirty years. Somehow by the late 1990s, women became the central focus of liquor and spirit sales. In a 2011 Toronto Star article, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth, David Jernigan, cited a market segmentation of alcohol sales as a contributing factor. The spirits industry was underperforming for women and younger generations. The pinking of alcohol, “chick beers” and other bubbly, brightly coloured cocktails rose in popularity for young women. As women aged and grew in the workforce, their buying power increased, as did their desires for downtime, and marketing worked its magic.

By 2010, Instagram and smart phones and those e-Cards of vintage images with snarky sayings arose. These cards made fun of the Betty Draper-era ideals of motherhood, blending punk ideals with alcohol in quick pink swoops. The Wine Mommies had landed.

There is this perceived liberation that comes with the mothers who drink. And admittedly, it can be funny. In a current era where mothers are asked to bake artisanal organic granola for their baby’s first birthday cake (no sugar, no dairy, no eggs, no nuts, no gluten), the demands and expectations of being a good mother are higher than ever. There is no room for failure, no room for being poor, and no room for jokes. The Wine Mommy represents a breath of fresh air for some, which I can appreciate from time to time given the bizarre identity negotiations we make as early parents. But the message that to be a liberated, cool mother you have to drink wine to deal with your daily domestic arena has a pervasiveness that I worry about as more time passes.  

How Much Mommy Juice Is Too Much?

Women’s intake of alcohol is rarely considered problematic, right up until someone decides to have a child. Suddenly, then, come those invisible expectations to uphold. Ashley Fetters explores this in a piece for The Atlantic:

Certainly, anyone drinking to self-medicate or developing an alcohol addiction is a cause for concern. But the concern over mothers drinking has historically been especially fraught. Throughout modern history, it’s been “more culturally problematic for women to be drunk than men, because it’s a violation of all sorts of notions of femininity,” Jacobson said. On top of that, mothering is known universally to be a hugely important job, one that doesn’t end every day at 5 p.m. or offer any time off. “Moms are never off the clock,” Jacobson said, which means any drinking a mother does could, to a critical eye, be seen as drinking on the job. Plus, in the 20th-century concept of the nuclear family, moms raised kids while dads worked outside the home and then came home to relax until bedtime—so dads’ drinking time was built into the day from the start, in a way. “Beer dads” has never materialized as a polarizing internet joke, even though fathers are often stereotypically associated with beer.

There is considerable push-back from other mothers against wine culture, and I think this is gaining even more attention now that we’ve had more collective conversations about alcohol consumption during the pandemic. Alcohol fuelled 2020 Zoom parties and punctuating endless lockdown days. There are memes about that particular time where we used alcohol at any point, because of the tremendous loss of routine and normal life structures.

The pushback seems gated by moralities that feel very Christian at times. Opinion pieces and mommy blogs increasingly raise a cautious eyebrow about the idea of Wine Mommies. One opinion piece demonstrates the backlash:

“It demeans mothers, encouraging them to hit the bottle when they can’t handle their kids, yet it devalues their children as well, telling them they are just so burdensome that mom needs to drink to get through motherhood”

This quote really hit me, because it falls right into the good mother/bad mother dichotomy that causes tensions and makes wine so desirable for women. It also fails to capture the much bigger domestic and caretaking realities that modern mothers face. The pandemic has made the maternal and parenting challenges all the more visible to everyone that’s been on a work call with us. We’ve been dubbed “superhumans” for making work from home and online schooling work during lockdowns. Countless articles covered the crisis, then burnout, then return to crisis that mothers faced. Despite the hyper-positive, superficial superwoman persona dedicated to pandemic moms, research in Canada and the U.S. has demonstrated that mothers have had little choice but to leave the workforce. A 2020 Canadian report from the Royal Bank found that while mothers with children under age 6 made up 41% of the Canadian labour force, they accounted for two thirds of the work exodus. They further find:

Men are picking up jobs at three times the rate that women are leaving the workforce amid the pressures and opportunities of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new Royal Bank report. More than 20,000 women left the workforce between February and October, while about 68,000 men joined it, said the study released Thursday. The report said the pandemic and the demands of raising children are likely to blame for the exit of women from the workforce, while men are benefiting from growth in the science, technology, engineering and math fields they dominate in.

Given this forced exodus, I think about the research that solidifies what a privileged position the wine mom really is in, as Kelly Harding and her colleagues find:

Contemporary media portrayals present ‘White, upper-middle class wom[e]n’ as being in a ‘crisis’ and ‘teeter[ing] on the edge of sanity’ (p. 46). Expanded discourses about motherhood and alcohol use are needed to address the privileged position of a wine mom, acknowledging the experiences of working- and lower-class mothers, mothers of colour and Indigenous mothers who are often absent from these discourses. Current discourses emphasize that the only type of motherhood worth protecting is ‘in alignment with White, upper-middle class conditions’ (p. 60). This interpretation holds true for the sociocultural constructions of the wine mom in this Instagram space where there is a continued reproduction of white, middle-upper class, neoliberal values.

If the Wine Mommy is a middle-income white woman in crisis, what happens for the caretakers who are in much more trying circumstances? Are those who do not fit the middle-class suburban white wine mom ideal allowed to post the wine memes or how they “take the edge off” after a tough day? Or are these classed, raced, and feminized tropes of the wine mom making it difficult for the lived realities of these women that don’t fit the Wine Mommy persona?

I think my concerns and curiosity around it lie in what happens when you’re a single-parent mom with multiple bills, part time jobs, and a constant desire to move away from a low-income tax bracket. That the general social discourse now is to have your peers offer you a glass of wine to take the edge off, rather than any firm understanding that modern parenting is at constant odds with capitalist success.

I’m hopeful that the changing discourses around alcohol use for women during the pandemic allows us to really re-construct away from the social narratives of women’s alcohol use as singularly white, well-off, and hilarious. Because after a while, the really drunk mum in the corner just stops being funny.