If your drinking makes you feel like a bad mum, you’re not alone.
Maybe Mother’s Day stirred something up. Perhaps it got you thinking about your relationship with your kids and how alcohol impacts that.
It doesn’t matter how old your children are – the guilt can be a lot to deal with.
If you’ve been beating yourself up, here’s what you need to know (and the key question to ask next).
Key points
Mummy wine culture has made this all worse
From wine bottles labelled “the kids are finally asleep” to prosecco playdates and memes about the wine you need for parenting, drinking and motherhood are often treated like one big joke. But behind all of that is something we don’t talk about enough – motherhood is relentless.
You’re expected to work like you don’t have children and parent like you don’t have a job. Exhausted, overstretched, under-supported – of course you reached for something to take the edge off. Drinking can be part of bonding with other mums too.
Drinking becomes how you handle everything
Somewhere along the way, wine stopped being an occasional relief and became your operating system. Perhaps your children have left home now but drinking is still how you decompress after work or how you get through a long day without losing it completely.
The pattern often stays because you’ve been practising it for years. So stop beating yourself up. You’re not broken or weak. You found a coping mechanism that genuinely helped for a while. The problem is it’s now causing more issues than it solves, and you’re self-aware enough to recognise that.
How could alcohol-free living help here?
Forget the guilt for a minute. Instead of cataloguing what you’re doing wrong, write down how you’d show up differently without alcohol. Maybe you’d have real energy in the mornings instead of forcing yourself through the school run feeling rough. Perhaps you’d say yes to spontaneous plans because driving in the evening would be no problem.
Maybe it would be easier to fully remember conversations with your teenagers. You’d be fully present for those random moments when they suddenly want to talk or need you. And you’d be role modelling another way of handling life.
The question isn’t “Am I bad enough to need to stop?”
You don’t have to quit. It’s your life, your choices. But because it’s your life, you also get to decide whether alcohol is good enough to stay in it. You get to ask: would stopping for a while show me that life could be better – maybe in ways I haven’t even imagined yet?
So the question isn’t “Am I a bad mum who needs to quit drinking?” It’s more: “Is alcohol good enough for me and my family?” Only you can answer that. You get to make the decision here – the one that’s right for you.
If you know something needs to change but you can’t imagine quitting yet, come and join us for Freedom Week. You’ll get 7 days of coaching and support to help you break out of the drink-regret-repeat cycle.
4 responses
Yes! Even without children, the “routine” we have practiced appears to be able to solve stuff it has nothing to do with. In fact, in my case, wine could have added to my hospitalization issue several years ago. This is easy to say now, but when in the hospital it was frightening. By the way, when we take a break we find not only saving money on alcohol, but also saving on the related “stuff” the industry dangles in front of us! Not drinking is most certainly a lifestyle upgrade! Many thanks as usual for your insight.
Alcohol is often presented as a quick fix for everything—stress, parenting challenges, even a global pandemic. It’s marketed as the essential social lubricant adults supposedly need to cope and connect. But the reality can look very different, as I explored in an earlier blog post: https://thesoberschool.com/alcohol-the-drug-that-claims-to-do-everything/
P.S. Our Mother’s Day is May 10; interesting how UK & USA/Canada have such different dates!
UK and US Mother’s Day fall on different dates because they come from two entirely separate traditions, each with its own history and timing. The UK version is tied to the Christian calendar and changes every year. While the US version grew out of a modern social movement founded in the early 20th century by Anna Jarvis, who campaigned for a national day to honour mothers after her own mother’s death. (I had to google that)!