Mommy needs:
Wine
An end to the white supremacist, patriarchal, capitalist system that makes modern motherhood so dehumanizing that self-medication is both aspirational and expected.
— Graeme Seabrook
Self-care has become an incredibly popular phrase in the parenting community. And for good reason, because not only are parents tired, as discussed in chapter five, but most of us also live in a state of burnout. Ann Douglas, a prominent Canadian parenting writer, talks at length about parental burnout and the many challenges of work-life balance. With almost 70 percent of parents working outside the home and what she calls our “total work culture” that demands employees be available for work communication outside of office hours, Douglas says that time pressure has become the norm for many families.1 It’s not just physical fatigue that parents are battling, it’s also mental fatigue and a general sense of overwhelm. There’s just too much to do in any given day, week, or month.
It’s understandable that parents are looking for solutions to burn-out, and the answer many of us are given is to increase our self-care. Unfortunately, the rhetoric of self-care is a grossly inadequate response that often only adds to the care duties of already exhausted parents. Allow me to explain. I think we can all agree that the demands of paid work and the demands of child care and household work have expanded in recent decades. Today we have more work-related travel, more emails, longer hours, longer commutes, and less job security (and therefore more pressure to constantly perform) than ever before. Parents are likewise expected to do more today than simply keep their children alive and, ideally, fed. They are expected to invest in their children so that they can thrive in every area of their life. The result is an entire generation of exhausted parents with too much to do, and there has been little analysis and not enough socio-political pressure to challenge the structures that create our day-to-day mental and physical fatigue. Instead what has emerged is a barrage of messages reminding parents, and mostly femme parents, that they need to take care of themselves. The self-care narrative that has developed from this is hyper-feminized and usually focuses on beauty rituals such as manicures/pedicures and bubble baths, or exercise such as hitting the gym and running. In more recent years there has also been pressure on the overwhelmed to avail themselves of co-opted spiritual practices and teachings such as yoga and meditation. This can increase emotional burden and tension, particularly if the teachings were co-opted from your culture or religion because it’s not particularly restful or rejuvenating to be told how to engage in these practices in a misunderstood or inauthentic way.
I call this prescriptive self-care. It’s the type of self-care that emerges from a combination of marketing and well-meaning advice, but I have a big problem with it. Usually prescriptive self-care has a financial or time cost that feels very expensive to my clients; it feels a little like getting a prescription for a medicine that they can’t afford while being told that their mental health can’t not afford it. The rise of doula care, night nannies, meal-delivery services, dog walkers, and babysitting apps that feel like Tinder has created a new economic market that capitalizes on parental fatigue. Why challenge or try to solve the problem of systemic parental overwhelm when it’s so readily profitable? There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with purchasing prescriptive self-care services. Many families use these services as a means of survival and protecting their mental wellness. But because they’re definitely not accessible to all families, these coping strategies end up doubling down on systemic inequalities. What this looks like is when BIPOC and low-income women make complex arrangements for someone else to care for their families because they have been hired to support a middle/upper-class, often white, family.
One of my biggest concerns with the rhetoric of prescriptive self-care is the way in which it sets parents up for guilt and shame. The logic of prescriptive self-care says that if we’re fatigued or drained, it’s because we aren’t caring enough for ourselves, making it a personal deficit issue rather than a by-product of the culture of impossible parenting. Instead of placing responsibility for parental burnout on the socio-political economic systems that make working full time and raising kids full time so difficult, we tell parents it’s their fault for not hitting the gym hard enough. I cringe every time I hear someone talk about parenting self-care by referring to the phrase “Put on your own oxygen mask first.” This metaphor, borrowed from airline emergency-procedure demonstrations that direct parents to put on their own emergency oxygen masks before putting masks on their children, overlooks the much more significant detail that the plane is plummeting to the ground! The culture of impossible parenting works to crash families, so blaming parents for not being able to engage in prescriptive self-care feels misguided at best. What I sometimes see in my practice is that self-care winds up being another item on my clients’ to-do list, which they then fault themselves for not getting done. The best indicator that you are adhering to prescriptive self-care culture is the presence of the word should.
“I know I should meditate before bed, but I really wanted to see how Orange Is the New Black ended.”
“I know I should go to the gym, but I just don’t have the energy.”
“I know I should write in my journal, but I never know what to write.”
Any time you find yourself caught in a “should,” take it as a signal to check in with yourself about what you really need. It’s likely a sign that you’re craving some time or space for yourself — but you have total freedom in how you achieve that, and what works for you may be different from what works for others. You don’t need to feel compelled to follow any of the suggestions from what marketing consultant Kelly Diels refers to as the female lifestyle empowerment brand, which is a marketing narrative designed to sell you products and services and not a support in learning how to care for yourself.2
Perhaps the most obvious marketing narrative geared to selling products as self-care to parents has been the creation of mommy wine culture, where marketers sold women on the idea that wine could be a way for mothers to cope with the daily grind and frustrations of parenting, much to the criticism of sober marketing specialists such as Alana Nugent. Nugent argues that the trend of using alcohol to cope with the demands of impossible-parenting culture has been strategically sold to mothers as part of a very profitable marketing strategy to increase alcohol sales among women. And it seems to be working: the absolute number of women who drink has risen on a global scale.3 But wine is not the solution for getting burnt-out mothers the rest they are craving. Nugent suggests that the marketing of alcohol specifically to mothers subtly discourages them from holding their partners accountable for their responsibility to their children and management of the household. In this sense, “mommy juice” (a marketing phrase to describe drinking wine while parenting) becomes both a mother’s motivation to power through her epic on-duty hours of child care, and her coping mechanism for overwhelm, boredom, and fatigue once the children are in bed. All of this is why there’s a rising resistance to alcohol being so casually tossed around as the solution for the stresses of motherhood.
The critiques of mommy wine culture are valid: mothers are the subjects of crafty marketing, consuming alcohol is not recommended when you have depression or anxiety, and it has a negative impact on women’s health. Yet for many parents that I know, specifically mothers, alcohol use is an easy and relatively cheap way to relax and have fun during a time in their lives when they don’t have access to their historical stress-busting activities.4 Support for the use of alcohol as maternal self-care has been wrapped up in an “I deserve this!” attitude that’s perpetrated through often humorous depictions of mothers struggling (and sometimes failing) to hold off on wine-drinking until 5:00 p.m., as seen on Netflix television shows such as Workin’ Moms and The Letdown. I think the “I deserve this!” sentiment also speaks to a desire for parents to hold on to an exclusively adult part of themselves, which can get easily lost in the demands and hyper-responsibility that come with caring for young children. For many people, alcohol represents freedom, lightness, and letting go of stress, so it’s understandable that for some parents drinking becomes an act of rebellion against the repetitive nature of parent life.
Which is why I feel very conflicted about the use of alcohol as a way to rest and de-stress. There was a time in my life where I would have argued that a glass or two of wine each night was critical to my survival and mental wellness, because it gave me a guaranteed way to turn down the volume of the brain chatter that was vigilantly making lists and keeping track of the needs of everyone in the house. As the kids got older, parenting became easier and I was able to share the household work in an equitable way with a new partner, so my stress levels decreased and my evening wind-down with wine and Netflix became unnecessary. While there are lots of great reasons to reduce or eliminate alcohol, I am hesitant to conclude that all parents, especially those who identify as mothers, need to give up their nightly glass of pinot if it feels supportive for them in this phase of life. Instead, what I will suggest is that parents don’t need more behavioural policing. Assuming that there’s no medical concern or compulsive behaviour, parents need to have the space to make deliberate choices around drinking. If it feels like another should, as in “I should skip the wine tonight because I don’t want people to think that I’m trying to be a wine mom” or “I should have a glass of wine at book club because I don’t want people to think I’m boring,” it’s a signal to hit pause and do a closer analysis of that thought.
So, if prescriptive self-care isn’t the solution and self-medicating with alcohol isn’t the solution, what are burnt-out parents supposed to do? Part of the solution is to cultivate a practice of self-parenting. Unlike prescriptive self-care, self-parenting isn’t just about cultivating luxurious experiences, taking breaks, or finding ways to have fun (although this could certainly be a part of it, if you want it to be). It’s the practice of parents taking care of themselves in the same way they would their children. Parenting a newborn(s) requires making sure your baby/babies sleep enough, eat enough, and poop enough. Self-parenting is no different, because it assumes that all parents are entitled to meet their own biological needs.
For example, I’m going to assume that you don’t let your kids go without eating or hang out in poopy diapers for very long. I also imagine that you think strategically about naps and energy levels before leaving the house with your kids, and that if you’re out and they have a fatigue meltdown you go home or organize a way for them to have a nap (even if they don’t choose to nap). Parents are generally skilled at not only meeting but anticipating their children’s physical, social, environmental, and emotional needs most of the time. And yet so many parents of young children struggle to meet even their most urgent biological needs, such as ensuring they get enough water or calories in a day or poop when their body tells them to.
I know that meeting your own biological needs with young children around is not always simple, but I highly encourage you to make it non-negotiable, even if it involves setting your fussy baby down somewhere safe while you go to the bathroom or to grab a snack. I once had a client that I did home visits with, and I started every session by making her a snack and bringing her water, because she was so hyper-attentive to her high-needs baby that she would not eat or drink anything during the day while her partner was at work — and working twelve-hours shifts! It is very difficult to feel grounded and attentive when you’re dehydrated and hungry.
Once you’ve found a way to meet your daily biological needs, self-parenting is composed of four nurturing cornerstones: Rest, Play, Boundaries, and Ritual.
Rest: Given how critical sleep is for our mental health, it’s really quite unfortunate that there isn’t a way to get our kids, or ourselves, to sleep on command. Despite this lack of control, it is certainly worth getting creative about ways to maximize sleep, and it’s equally important for parents to find opportunities to rest their bodies and their minds. That’s not the same as protecting time to try to sleep, because that is a straight-up biological need. Rest is about protecting wind-down time, just like you would give your kid(s) some time to play quietly before you tuck them in.
Many clients lament about the difficult choice at the end of the day, when the kid(s) are asleep and the daily housework is done (done enough, anyway), between resting, usually by watching television or reading, or going straight to bed. While they’re exhausted, going to bed immediately robs them of wind-down time, spending time with their partners, or connecting to the non-parent parts of themselves. It’s critical for parents of young kids to have time when they are not “on duty” and aren’t needed to attend to anyone or anything, so that they can have time to daydream, create, relax, and just do whatever they want in that moment. Having your partner take the children to the park so that you can mop the floors uninterrupted does not constitute rest! Often rest time gets combined into chores, such as watching television while folding laundry, which does not feel as restful as watching television while curled up with a blanket and a hot tea. So if you’re going to rest, really rest.
Play: Adults need to play, too! It’s important to break up work and rest with fun. What it means to play is unique to each of us, but ideally it means having something to look forward to. Sometimes this coincides with having a break from your kids/family, such as a date or a night out with friends. It might involve something that takes up a lot of resources, like going on a vacation, but it doesn’t have to. You can absolutely integrate play into your day-to-day, although it may look really different from what fun looked like before kids. It could mean going to the park with your two-year-old and running through the splash pad with them, or taking your six-month-old to a Stars and Strollers movie and enjoying your favourite Marvel character on the big screen. There are no rules about how to integrate more play — it just involves seeking joy. I’ve had clients reread the entire Harry Potter series, start playing video games again, and even have a weekly group phone call with friends while watching The Bachelor so they could gossip and rant about the show during the commercials.
If you feel like you’ve lost your sense of play, try making a list of all the things you used to love to do as a child, and then revisit them, which could result in you joining a team sport or going camping or baking desserts with a loved family member. If you’re feeling really depressed and nothing feels like fun, pick something that used to bring you joy and do it anyway. Sometimes when we do the opposite of what our depression is telling us (“stay in bed and don’t reach out to anyone”) we surprise ourselves by feeling a bit better.
Boundaries: Whenever I try to explain what’s meant by boundaries, I like to borrow from Brené Brown’s definition: boundaries are simply an internal understanding and external communication about what’s okay and what’s not okay for us.5 Yet setting boundaries is far from simple for many of us. Often, we struggle to communicate them because we don’t have an internal knowledge about what is okay and what is not okay for us. Many parents, particularly mothers, have trouble tuning in to their own internal sense of yes or no because of impossible-parenting messages that tell us sacrifice is a demonstration of love. But there are usually clues when your boundaries have been violated, such as feeling angry, resentful, or overwhelmed, which is why it’s useful to pay attention when those feelings show up. Even if we do know what our internal boundaries are, it takes bravery to express our needs and keep people accountable. Saying no can be really hard, particularly if you have a history of saying yes and prioritizing the needs of others above your own, because they can be confused or hurt by your no. And finding the bravery to set (and hold) boundaries takes from our emotional energy stores, which is why it often feels easier just to say yes or do it ourselves. Even so, I would encourage you to experiment with putting your (very limited) energy into boundary setting, as it can lead to a greater sense of peace and authenticity. And this absolutely includes setting boundaries with your children!
Rituals: I generally stay away from the language of routines for parents with newborns and young babies, because postpartum life is often chaotic and how we spend our time can feel out of our control. Instead I suggest that every parent build a sense of the daily rituals that help them feel like they’re caring for themselves. Often these are pretty boring. Go outside every night after dinner, either for a walk or just on the apartment balcony to feel the sun or moon on your face. Even if you’ve been up all night, set a time that marks the start of the day, such as 6:00 a.m. or 7:00 a.m., and create a ritual around changing out of your pyjamas as soon as the clock hits that time. Use an elastic band to attach your mood medication to your toothbrush and take it every night when you brush your teeth. You don’t need rituals for everything, but they are important to help you feel a sense of order in your life, and rituals become extra important when you’re feeling very depressed. Spend a few moments and write down the five things that, when done daily, make a big impact on your day. Next, create a simple and easy ritual around each of them (the simpler the better). Finally, ask the people on your support team to help you implement these practices.
Once you’re able to identify the differences between prescriptive self-care and tending to your physical and emotions needs in a loving, parental way, you can identify what might actually help you feel cared for. Often, these are simple things like “I just want to be alone in my house for a few hours,” or “I just want enough time to shower and have a hot coffee in the morning.” One tool that many parents find helpful is the four squares of self-parenting, which is designed to help you become more familiar with current strategies of self-parenting and let you brainstorm new ones. Simply draw a big square and divide it into four smaller squares. Label and fill out each section with the headings below and then keep it somewhere handy for those extra-hard moments.
In this section, make a list of all the people that you can call upon for support. It might be helpful to categorize them into three groups: (1) Emotional, (2) Physical, and (3) Informational.6 The first group includes people that can offer you emotional support or the people you’re comfortable sharing your feelings with. Often, they know the right thing to say or are really great at helping you to calm down or at making you laugh. The second are people you can rely on for physical support, such as watching your kids or dropping off dinner. They may not be great at talking about hard feelings, but they’re awesome at running to the store for you. The third are people that you trust to give you good informational support. So much of parenting involves wading through conflicting or unwanted parenting advice and it can be hard to wrap your head around it all. Often these people are professionals, like your doctor or pediatrician, but they can also be wise parent friends or family members. Once you know who your people are, tell them that they made the list and let them know that you’re going to be leaning on them.
You can refer to this section as mindsets, affirmations, internal scripts, or anything that highlights how you talk to yourself during hard times. Some people love to use classic phrases, such as “I would never be given anything I can’t handle.” Others like to use pop culture references, such as Kimmy Schmidt’s mantra, from the eponymous television show, that “a person can stand just about anything for ten seconds, then you just start on a new ten seconds. All you have to do is take it ten seconds at a time.” I’ve had some clients find solace in naming distorted thinking patterns, as in “I’m catastrophizing — where is the evidence to support this thought?” and others who turn to mindfulness one-liners, such as “This is just a moment in time and it will pass.” It doesn’t matter what self-talk you use, as long as you find it helpful. If you aren’t sure where to start, try asking friends and family members what kinds of self-talk help them through tough times and see if anything resonates. If it does, borrow it!
These are all the things that help sustain you when you feel like you’re not coping well. The good thing about this section is that there is no such thing as bad coping. I often see shoulds sneak in here; clients will say something like “I should probably go for a walk,” to which I’ll ask, “Do you like going for walks?” and will often get a response of “Not really.” These strategies aren’t meant to be stretch goals. Ideally, your coping mechanisms will be the things that you already know work, and by writing them down you are simply bringing more intention to them, as well as making them as safe as possible. I’ve seen things on this list such as “take ten slow deep breaths,” “throw eggs at the garage,” or “rip out the pages of old books while screaming into my pillow.” The things you would not include on this list are things that harm you or things that you are actively working to change. For example, if you historically shopped online as a way to self-soothe and you’re working hard to find other ways to calm yourself, you would not list that among your coping strategies. I find that coping strategies for anxiety often involve movement, of your breath or of your body, because anxious energy wants to be moved, while depressive strategies are gentler and more loving, as depressive energy wants compassion. You goal is to generate a list of things that help you get back into a place where you feel grounded and able to regulate your emotions, so get creative about what helps you connect to this space.
This is the section where clients often list things that we generally know are good for our mental health, but can’t necessarily (or aren’t necessary to) do all the time. Things like “spend time in nature” or “go out with my friends” or “do my physiotherapy exercises” belong here. It’s not uncommon to see things that could be categorized as prescriptive self-care in this list, such as baths, journaling, or exercise, and that’s okay! When you aren’t operating from a should place, these can be wonderful activities to engage in, if they resonate with you and you find them supportive. Once this list is complete, strive to build these activities into your days, with lots of self-compassion if you don’t always get to them. If they start to feel prescriptive, you can simply swap them out for something else.
One of the biggest obstacles to self-parenting is parent guilt, because in the culture of impossible parenting, any time a parent prioritizes taking care of themselves, they risk compromising the best interests of their children (either consciously or unconsciously).7 If meeting your owns needs, wants, and desires causes you to feel guilt (meaning you feel that you’ve done something bad) or shame (meaning you feel that you are bad), it could be that you’re measuring yourself or your child against impossible standards. I want to gently remind you that taking time to care for yourself will not prevent your children from meeting their full intellectual or emotional potential, because there is no such thing!8 The idea that a “perfect” childhood produces a more complete or fully realized adult is a delusion that robs joy from both parents and children. As mentioned in the previous chapter, the relationship between parent and child is rooted in synchronistic flow, meaning that it’s healthy to have both connection and independence from your children.9 While independence from your children can feel emotionally challenging at first, it can be helpful to remember that maintaining a sense of self and learning how to share the work of parenting with partners, family, or paid caregivers will benefit you and your children.
In the early 2000s, I completed my sociological graduate thesis about how social policies shape the construction of good/bad mothering identities for women in the Canadian prison system; it involved many interviews with previously incarcerated parents. Feelings of guilt and shame about not being good enough were significantly tied to the internalized construction of bad mothering identity for many of the women I interviewed, which I had suspected would come up as a theme. Years later, when I started offering social work counselling to a much broader population of parents, I was struck by how consistently the themes of guilt and shame came up. In fact, guilt and shame seem to be a reliable part of parental identity for parents being held and/or holding themselves to impossible parenting expectations. What’s most interesting is that the types of things parents feel guilty about usually don’t seem like actual offences to most outsiders. They often include things like “I feel so guilty about putting the baby in daycare but I had to go back to work” or “I feel so guilty that I had a C-section.” Many parents feel guilty about things that they cannot control, and that others would interpret as logical or practical.
I find that parent guilt comes from one of two places. The first is when parents fail to adhere to their own sense of parenting values, as we examined in the previous chapter. For example, I once worked with a parent who had a deep core value around honouring community, and they were riddled with guilt over moving across town during their pregnancy because their baby wouldn’t be able to see the other children in her community as often as they would like; they worried that as their child got older, they wouldn’t have a sense of belonging. Their work was to come to terms with the limitations of accessing their old friends and neighbours and seek out ways to connect with local parents to build a new sense of community.
The second place I see parent guilt emerge is when a parent feels they are failing to measure up to someone else’s parenting values, whether that “someone else” is a single person or an entire culture. I lived this myself when my children were younger. I hated taking them to the park. It was always too hot or too cold, it bothered my allergies and cranked up my anxiety, and there were often gross bugs. But I felt guilty if I didn’t take them every day, because the park was literally across the street from our home. Did it really matter if I didn’t take the kids to the park every day? No, it didn’t, but I had internalized the message years before that kids needed to play outside in parks. These seemingly innocuous ideas, such as “kids need parks,” can sneakily erode our sense of parenting confidence, making us feel like we aren’t following the rules of good parenting. On the days when you find yourself feeling guilty, take a moment to assess whether you’re guilty of violating your own principles or external principles. If the guilt is coming from somewhere external, try to let it go by reminding yourself that you only get so much emotional energy, and you need to protect it for the things that really matter. Once I let go of the park guilt, I was able to find all sorts of fun ways to play with the kids that adhered to my parenting principles. And we got to stay in our bug-free house and not have the sunscreen fight.
However, if you find that you’ve violated your own parenting principles, then I encourage you to be guilty, rather than feel guilty. If you are guilty, you can do something to rectify the situation, versus trying to push away guilty feelings. If you suspect you might be guilty and have caused harm, the following questions can help you move from feeling guilty to making amends.10 Be sure to put a cap on how long you will punish yourself — there isn’t a crime in the criminal justice system that doesn’t have a sentence associated with it, and it should be no different for your internal crimes!
What crime are you guilty of?
Example: I am guilty of ignoring my baby’s cries during our walk because I thought they would fall asleep, but they were crying because they had a giant poop, and now they have a diaper rash.
What is the punishment for this crime?
Example: I feel awful. And I did have to clean up a giant poop without enough wipes and it somehow got in my hair, so that wasn’t fun.
What is the sentence?
Example: I’ll let myself feel bad about this until tomorrow. I’m going to be extra attentive to the baby all night and then make sure that I pack extra poop gear the next time we go out. And if I’m trying to walk them to sleep and they’re crying hard, I’ll check on them.
You also may not feel a lot of guilt or shame, but that doesn’t mean you aren’t impacted by parenting expectations. Some parents share with me that while they don’t have a strong internalized sense of guilt about engaging in self-parenting, they worry about how their actions (or inaction) will be received by others and whether they could be accused of being a bad parent. I’m noticing that on a collective scale, parents are growing increasingly fatigued by persistent, tense feelings of competition or judgment about their parenting decisions. We are tired of being judged and we don’t feel like judging others! While it requires bravery and self-compassion to model self-parenting from within the culture of impossible parenting, it’s equally possible that the people whose judgment you fear will see you as a model for a new, less hostile parenting culture.
Self-parenting isn’t just about finding ways to take care of yourself. It’s also a way to give yourself the type of parenting you wish you had received as a child but didn’t necessarily always get. In many ways, becoming a parent is an opportunity to re-parent yourself, as you become much clearer about what your parent(s) went through trying to raise you.11 This may fill you with compassion and awe, or it may fill you with grief to realize all the needs you had that weren’t met, but I think for most of us it’s a combination of the two. Self-parenting requires you to observe your own emotional needs and notice gaps in the care or emotional intelligence or regulation you’re experiencing, so you can learn how to address your own needs as an adult.12 Becoming a parent is a time of significant change and growth, and an opportunity to change in ways that are irreversibly beneficial to your sense of self.13 It might help to view facing challenges in your day-to-day as an opportunity to learn more about yourself, rather than as a struggle against your faults and flaws.14 Until we are able to parent ourselves effectively, it’s often a struggle to parent our children in the ways we would like to. The more we tend to ourselves, the easier parenting feels, because we’re modelling the values we want to give to our kids, such as kindness, boundaries, and self-compassion. And even if our kids never notice all the loving values we are modelling for them, it feels good for us — and that’s enough.