Why your glass of wine at witching hour is no joke
Alcohol — “mummy’s little helper” — has become an embedded and amusing part of modern motherhood. So what’s the problem with a glass of wine at witching hour? As it turns out, there are a few.
Lifestyle
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Late afternoon, every day, it starts. The fussing, the whinging, the general irritability of one or more children.
The witching hour — from around 5pm onwards — arrives for mothers of young children, colliding with chores of cooking dinner, feeding babies, bathing children and cleaning endless mess.
It’s an exhausting and stressful patch of time, especially after a long day of often relentlessly repetitive parenting tasks.
With older children, there’s homework to supervise, Book Week costumes to create, sibling fights to arbitrate, school newsletters to read, screen time to regulate. And often, it’s after returning home from paid work outside the home.
Yes, you wanted this. Yes, you love your children. But surely it’s wine time. Wine o’clock. A small, soothing reward to get through, to take the edge off, to cope.
For some, it’s only one glass a night. But for others, one (generous) glass while making dinner turns to two, then three. Is that bottle almost empty? It’s become a habit but it’s OK. You can handle it. Until you can’t.
Alcohol — “mummy’s little helper” — has become an embedded and indeed amusing part of modern mothering culture.
Social media memes (Leftover wine? Hahaha; They whine, I wine; The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink; Surviving motherhood one bottle at a time) are shuttled about endlessly on Facebook and Instagram.
The “need’’ for alcohol to preserve a mother’s sanity is joked about openly at the school gate.
An alcoholic beverage for the parents has become a standard fixture at children’s birthday parties, at weekly cricket or swim club meets (some primary school swim clubs are fully licensed) and school fetes.
After-school park plays often go hand-in-hand with a wine or bubbles pulled out of an Esky, while a glass of wine also has its place as an isolation buster.
The social disconnect and loneliness that sometimes envelops new parents is being tackled by Facebook social groups, such as Mums Who Wine, which aims to build connections between mothers in their communities.
New mum Alida Skimmings, 35, who co-runs Instagram account Wining Wives, says she only realised how important social media parenting groups were once she had her first child, daughter India, three months ago.
The primary school teacher says she was “quite a big drinker’’ before the birth of her daughter but has now slipped into a more sedate ritual of having a glass of wine about 5pm when India goes down for a sleep.
“I feel like I need to have something just to relax to make my afternoon a little bit enjoyable,’’ she says.
“I can easily see how it could become a problem for some people because sometimes you don’t want to stop at one.
“Sometimes it can be overwhelming and a bit isolating with a little baby and it’s hard to be at home by yourself. It’s a massive lifestyle change and sometimes I love it and sometimes I hate it.
“I have a really supportive mum and my husband is great but having a wine at that time is a nice little ritual.”
So what’s the harm? As it turns out, in some cases, immense.
What many women don’t realise is that alcohol is attributable to an estimated 830 cases of breast cancers in Australian women each year, with 144 of those women dying from the disease, according to not-for-profit organisation Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE).
Its Annual Alcohol Poll 2019found only 16 per cent of Australians are aware of the link between alcohol and breast cancer.
Alcohol, a World Health Organisation group one carcinogen (or known to cause cancer), is one of the nation’s greatest preventive health challenges and is linked to about 200 disease conditions and 6000 deaths each year, according to FARE.
Here’s another way of looking at a bottle of wine, which usually contains about seven-and-a-half standard drinks.
Research published in BMC Public Health journal in 2019 found drinking one bottle of wine for women has the same equivalent cancer risk as smoking 10 cigarettes. For men, it is five cigarettes.
“We know most people don’t know about the cancer risk of alcohol. And breast cancer seems to be particularly relatable to alcohol,’’ says FARE’s director of policy and research Trish Hepworth.
“Alcohol is a legal drug but it is a drug. It’s addictive, it’s psychoactive. (Drinking alcohol) is really not harmless. There’s no safe level of drinking alcohol, there’s only lower risk guidelines.’’
In December, the National Health and Medical Research Council released revised drinking guidelines to no more than 10 standard drinks a week, down from the 14 set in 2009.
Hepworth says women in today’s busy world are “increasingly joking’’ about how they can’t cope without alcohol.
“We have put these incredible pressures on women,’’ she says.
“You have a look at all the memes and some novelty gifts — the wine glasses that hold an entire bottle of wine — there is a growing merchandising that encourages this level of high drinking.
“It’s completely pervasive … there’s basically nowhere you go that isn’t an alcohol-related event. It’s a really dangerous message if women feel like they can only relax with a glass of wine. The trouble is that it very easily slips into those high levels of drinking.’’
Women are catching up to men in rates of alcohol consumption, the gap between the sexes narrowing over time, according to a 2016 report by the National Drug and Alcohol Research Centre.
FARE’s Annual Alcohol Poll 2019 finds 79 per cent of women consume alcohol (compared to 85 per cent of men) with 59 per cent of women typically consuming one to two standard drinks on a typical occasion.
Dr Mark Daglish, addiction psychiatrist and director of HADS (Hospital Alcohol and Drug Service), says women’s drinking has become more accepted and using alcohol as a coping strategy “seems to be socially sanctioned’’.
“The social norm is now whenever people gather together, alcohol has to be a part of it … it’s difficult to find places where that is not true,” Daglish says.
“That running gag about the book club actually being a wine club where they occasionally discuss a book, speaks to a background truth. It normalises drinking.
“And if you have a problem with alcohol, that makes it easier to hide and harder to recognise in yourself.’’
It is also common, Daglish says, for people to underestimate how much they drink. Physically large wine glasses makes it difficult to accurately judge how many standard drinks are being consumed.
“There is no such thing as healthy drinking. The message that alcohol is a carcinogen isn’t widely known,’’ Daglish says.
“There’s this sense of you’ve got to keep going full throttle right through the day, switch off, sleep, recharge the battery, get up in the morning and go full throttle again.
“That sense of winding down is really difficult and we are looking for ways to accelerate that winding down so we can keep going harder for longer.
“The message that when you feel stressed and you have a drink … yes you do tend to feel better in the short term. But that’s the thing — it’s short-term gain for long-term consequences.’’
Faye Lawrence, 46, a Brisbane marketing communications consultant and psychology degree graduate, was, at her worst, drinking two bottles of wine daily.
She admits to previously drinking at home “to deal with the kids’’ (now aged 23 and 20) and says alcohol is often a “quick fix’’ for the juggle of career, children and elderly parents.
She is now more than two years sober and in 2018 started a group called Untoxicated offering sober social outings from bush walks to brunches.
Now with 3500 members in Melbourne, Brisbane and Sydney, about 60 per cent are women aged between 35 and 55 who fall somewhere between having no problem with alcohol and being an alcoholic.
“The shift towards the sober curious movement is becoming much more acceptable,’’ Lawrence says.
“Untoxicated is a positive social model … we are not a recovery model but it’s part of the jigsaw. It’s showing people a viable alternative.’’
There are also more people publicly sharing their stories of problem drinking.
Melbourne-based Juli Oglivy, 43, wife of Australian golfer Geoff Oglivy, last year spoke out about her battle with alcoholism, revealing she drank a bottle of vodka a day at her worst. Now sober for almost three years, Oglivy says her drinking gradually increased after having three children in four years and remaining at home while her husband travelled with golf.
She says alcoholism in women under 50, who are often drinking behind closed doors at home, is an issue not talked about enough.
In 2017, former Channel 7 journalist Talitha Cummins shared her journey from alcoholic to sobriety after many years of denying to herself she had a problem.
The 39-year-old is now an ambassador for Hello Sunday Morning, which aims for a better drinking culture.
Internationally, the memoir Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice to Not Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol by Holly Whitaker has also captured a lot of attention.
Children are annoyingly observant, little soaks of our habits, words and mannerisms.
A 2019 UK study of almost 1000 non-alcohol dependent parents examined the impact of parental drinking on children aged 10 to 17 years and found more than a third of children reported at least one negative outcome from their parent’s drinking.
Negative experiences included being given less attention than usual, being put to bed earlier or later than usual, and parents who were “more unpredictable than normal’’.
Hepworth says parents are undoubtedly one of the biggest influences on their children.
“They are little sponges … the more they are exposed to, the earlier they start drinking and the more they will drink,’’ she says.
“We need to make it a lot easier for people to choose not to drink. It’s very difficult — and you hear this from a lot of people who have chosen not to drink — to remain sociable in Australian society …
“You might be trying to cut down and you are tired at the end of the day and there’s an ad that says you can have a bottle of vodka delivered to your house in 30 minutes on your Facebook page.
“There is currently nothing to stop alcohol companies exploiting the fact that they know people are heavy users of alcohol.’’
Lauren Oliver is a former WorkCover lawyer who founded Mums Who Wine in 2017 as a Facebook social group.
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Six months later, it was so successful she quit her job to work with the group full time. It has now connected about 10,000 people at events nationally.
For all the concerns regarding abuse of alcohol, Oliver, 36, of Melbourne, believes the isolation that sometimes comes with being a parent is equally as dangerous.
“Our focus is on connection,’’ Oliver says. “I recognise the risks of drinking, but the thing people often overlook is isolation and loneliness. We are in a loneliness epidemic.
“We live in an Aussie culture where we drink — I’m not saying that’s a good or a bad thing — but so many people are stuck at home and not getting out. There’s a disconnect.
“We can create a space where mums can meet other mums in their community … they might have a glass of wine to relax and it encourages them to get out of their comfort zone and not sit at home and watch Netflix. They can actually build relationships in their community.’
“Despite what the name suggests, I never want to come across as a boozy mums’ club or that I promote drinking.
“It’s not the drink, it’s what it represents. They don’t want the wine, they want the connection.’’
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