Posted on 11/12/2006 4:29:48 AM PST by MadIvan
WHEN Laura Hunter welcomes up to half a dozen fellow mothers to her suburban New Jersey home for an afternoon children’s play hour, she follows a strict routine. The children are ushered into the playroom or garden and given cups filled with apple or orange juice. Then Hunter gets out her real glasses and pours margaritas for the mums.
They have become known as the Mommies Who Drink, after the title of a new book by Brett Paesel, a California writer who urges mothers not to sacrifice their lives to child-rearing. Their cocktail of choice is the “momtini” — a potent Martini designed to make mothers feel better about the hours they are obliged to spend responsibly sober.
To the chagrin of America’s guardians of rigid parental correctness — which frowns on the intake of alcohol anywhere near anyone under 21 — increasing numbers of bored, frustrated or just plain thirsty mothers are flaunting their cocktail playgroups as a symbol of their liberation from domestic drudgery.
“I adore my children and feel fortunate to have been able to stay home with them, but I also love Martinis, shoes, novels and a well-used swear word,” said Susan Wagner, who describes herself on her Friday Playdate blog as “a martini-swilling, shoe-shopping, writer mom-of-two”.
Melissa Summers, a Michigan mother who invented the term momtini, attracted so many readers to her Suburban Bliss blog with accounts of serving bloody marys at children’s playgroups that she now sells T-shirts, coffee mugs and underwear emblazoned with the logo.
“These aren’t mothers who are getting wasted,” noted J D Griffioen, a contributor to Bloggingbaby.com. “The drink is a symbol that they haven’t completely let go of who they are, and haven’t let their kids overrun their lives entirely.”
The trend has stirred concern and criticism from psychologists and child development specialists who have warned that mothers are in danger of becoming alcoholics and their children are at risk from drunken driving on the way home. Conservative parents are appalled that their children might be exposed to other playgroup mothers swigging chilled chardonnay.
“Keep drinking during playdates,” sneered one blog contributor. “Then maybe you can all get together in the ER (emergency room) a few years from now when one of your kids wraps their car around a tree in a drunken stupor . . . like their moms taught them to do.”
Yet other mothers see the trend as a long-overdue backlash against “helicopter” parenting — over-protective parents who hover over every phase of their children’s lives.
“There is no guilt in craving social situations that aren’t wholly centred around everyone’s children,” said Christie Mellor, whose book The Three-Martini Playdate was intended as a tongue-in-cheek riposte to over-obsessive parents.
She said she was driven to rebel when she attended a “pyjama-rama” party at a California bookshop. It was a Friday evening and the parents as well as the children were dressed in pyjamas for story reading.
“I didn’t wait all this time to become a grown-up so that I could spend my weekend nights in my pyjamas singing along with a stuffed bunny,” Mellor said. She added that she was not advocating that mothers drink three Martinis — her book was “meant to be a metaphor for having more fun in your life and having a grown-up life”.
Regards, Ivan
Ping!
I guess the one year old is the "designated driver."
I'm so sick of the term "helicopter parents." It's being used to make parents who are involved in their kid's lives feel guilty...sorry, I don't feel guilty for "asking questions" and "knowing where he was and whom he was with" when my kid was growing up.
My son's in college now and he said one of his profs has been using the term a lot. He asked me what it meant...said the kid's don't have a clue what the prof's talking about...they've never heard the term "helicopter parent." That lets me know the term is being aimed at the parents to try to invoke some sort of guilt.
Buncha goofballs just trying to get attention. When I was a child, everyone's parents drank, unless they were Mormon. (For the Southern Baptists, it was "medicinal.")
They didn't make a scene over it - they poured a glass of wine or two during dinner, or had a rum and Coke in the evening if friends came over, had Bloody Marys on Sunday morning or frozen daiquiris in the afternoon during the ironing ... nobody gave it a second thought.
It always bothered me that anyone should be made to feel guilty about their parenting, when most are doing the best they can.
I do think Parents need breaks from their Children's lives, at times. Parenting is a very labor intensive job, and it is non-stop. Who could begrudge a martini Break , if it makes the Parent Happy, then they are happier around their children.
And that I think is the point these women are making. I'm not advocating getting falling down drunk at a playdate. But what harm is their for the moms to have a cocktail while the kiddies are all playing?
All these ladies are doing is telling the PC crowd to stick it..........
My Parents raised Four Kids, without a drop of liquor in the house. Of course they both had to work , to put food on the table.
Have the Mothers Against Drunk Driver weighed in on this yet??
I think that's the point. This is a swing backwards to that time when having a cocktail was part of normal social rituals, not some social evil. Life at home with the kiddies can be monotonous and even tension provoking. Get togethers of mommys with everyone's kids playing in the other room while the adults relax with a cocktail is proper modeling of drinking behavior. No one is out of control. No one is drunk. It is a much necessary antidote to a mommy's lonely hours of tedium bent over a dryer, a dishwasher, a vacuum, keeping it all together, being responsible.
So that's what that means. I thought it meant families with helicopters, and I just didn't know any of them!
I was just referring to the term "helicopter parents."
Obviously we didn't know your family :-).
It refers to the kind of parent (usually mother) who just can't let their college age kid grow up.
Deacon Jim, are you a stay at home Parent? I suspect not as you are a male, and I suspect you are not a teatotaler either.
Martinis in the afternoon seems a little pretentious to me, as does the show they're making with accessories and so on. That's the difference between these people and my parents' generation, I think - everything has to be a Statement.
The difference is that your parents did it at night .. not during the afternoon hours as these moms are doing
I'm not a prude .. and have nothing against a glass of wine, a beer or whatever
But I sure as heck wouldn't doing it during the day when I had infants and toddlers running around the house
I had a hard enough time keeping up with them as it was in a sober state of mind
In a way ... when the Officers' Wives Club of my childhood had drinks with luncheon, they didn't start a blog and sell accessories.
Nah, it's just New Jersey, home of idiot liberals who just elected a crook to the US Senate.
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