IS A ‘MUM NIGHT OFF’ SO BAD?
Lily Allen was pictured necking whisky and collapsing at Notting Hill Carnival last week. Along with her hangover, she received a whole heap of judgement because she is a mother. Liz Fraser asks why it’s always the female parent who suffers the scorn
LAST SUNDAY, NEARLY 2 million people, 40,000 volunteers and 30 million sequins attended the 46th Notting Hill Carnival in West London. Over the course of the day, police made 450 arrests, most of these in some way connected with either drink or drugs. And it’s a fair guess that thousands of other revellers got more than a little tipsy.
But one woman’s drinking came under the spotlight more than any other; singer and songwriter Lily Allen, had, it seems, a little too much of the hard stuff, got spectacularly smashed, and was carried away from the carnival looking, to put it kindly, a tad the worse for wear.
As soon as the photos of her drunken afternoon went public, Lily’s Twitter feed lit up like a firework at, say, a carnival. In a blaze of moralising, judgemental comments about her ‘behaviour’, she was swiftly and viciously berated on both Twitter and other online forums. Not because she got drunk. No. Because she got drunk, and she is a mother. Worse still, she got drunk, she has children, and she has a public platform on which to slag her off for getting drunk and having children.
How DARE she, people shouted through their Tweets, go and get DRUNK, when she is a MOTHER? What about her poor children, who she has obviously abandoned in the play area of her local Ikea with nothing but pickled herring and Småg as din klverhö ft enbl at ten crisp s to eat? How could she just go out and…be a normal 31-year-old at a carnival, taking a day off childcare and having fun?? Had she NO SHAME?
This is the kind of knee-jerk condemnation very often thrown at parents, whether they are award-winning pop stars or not. Even if our children are being well looked after by someone we know and trust, and we’ve spent the last 364 days doing nothing but feeding them Stuff We Saw Jamie Oliver Making and cleaning snot off their faces, we are still scowled at for letting our thinning parenting hair down, going out and getting legless. And FAR more often than not, this tut-tutting is aimed at mothers, not fathers.
I was once castigated at a family wedding for drinking two glasses of champagne and then nearly falling into the wedding cake. I’d recently had my third baby and this was my first ‘drink outing’ for a year. My husband was hammered on the dance floor – and nobody even noticed.
It’s as if our ovaries are covered in smallprint, which says, ‘Oi you, over there with the womb. No fun for YOU any more, sweetheart. Put that G&T down and get back to scraping fish fingers off the floor.’ Dads are spared this overnight and permanent metamorphosis into professional fun-dodgers. If a dad goes out and gets steam-rollered, even in public, nobody bats a knackered eyelid. He’s still one of the lads. Good on ’im, for having a laugh and not letting fatherhood turn him into… a mother.
Well, the way I see it is this: as long as we look after our children well, love them and care for them and teach them not to operate heavy machinery if they’re taking sedatives, I think we’re allowed an occasional wipe-out bender. Preferably not in their presence, not frequently, and not immediately before the termly parentteacher consultations.
I actually don’t like the pervasive drinking culture we live in at all, and the term gin o’clock is one I really dislike. But getting drunk once in a while is absolutely fine. Yes, even if you have fallopian tubes.