Mother’s little helper is back, and daddy is partaking, too
7: 51 p. m.: It’s exactly 125 days tomorrow. I am pretg drink.
7: 52 p. m.: Drunk.
7: 52 p. m.: I can tell.
I have a yearslong WhatsApp message group with a handful of fellow mothers of small children from across the United States and Canada. Since the pandemic began, what I refer to as “mom chats after dark” start around 7: 30 p. m. Eastern time. That’s when the children are asleep and a wave of inebriation begins on the shores of the Atlantic and crashes across the continent. The message above was from July, when we hit 125 days of lockdown.
12: 10 a. m.: I’m really high and eating this cake right now and it’s sooooo ( expletive) good.
That one is from a mother in California in early September, when she was trapped inside with her three children for days because the air
was so thick with smoke that it was unsafe to breathe outside.
Since the pandemic began, members of the group have experienced job losses, wildfires, protracted power outages from tropical storms, political unrest, elderly parents with COVID- 19, a news cycle on turbo and unending days filled with educating, feeding and caring for their children while also trying to fit in eight or more hours of work.
And we’re the lucky ones who can meet our children’s basic needs. Somewhere between 20% and 40% of parents of children under 5 have worried about their children getting enough to eat since the pandemic started, and many who cannot work remotely are scrambling for coverage with the fitful reopening of day care centers and schools.
The increase of substance use among parents is “just kind of understandable,” said Jonathan Metzl, the director of the department of medicine, health and society at Vanderbilt University. “This is an incredible, once- in- an- epoch stressful situation, and the kinds of outlets people usually have in their lives are just not available. We can’t go to the office, we can’t go to the gym, we can’t really see friends or family, and we never get a break.”
“My hobby is doom scrolling and learning the science of COVID and smoking weed and sitting on the toilet staring at the wall,” said Julie Kortekaas, 36, a mother of two children, ages 10 and 18, and a health- food restaurant owner in London, Ontario. “I just hide in my bathroom and vape,” she said, to deal with the stresses of a restaurant industry that’s unrelentingly bleak, customers who are anti- mask and a husband who works as a house painter and is concerned about virus risk in other people’s homes.
Kortekaas has increased her marijuana intake since the pandemic started ( it is legal in Canada). “I smoke some weed and am able to calm down and clean my kitchen and do my laundry and do some regular- person things,” she said.
Although there aren’t reliable statistics that break down parents’ use of alcohol, marijuana and anti- anxiety medications specifically, overall adult use of these substances has gone up since the pandemic began, said Dr. Nora Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
A nationally representative study of more than 1,500 Americans over 30 published in JAMA Network Open showed that the use of alcohol is up among all adults in that age range, but in particular, among non- Hispanic white people, women and those between 30 and 59.
Many states where marijuana is legal have seen a big increase in sales since the virus began; for example, in Washington state, “cannabis revenue spiked at the height of the pandemic,” according to budget analysis from a local news radio station, KXLY. Some data from earlier in the pandemic showed that prescriptions for anti- anxiety drugs were on the rise. Prescriptions for Klonopin and similar medications rose 10.2% in
March 2020 from March 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported, citing statistics from IQVIA, a health research firm.
Some parents have made a
ritual of substance use that helps them separate work from play when mostly homebound. At 5 p. m. Bree Sanchez, 45, and her husband have a drink in their backyard. “We need to shape this day a little, a transition to our next thing, which is laundry, dinner, cleaning stuff up,” said Sanchez, an art director and mother of two children, ages 9 and 11, in the Bay Area. Their daily cocktail is “a way to pause and talk to each other, and the kids will leave us alone.”
Although a desire to blunt the pain and uncertainty of 2020 with all manner of substances is understandable, Volkow worries that many parents won’t be able to tell when their drinking or drug use tips into dangerous territory. “It’s hard to be aware you’re falling into a pattern that’s problematic,” she said, adding that people with substance abuse disorders may rationalize any amount of intake, and may not be able to recognize that they’re increasing their use over time.
Middle- class parents’ selfmedication has long been recreationalized, even romanticized in America ( so long as they were white); think of sitcom dads pouring a drink and sinking into the BarcaLounger after a long day with Bob in accounting, or neurasthenic moms popping pink capsules while the casserole browns.
In the postwar period, tranquilizers were marketed and prescribed to many women who were experiencing discontent related to their domestic roles. At the time, there was a great deal of cultural panic about their becoming too powerful outside the home, said Metzl, who is also the author of “Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs.”
The first drug to be marketed as “a drug for the tensions of the motherhood role,” was Miltown in the 1950s, Metzl said, followed less than a decade later by Valium.
These powerful drugs were sold as a way to sedate women who didn’t fit the 1950s submissive ideal later satirized to chilling effect in “The Stepford Wives.” In 1966, the Rolling Stones released their infamous track “Mother’s Little Helper,” placing the blame on tranquilized mothers for needing a pill just to get through the day ( coming from a band known for its louche drug use).
Despite working more hours, mothers in the 2010s spent more time on child care than they did in 1965. That’s around when “wine moms” entered the lexicon: women who were using alcohol to take the edge off a long day spent parenting intensively.
Social media has amplified these moms. They’re winkingly letting us know that the expectations of modern motherhood are unreasonable by posting memes on letter boards like “Motherhood: Powered by Love Sustained by Wine” and drinking from enormous goblets on TikTok videos.
All that was before the coronavirus, when the stressors and responsibilities of being a mother increased immeasurably. There’s more housework, more child care, remote learning to manage and a contentious political moment with reproductive rights, among many others, hanging in the balance.
“It’s ironic we’re having this conversation now, in light of profound threats to everything women stood for in the ’ 60s and
’ 70s,” Metzl said.
On Instagram, around 70,000 posts are tagged # winemom, but when you look through them, you realize that a small portion are posts about trying to stay sober in a wine mom world — a difficult task made even harder by a pandemic.
Katy Maher, 47, has been sober for almost 19 years. The mother of 7- year- old twins in Chicago, she lost a job of nearly 20 years at a recruiting firm. “I was devastated,” Maher said. “I was bitter and sad, and there was no closure and no goodbye. It’s all due to COVID.”
“I’m supplementing eating more instead of drinking,” she added. “I’m an addict, so it comes out in different ways.” She said that she tried not to be judgmental of the “mommy juice crowd” but that she worries about the potential for substance abuse. “I absolutely think it’s harmful in many ways.”
Volkow shares these concerns. She said that some signs of problematic substance use are when you need more and more to get the same effects, you cannot skip a day of use, or you’re forgoing other activities to use the substance when it’s not appropriate. A family history of addiction adds to risk.
But for some parents, getting just a little stoned is the only way they can eke out a small measure of joy in an otherwise fairly hopeless time. Deborah Stein, 43, said her nightly pot gummy is the one thing allowing her to get a good night’s sleep on a regular basis.
She’s the mother of a 21month- old in Los Angeles and works in the theater industry, which has been “completely decimated” by the virus, and she and her husband are worried for their future livelihood, along with the health of their families, the air quality, the election and about a million other things.
After dinner, the couple split a “chill” gummy containing 50 milligrams of THC. “It’s a way of carving out this hour or 90 minutes we get to spend together, before we have to walk the dog,” Stein said. For at least that brief window, “we get to be peaceful.”