"They should have wine for us..."

“They should have wine for us…”

 

            Both Dermot and Wren have started taking music lessons over the last year.  Dermot is taking saxophone and this year Wren is taking guitar.  The lessons are out of the store where we got their instruments and each week sees one of us accompanying them to them to sit and wait while they are instructed.        

            The staff at the store are friendly and Dermot chats away with them like he’s Norm from “Cheers” when Wren has a lesson and Wren generally amuses herself while he has his.  If I am with them I have no shortage of things to do either.  I always have my book bag with me for school and I often take sponsee calls at that time of day or sometimes I allow myself to sit back and simply listen to them play.

            One Friday evening while Wren was strumming away with her teacher and Dermot was waxing poetic with adults at the front of the store I found myself sitting next to another mother.  I ended a call and she put her magazine down and struck up a conversation with me.  We talked about kids and music lessons and the hustle and bustle of shuffling family back and forth from activities on the weekends for a bit.  She mentioned that we had picked an odd time for lessons being that it was dinner time on a Friday night and I agreed that sometimes that could be a little brutal.  She sighed and said, “They should have wine for us while we wait, it’s the least that they could do”.

            I was struck by that as I so often am now, because that is the kind of thing I used to say all the time in my life before recovery.  The mommy wine culture is a thing and I had latched onto it and I took it to the nth degree.  When we lived in Annapolis, I used it as an excuse to drink at any event.  If I was gathering with friends for anything (and I mean anything), wine and alcoholic drinks of any variety needed to be included. If they weren’t I felt a mild sense of panic and I turned my nose up at the same time.

            I am so lucky now, because I don’t think about that anymore and I don’t even notice until someone mentions it like this woman had at the store.  I don’t feel like I need a drink to make it through my kids’ music lesson or anything else anymore.  Of course I may be reading into her comment a little, but I can comment on what my old thinking was, and for my old self, that would have been true.  I would have been calculating how long it would be until the lesson was over and until I could get to the next drink and I would very definitely be thinking how great it would be if they provided us wine.

            I see it a lot, the mommy wine culture.  The comments on Facebook and Instagram and elsewhere, about how people “need” a drink to get through this or that.  The outing with kids to the park jokingly accompanied with a “mommy sippy cup” or a handbag with a built-in flask.  I get it, or used to, and would have been all about it, but it makes me sad now.  Try booking an event at one of those paint nights for a group and say that you don’t want the drinking option and see how far you get.  Book clubs don’t have to include wine and cheese, and other events and outings don’t have to be centered round a bar or cocktail as all of mine used to be.

            I don’t mean to sound as though I am lecturing.  I know that most people don’t have the same issue that I do with addiction and can take it or leave it alone.  I suppose I am commenting on the culture and commenting because I know that for all those among the group at paint night or book club who can take it or leave it alone, there is, among them, a Fiona who can’t think about anything else but the next drink and who could not sit through the whole music lesson either without the glass of wine, or the thought of one, and missed listening to their child’s music.