About a week before Mother’s Day, I saw a sign near the College Plaza liquor store:
“Remember your mother with a bottle of wine for Mother’s Day. After all, you’re the reason she drinks.”
Yep. That’s the truth. (The traditional gift that I get each Mother’s Day is a load of manure, a gift that I cherish, despite what some might interpret as a metaphor for the past 30 years. But I digress.)
What is it with mothers and wine? Gabrielle Glaser in the June 22 Wall Street Journal gave us a glimpse of her Simon and Schuster book that was published on July 2, Her best-kept secret: Why women drink and how they can regain control.
Glaser calls it a “growing female predilection for wine.”
Now that’s an understatement.
More than 650,000 women follow “Moms Who Need Wine” on Facebook. Glaser claims another 131,000 are fans of the group “OMG, I So Need a Glass of Wine or I’m Gonna Sell My Kids.”
So what do we know about mothers who drink?
The more educated and well off they are, the more likely they are to imbibe, according to Gallup. That figure is nothing new, but between 1997 and 2008 the number of women arrested for drunk driving went up 30 percent, while men dropped 7 percent.
Here’s the stat that stunned me: 10 percent of women between 46 and 64 said they binge drink. Remember when you binged in college and said “never again”? You might have said never again five or 10 times, but didn’t you stop with the never agains when you turned 40?
Once a woman turns 40, doesn’t she start questioning how much longer she’ll continue to hurt herself? Isn’t that the age of wisdom in which you’ve already shed bad boyfriends, husbands, cars, baby fat and painful memories?
I fall within the 46 to 64 age group. What Glaser didn’t say is how this 10-percent binge group recovers the next morning, when there’s even more rats to kill and water to haul.
Forty-six to 64 is when menopause creeps in and every glass of wine amounts to another blast from the furnace. That’s when your kids start talking back and even the dog sees you only as the source of the next meal.
Is wine that good?
The differences between how men and women metabolize alcohol explain why a woman’s liver and brain will go south faster than a man’s. Because women have more body fat, it takes a lot less alcohol to do the same amount of damage, plus the damage happens more quickly.
Then there’s the risk of breast cancer which is increased in women who drink more than one glass of wine a day. Never mind the insomnia.
I drink less now than ever. Plus, I’ve put the skids on drinking wherever it’s not safe to drink – which are most places where there are people. My mouth is big enough without alcohol, despite my delusion that I’m a better writer when I’m greased with tequila. Wine, like tequila, dissolves whatever flimsy filter I can claim.
The general rule is I do not drink wherever I’m likely to get in trouble. That eliminates a lot of places, such as where I’m typing right now, at Denver International Airport. I’m listed as number 14 on a stand-by flight to Durango – a good reason for an educated person like me to find a bar, especially since I’ve been sitting here for six hours, almost long enough to drive my ass home, where I belong.
I think what helped women justify drinking too much wine started with the rationalization that red wine is heart healthy. Grapes are good for you – anthocyanins maybe, or some great nutrient that comes from deeply-colored fruits and vegetables. Wine is good food, moms rationalize.
Face it. Women at home with kids can grow bored and anxious.
They’re bored because of the thankless routine, and they grow anxious because they know they’re bored. Wine is a respectable cure for anxiety. Unlike prescription drugs or weed, it goes down easily.
But here’s the dilemma: Drinking on the job – especially when you are the boss and the job is boring – causes guilt.
This is why getting a load of manure for Mother’s Day beats getting a bottle of wine.
It’s a lot less complicated shoveling poop in the garden.
