Is the Pandemic Creating A Generation of Alcoholic Parents?

Dry January might be a good idea if you’re still day drinking this far into the pandemic.

I am no stranger to issues with drinking. On occasion, my problematic drinking has appeared in my writing, and it has sparked some raw conversations around the immense stress that modern parents, particularly mothers, face. Nevertheless, when my children’s school closed for lockdown in March 2020, there was a collective air of togetherness that seemed to include permission to slug back some stress juice. We would get through this, damn it! But as the pandemic dragged on, so did the drinking for me and millions of other exhausted and anxious parents.

At first, the general thinking seemed to be that lockdown would only last a couple of weeks and that this novel coronavirus emergency would get figured out by scientists and leaders. Surely this wouldn’t be as bad as 1918, right? In the meantime, to hell with normalcy, this once-in-a-lifetime density of stress was a job for alcohol.

Day drinking was ok, funny even.

There was a landslide of mom jokes online, of course. There were articles about spikes in alcohol sales. At least to me, it felt like a group resolve to survive no matter what, even if that meant eating junk food nonstop, Zooming in pajamas, and hitting the vino at 10:00 am.