![]() “I post about my struggles and people reach out saying, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ve been there,’” Bodenstine said. People could indeed relate: now has more than 95,000 followers, who frequently get in touch with Bodenstine to share their appreciation for her honesty and her jokes she also gets a lot of responses to her Instagram Stories, where she often shares more about her own family, from parents of other kids with special needs. It’s been something that has helped me, you know, de-stress at the end of the day.” “Obviously, ‘mom’ was and still is a huge part of my life, and I just have always enjoyed wine. “I wanted to find a name that was kind of general, that people could relate to,” she said. She wanted to create something that would help her find humor and joy in the situation, as well as support. Bodenstine started her account in 2018 when she and her husband were “in the thick of it” parenting a preschooler and a toddler, the younger of whom was undergoing tests and would soon be diagnosed with sensory processing disorder. one night in 2016 when she was rocking her second child, then six months old, to sleep. Principe remembers coming up with her handle around 4 a.m. So if you asked a self-identifying wine mom to explain who exactly the wine mom is, she’d likely tell you that she’s a busy, exhausted parent who just needs a break and a laugh, a moment to remember who she is other than “Mommy.” Anne Bodenstine and Angela Principe, the founders of the popular Instagram meme accounts and respectively, both told me that they started their accounts at times in their lives when they felt worn down by the challenges of parenting. The memes, she told me, with their candid expressions of frustration at the somehow simultaneous monotony and chaos of modern mothering, struck her as “a vaguely feminist rejection of the vision of the traditional self-sacrificing ‘homemaker’ mom that’s been memorialized in the 1950s sitcoms.” It “allows women to embrace their identity as mothers, while also refusing to be solely defined by that role,” she said. Lisa Jacobson, an associate history professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara who researches families as well as food and drink culture, told me she recognized instantly why “wine mom” humor resonates with mothers. Wine-mom humor can be cathartic, even empowering, for mothers themselves. Maybe people are searching for “wine mom” mugs and T-shirts to give as gifts for Mother’s Day and the winter holidays, or maybe when mothers and kids spend time together over those holidays, one or both parties get curious about wine moms, and who qualifies as one. “Motherhood-powered by love, fueled by coffee, sustained by wine.” Google search interest in the term wine mom has spiked every May and December in the United States for the past several years. “Wine is to moms what duct tape is to dads. “The most expensive part of having kids is all the wine you have to drink,” goes a particularly ubiquitous meme. In the mid-2010s, the phrase was popularized as it became commonplace for moms to joke online about drinking wine to cope with the stresses of motherhood: Self-identifying wine moms began to poke fun at themselves in viral videos, blog posts, and memes. Moms who enjoy wine certainly existed before the internet, but it’s the internet that catapulted the wine mom to meme stardom. The wine mom is either a beleaguered but sympathetic figure, or a subtly sinister one-it depends on whom you ask. So should you label any mom who likes to drink wine a “wine mom”? That turns out to be a complicated question. But en masse, wine moms have come to represent (for some) troublesome trends in modern parenting, or even comfortable middle-class complacency. Technically, that’s all it takes to join the ranks of “wine moms,” and yet the phrase has come to represent so much more than motherhood and wine enjoyment.Ī wine mom, alone, is someone who likes a drink to take the edge off of parenting, and who’s willing to poke fun at that fact.
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