Forget rugby club boozers, it turns out that stressed mums are the latest drunken hell-raisers - swapping tea after school for a glass (or three) of wine. I know, I know. It sounds hard to believe. Whoever has time for a cup of tea? Is that the one we supposedly sip while the baby sleeps, the children quietly do some colouring in and fairies pick congealed raisins out of the coir matting in the hall? Yeah, right.
What I want to know is where the hell are all these hard-drinking mums? After dropping my daughter off for her first day of school I headed out with friends to Caffe Nero to celebrate. With cappuccinos. One person ordered a muffin.
They must be out there though, because the alco-data in question comes from surveys which we parents have filled in ourselves. Those of us with kids, it turns out, are admitting to rolling round drunk at 4pm, and devil take the hindmost. To which I plead: can't the statistics take into account all that time when we were pregnant and breastfeeding and not drinking a solitary, measly, teeny-weeny drop?
By God though, if it really is true, who can deny that parents deserve a drink? Parenting is hard work! I don't normally pay much attention to advice. But when I was pregnant every single person I met told me that parenting was going to be hard work. Then I had my babies and, wow! It turned out they were right. That was particularly annoying, of course, because I had to deal with their rightness while knackered and, naturally, stone cold sober.
What those good souls with their sage advice didn't tell me, though, was that looking after a newborn is the easy part. Nappies and gurgling and midnight feeds? A doddle. Meanwhile, school-age children are easy too. For starters they're someone else's problem for most of the day. If the stress of motherhood was really driving women to drink we wouldn't be waiting to hit the bottle until after school pick-up, we'd all have the gin fitted upside down in the kitchen like they do in bars. As soon as the kids scuttled off to class dressed in one welly, three skirts and a pair of Ann Summers kitten ears, there would be no fuss with corkscrews - we could just reach for another shot. Or a double.
