“I’m a wife and a mother, and everything in my life looks fine, but I’ve had a secret for a long time: I’m drinking too much. I had my daughter a couple years ago. I was in a new city, without friends or family. I started attending the moms’ group in my neighborhood. Each of us brought a bottle of wine for the get-together, and by the end of the night, there was no wine left—we drank it all. I started to like this, drinking with my new friends.
My husband travels for work nearly every week and then hangs out with his own friends. I’m by myself with my daughter most of the time.
I started buying wine to drink after she’d gone to sleep. Now it’s a habit to drink every day. Some friends showed me how to mix vodka with Gatorade, so I could carry a bottle in my purse everywhere. Drinking is part of my daily routine, and it’s important to me. This isn’t wrong, in my opinion, and my friends think so, too. On the contrary, it helps to relieve the stress, exhaustion, and solitude of basically parenting alone. It’s fun and it’s fine, as long as I can manage my daily life.
My husband has been surprised sometimes and tells me, ‘Take it easy.’ He doesn’t understand that drinking is totally okay if you can control how much you drink, if you aren’t getting drunk, passing out, or blacking out every night. It’s become a point of friction between us.” —Celine
Lamberghini-West, A., & Karlen Triplett, P. (2025). Tipsy: A Woman’s Self-Guided Method for Managing Alcohol. US: Aysen Wellness.