What we can tell you about the Slacker Mum Movement after two glasses of wine

This month my feminist mothers’ group discussed the Slacker Mum Movement or Mothers Who Drink. You know, like this article from The New York Times about mothers’ cocktail hour, and these books currently making a big splash in the pond of parenting (normally so dominated by Alpha Mother reading material)? Sippy Cups Are Not For Chardonnay, Naptime is the New Happy Hour, Daddy Needs a Drink, I Was a Really Good Mom Before I Had Kids, The Three-Martini Playdate, and the most recent, Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms.

Our mothers’ group always meets of an evening, over a glass of wine and sans children, so we’re totally qualified to review this movement and the real question is why it has taken us so long to get to this particular topic. It is no surprise then that we found many aspects of the Slacker Mum Movement extremely freeing, after all, a number of us are pretty much card-carrying Slacker Mums (unfortunately I’m still a little nerdy but I’ve got some runs on the board). However, we noted two less favourable features of the movement during our discussion – its willingness to embrace liberation without even mentioning feminism, and its classism. Almost certainly, a mother from a low socio-economic group wouldn’t get away with a book of this kind of humour, she’d risk being seen as neglectful rather than endearingly chaotic – imagine if the mothers in that New York Times article were drinking bourbon and cokes instead of Cavit pinot grigio, would this be seen as the emergence of a trend in sophisticated motherhood?

Our group then moved along and talked about the gift of the Slacker Mum trend – the way it reduces our expectations of motherhood, and the breathing room it gives us all to be less than perfect. As we sipped our wine we wondered if mothers really were judging one another so much or if it just felt that way in our weakest moments. Well. I can say, following our own confessions of judgementalness that yes, we are judging one another, quite a bit. The snottiness of your children’s noses, the groceries in your shopping trolley, and the way you’ve taught your children sex education are all being noticed.

And then we moved on to our dirtiest little secrets of motherhood.

Our group’s confessions took a decidedly darker turn than those generally expressed in books like Dirty Little Secrets From Otherwise Perfect Moms – this again was another beef we had with the Slacker Mums Movement. The false slackness, the confession that actually makes you, the confessor look good, the confession that through its lightness makes everyone else feel bad. In our group we were having none of that. I’m not going to repeat the melt-down type confessions because they seem too personal to discuss outside the group but what follows are a couple of the more endearing moments of slackness. Among us was the mother who turns the music up in her car to uncomfortably high volumes when her children are fighting to drown them out, but mostly to antagonise them (the speakers are in the back seat of the car and they hate her music). The mother who felt so insecure about the wealth of the other mothers at a children’s birthday party that she got drunk on the expensive champagne in front of the other parents and had to take her child and herself home in a taxi.  And the mother who gave a rather furious time-out to her screaming toddler before realising that she’d completely forgotten to feed her all morning. When we say slack, we mean it.

Bask in your relative glory or lighten the load and ‘fess up here (don’t forget to make your comment anonymous). If you’re too shy here then you can try this one instead.