Stressed Out 'Liberated' Moms Increasingly Turn to Booze, Therapists to Cope

The headline at the top of Babble (a Disney-owned website for mothers) read, “I Hired a ‘Mom Coach’ and Here’s Why You Might Want to Consider One, Too.” Halfway into the post, after about 500 words that boil down to the fact that a “mom coach” is nothing more than a life coach for moms, you get to the “why”:

In talking to her, I felt ridiculous admitting that I couldn’t even name the last time I had taken a true break from work. I even worked through labor with my fourth child three years ago and ran an online class while I was physically miscarrying last month. It was almost embarrassing to speak my truths out loud, but when a professional told me I needed to take a real break, it actually felt like an enormous sigh of relief.

Well, thank God a “professional” could tell you to take it down a notch. Without the reassurance of a licensed/certified/credentialed “mom coach,” how could any of us possibly calm down? Just to be on the safe side, as soon as the writer hung up the phone with her mom coach she checked in with her therapist—a second credentialed “professional”—to make sure it was okay to relax. “Because coaching is never a substitute for therapy,” she wrote.

To be sure, there is a purpose to psychotherapy. Requesting permission to take a day off isn’t it. Since when does any adult, let alone an empowered woman in the 21^st century raised by a generation of liberated feminists, need permission to cut back on work? I thought feminism put us in charge of our own lives. Why, then, are we paying “mom coaches” $200 per phone call to tell us to do little more than take a few days off of work, or primary parenting, or whatever it is that is stressing us out and relax?

Not that long ago Babble published a piece explaining that “mommy drinking culture” has “normalized alcoholism” for American women. Apparently “mommy’s sippy cup” is a real dilemma for a generation of women who supposedly escaped the Stepford day-drinking curse. Which is odd, because I thought we were liberated from all that in the ’60s. Weren’t we?

Apparently not. Feminism’s target mom-demographic, financially well-off white women, are becoming increasingly imprisoned by cultural norms established by their liberated foremothers. When Lucy Rorech (42) quit working on Wall Street to spend more time with her three children, she wound up throwing wild cocktail-infused playdates for her fellow mommy friends in Park Slope, Brooklyn. Quite often these playdates ended in mommy blackouts. According to the New York Post, Rorech is one of a growing number of mothers who turn to addiction because they just can’t “…cope with the stress of raising children, having a career and taking care of the household.”

What Would Betty Friedan Do? Hiring a maid and going back to work was supposed to be the answer to the boredom of housewifery. But, today’s mommies are anything but bored. They’re so stressed out that they need a cadre of professionals to save them from addiction-induced blackouts. Who knew we were being liberated in order to be enslaved?