Episode 89 | Suzanne Warye — Mummy Wine Culture, the Vodka Deal & the Morning She Couldn't Remember Feeding Her Baby
Suzanne Warye grew up in Wisconsin, a state where 97 of America's 100 drunkest cities are located and the baseball team is literally called the Brewers. Drinking there didn't feel like a choice. It felt like a foregone conclusion.
Her parents divorced when she was six and her dad went hard into the party. Then, when she was nine, he sat her down and told her the doctor had said if he wanted to dance at her wedding, he had to quit. So he did. The next drink he had was at her wedding, twenty-four years later. That was the only conversation about alcohol she ever had growing up. No warning. No cautionary tale.
She had her first drink at fourteen — straight vodka, wasted, and that immediate rush of belonging. Varsity volleyball, student council, honour society by day; blackout drinker by night. College in Green Bay was booze and boys. Then Atlanta, then Chicago — single in the city, waking up in places she didn't recognise beside people she didn't remember. She calls it what it was: the walk of shame, a phrase that only ever applies to the woman.
It never occurred to her that quitting was an option. She didn't think she qualified. She just had to drink better. Be more adult about it. Find the moderation everyone else had supposedly mastered.
Then came motherhood — and one of the most extraordinary confessions on this show. Suzanne became an influencer in 2015, before the word existed. And she was paid by a vodka brand to make drinking look glamorous by the pool. She made it look beautiful. She poured every drop down the drain and never took a sip, because she was a busy mum with three kids and couldn't drink in the afternoon. Her followers didn't know that. They only saw a woman who seemed to have it all and a drink in her hand. She was, in her own words, both a perpetrator and a victim of mummy wine culture.
On the 19th of January 2020, after a champagne party, she woke at 10am and realised she'd nursed her three-month-old in the night with no memory of it at all. She spent the day on the couch, looked around at the chaos of her own home and thought: this scene needs a mum.
She got up and told her husband she was done. Six and a half years ago. Her husband quit two years later. Her book is The Sober Shift.
One word for her life now: wonderful.
Suzanne Warye is a sobriety influencer (@suzannewarye and @thesobermomlife) and the host of the popular
podcast The Sober Mom Life. Residing on the North Shore of Chicago with her husband and three kids, Suzanne
spends most of her time reheating her coffee and rocking her “whole heart, half ass” parenting philosophy.
For more visit:
https://suzannewarye.com/
https://thesobermomlife.com/
You can get the paperback copy of The Sober Shift here:
https://amzn.to/4yMk1he