Most evenings Sarah Rusbatch would watch the clock edge towards 5pm, open a bottle of wine and pour herself a generous glass of chilled sauvignon blanc.
It had become the best part of her day: her “me time”, the moment the demands of motherhood, marriage and work melted away. To Sarah, it didn’t feel unusual. “Of course you drink wine after a hard day of parenting. That’s the only reward you get.”
She never thought she had a drinking problem. She didn’t wake up craving a drink. She wasn’t even drinking every day.
“Most days, I would wake up going, ‘Right, I’m not going to drink today,’” she says. “But then it’s almost autopilot: By five or six o’clock, you start to think, ‘Maybe I could just have one.’ I never really knew if it was going to be a night that I’d have one or two glasses, or if a whole bottle might go.”
The next morning, Sarah could still get up, go to the gym, get her children to school and run her recruitment business. “It just felt normal. Everywhere I turned, that’s what women were doing to cope with parenting and juggling work and doing all the things.”
Sarah, now 50, describes herself as a “grey area drinker” – not physically dependent on alcohol, but no longer feeling fully in control of it either. She’s not the only one. For a generation of women raised on wine o’clock, girls’ lunches and big weekends, alcohol has long been the reward for holding everything together. Now, in midlife, many are facing a reckoning.
Under pressure
A 2022 Australian study found 21 per cent of women aged between 45 and 60 were drinking at binge-drinking levels – defined as five or more drinks in one sitting – up from about 14 per cent in 2001.
“People associate binge drinking with teenagers and young adults,” says Mia Miller, a public health researcher at the National Drug & Alcohol Research Centre and the study’s lead author. “But one in five midlife women are drinking at this level at least once a month.”
Although midlife men are still more likely to drink at risky levels, the gap is shrinking. Men are drinking less than they used to, while women’s drinking has stayed steady or crept up.
Binge drinking is not the only concern. “We also need to be aware of the pattern of a glass or two of wine every night,” Mia adds.
After moving to Perth, Sarah’s drinking changed. She’d left behind a successful career in London and was raising two kids under two with no family nearby and a husband working long hours.
“Nothing prepares you for how that’s going to feel,” she says. “I was homesick. I was lonely. I was struggling with my identity.”
A glass of wine at the end of the day felt like relief, but it soon became her “crutch”. “It was the first time I was drinking at home on my own. Alcohol, for me, became something I was doing more and more to stop me feeling uncomfortable emotions.”
For many women, pressures converge in midlife: demanding careers, children who need support, ageing parents and the physical and emotional upheaval of perimenopause and menopause.
Dr Nicole Lee, CEO of online alcohol support program Hello Sunday Morning and Adjunct Professor at the National Drug Research Institute, calls it a “perfect storm”. These women also came of age in a “peak drinking time”, she says, when heavy drinking was normal and expected. By the time midlife hits, alcohol is a familiar quick fix: affordable, socially accepted, easy to justify and waiting in the fridge.
“If alcohol’s your reward for a hard day, and you have weeks and weeks of hard days, then it will become a habit,” she says. “That’s when it starts to get really problematic.”
For 49-year-old Victoria Vanstone, alcohol had always been tied up with her identity: The party girl, the reliable drinking buddy.
When she had her first child at 34, Victoria was determined motherhood wouldn’t change her. During the week, she threw herself into being the “perfect mum” but as soon as her husband came home on Friday, she’d tell him, “Right, I’m out.”
“It became a habit,” Victoria says. “I’d meet my mothers’ group, we’d go out and I’d always get really drunk because I thought, ‘This is my time, this is my reward.’” She remembers going back to the bar while the others were still halfway through a glass of wine: “I’d be there ordering shots.”
Mummy wine culture made it easier. “There was something in me that, once I started, I couldn’t stop. One drink in, I’d think, ‘I’m going home at 10.30pm. I want to be a good mum tomorrow.’ But once the second one was down the hatch, it was like, ‘No, I’m out for the night.’”
The breaking point came six weeks after her second baby, when she went out drinking despite promising herself she would change. “I woke up the next day with a terrible hangover again, and massive anxiety and panic,” she says. “I walked into the lounge to my husband and said, ‘I can’t stop once I start. I need help.’”
Even then, she questioned whether her drinking was serious enough. “I really felt I was the only person in the world who had ever got help for a very normal thing. I thought you had to be a proper alcoholic, you had to be on the edge of life, falling apart, to be deserving of professional help.”
The stereotype of what an alcoholic looks like makes it harder for women to recognise when their own drinking has become a problem.
“Alcohol addiction can look like somebody going to work every single day, being an incredible mum, being a wonderful, loving partner,” says Ayla Chorley, CEO of The Foundation for Alcohol Research and Education (FARE).
“It’s easy to point a finger and go, ‘I’m not someone who’s homeless clutching a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to my chest,’” Victoria adds. “But that image is rare and extreme. Most people who have an issue with drinking are people like me, whose lives are being negatively impacted by alcohol.”
Denial is often tangled up with shame. “How society sees men’s drinking versus women’s drinking is very different,” says Ayla. “Women think they’ll be judged. Mothers feel like they’ll be seen as a bad mum, as failing.”
For Danni Carr, the issue wasn’t how often she drank, but what happened when she did. A typical night started with “just a couple of wines”, a cheese platter, friends and music. But all too often it ended in a blackout.
“Sometimes I’d go months without drinking and then think, ‘Oh, I’ll just have one.’ And then I wouldn’t remember going to bed that night.”
The next day, she’d send a breezy text – “wasn’t that funny?” – while sitting with what she calls a “shame bomb”.
Her kids were only eight and four, but they were starting to notice the slurred words and arguments, and sometimes asked their parents not to drink.
“I hate to say this,” she admits, “but it was getting to the point where I couldn’t remember if I’d fed the kids.”
Then came an afternoon that was supposed to be low-key. Friends had come over before going out, and Danni was meant to babysit their children. After a few drinks, she got so drunk they had to stay, put her to bed and look after the children themselves.
“I was just so embarrassed,” she says. “There were so many nights on repeat, waking up going, ‘You idiot. You’ve done it again.’”
You deserve it
The idea that women have ‘earned’ their wine did not come out of nowhere. Alcohol has increasingly been sold to women through the language of empowerment, friendship, self-care and reward.
Ayla Chorley describes it as “an intentional shift by the alcohol industry around seeking out the female market”.That became especially visible during COVID, when many women were juggling work, children, home-schooling and care, and alcohol was marketed as something they deserved at the end of an impossible day.
The same message is reinforced by a broader drinking culture, where alcohol is woven into everyday life: Friday drinks, birthdays, barbecues, stopping by the bottle shop on the way home. Say you’re not drinking, and the response is immediate: “Oh come on, just have one.”
Associate Professor Belinda Lunnay, a Torrens University researcher who studies women and alcohol, points to the ways women’s leisure and self-care have been repackaged around drinking, from bubbles at the hairdresser to paint-and-sip nights and the chorus in the group chat after a hard day: pour yourself a wine.
Alcohol can start to feel like a relationship. “Women talked about it like it was a human one. It’s a reliable friend,” Dr Lunnay says.
Counting the health cost
The uncomfortable truth is that alcohol is so normalised, the risks hide in plain sight. Most of us know drinking isn’t exactly good for us – we know the hangover – but we often underestimate its wider effects, particularly in midlife. “There is a general awareness that alcohol isn’t good for you,” Ayla says. “But people don’t realise just how not good it is.”
Alcohol is classified as a Group 1 carcinogen, the same category as tobacco and asbestos, and is known to increase the risk of seven types of cancer, including breast and bowel cancer. In Australia, it is estimated to contribute to around 5000 new cancer cases each year, including six per cent of breast cancer cases.
When it comes to breast cancer, alcohol is a modifiable risk factor, yet Ayla says awareness remains “extremely low”. Even one standard drink a day is linked to a seven per cent higher risk of breast cancer.
The familiar message to “drink responsibly” suggests alcohol risk is simply a matter of counting drinks and staying on the right side of the line. But the health evidence is more confronting: No level of drinking is completely risk-free. Because of body composition and hormones, women experience greater harm from the same, or even lower, amounts of alcohol.
Alcohol may also undermine the very things women are trying to protect in their 40s and 50s. A glass of wine might feel like it helps with stress and sleep, but Dr Lee says, “over the long term, it makes you feel worse and everything harder to manage”.
In midlife, many women find alcohol starts to affect them differently. “They often say one drink feels like three.” Poor sleep, irritability, sweating or low mood are easily blamed on menopause, but Dr Lee notes, “some of these symptoms are being made worse by alcohol and some of them might be because of alcohol itself.”
The point is not to make women feel guilty for drinking. “If you’re having a drink knowing it’s not the healthiest thing for you, and you’re making that choice, that’s important,” she says. “A lot of women automatically pick up a drink without really thinking about it because we’re so programmed for it.”
What comes back
After years of taking breaks and trying to moderate, Sarah Rusbatch’s decision to give up drinking came when a friend asked the question she had been avoiding: “Why are you fighting to keep alcohol in your life when you know you feel better without it?” It was the truth she had been circling for years: Alcohol was taking more than it gave.
At first, she kept the ritual, pouring an alcohol-free drink at the hour she once reached for wine. These days, her evenings are “spacious and calm. I’m calmer, more patient and so much more present with my kids.”
For Victoria Vanstone, quitting drinking “changed everything”. She has built a career, instead of what she describes as “fumbling through life”. But one of the best things, she says, was getting back something she had lost: trust in herself. She hasn’t become the “perfect mum”, but her children now get a mother who is “present and available”.
Danni was 40 when she decided to take a one-year break. By the end, the relief of not waking up filled with shame was too powerful to give up. Eight years on, her life looks different: early nights, time with her children, dinner with close friends or a night on the couch. “It might seem boring from the outside but it’s so much more peaceful than the alternative.”
None of them pretends life suddenly became easy. There are still hard days, but alcohol is no longer the only way through them.
Sarah, who now coaches women on how to change their relationship with alcohol, says many expect to miss what they gave up. “But what women notice is how much better they feel mentally, physically and emotionally,” she says. “Their resilience builds, they feel more confident, and their lives start to open up.”
Check in with your drinking
How much am I actually drinking?
Track your drinks. “Often you feel like a drink, have a drink and lose count,” Nicole Lee says.
How often am I drinking?
Frequency can be more telling than quantity. “If you are drinking every day or nearly every day, you are almost certainly dependent on alcohol at some level,” says Dr Lee.
Has alcohol become my go-to?
Are you reaching for a drink whenever you feel stressed, anxious, upset or uncomfortable?
“If relief comes only after a drink, that’s a sign,” says Ayla Chorley.
Am I making rules, then breaking them?
Watch for bargaining: I don’t drink during the week, except tonight. Or: I’ll just have one, then having more than you meant to.
Is alcohol still doing what I want it to do?
If you’re drinking to relax, cope or switch off, Belinda Lunnay suggests asking whether it’s still working – and what else might help.
Would I drink if it wasn’t there?
Notice when alcohol feels automatic: Because it’s expected, available or part of the routine.
Could I take 30 days off?
Sarah Rusbatch often asks women this question. If the idea brings up excuses or feels impossible, alcohol may be playing a bigger role than you realised.
Simple ways to cut back
- Take a break. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. “Any time off alcohol is great for your body and your health,” says Dr Nicole Lee.
- Slow the pace. Swap every second drink for water, soft drink or a non-alcoholic option. “That effectively halves your drinking without you even trying,” Dr Lee says.
- Don’t do it alone. Support matters, especially when drinking is part of your social life. If friends or family don’t understand, look to your GP, an online program, support group or anonymous community, such as Hello Sunday Morning.
- Keep going. Finding it hard does not mean you have failed. “Most people have trouble the first few times they try to cut back,” Dr Lee says. “You’ll learn something every time and it will get easier.”
For support, speak to your GP, visit Hello Sunday Morning, Alcoholics Anonymous or call the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015.
This article originally appeared in the July 2026 issue of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Subscribe so you never miss an issue.
