“For me, partying is not just a gin and tonic after a restaurant. It is dancing all night, without restrictions, without looking at the time. It is interrupting the “parenting phase” of my electrical panel! It is part of the balance of my life. » Laure (name changed), 36, lives in Lyon, where she is a marriage and family counsellor by day and passionate about electro and techno by night. Motherhood – she has three children aged 10, 6 and 3 – has not diminished her love for the dance floor, its unusual encounters and its range of possibilities.
But it’s not about taking on the role of babysitter early in the morning and nursing a hangover with her children. A rule learned painfully two years ago. Returning from a night of drinking, she and her husband take over as babysitter and collapse into a drunken sleep. Early in the morning, her youngest son, a year and a half old at the time, got up early to ask for his bottle. A few moments later, there he is with the empty bottle in one hand and an Atarax tablet in the other, with a bite mark clearly visible on the tranquilizer tablets, although kept in the toiletry bag.
Panicked, the parents called the poison control center, which directed them to the pediatric emergency room for twelve hours of observation. They will leave at the end of the day, stunned, with their son safe and sound, with no trace of ingested medication. “This moment was an electric shock, Laure remembers. That night, when I had more drinks, I only thought about myself, not about my son or the next day. It was a parental mistake that could have been dramatic. It was the first and above all the last time. » For a while, the couple stopped dating. Then she made sure that the partying did not spread to the family. Laura sums up: “Either we look after the children until the next evening, or better yet until the next day, or we split up: one goes out and the other stays to look after the children. But we are a team of parents like a “party” team, we very rarely separate.”
“Tendency to leave everything”
Is partying the glue that holds a couple together? For Constance (who did not want to give her name), a mother of three children aged 12, 9 and 7 who lives in Marseille, these nightly epics have long been a breath of fresh air that she considered essential for her and her partner. “I had a great need to escape through partying, especially when the children were small., she says. It was a way to break away from everyday life, with my husband, to dance, sing, laugh, in short, to be something more than just parents together. So I had a tendency to give it all up, maybe too much. » Today, the demands of early childhood have faded and the pace of her outings has been balanced with family life. On weekends, the now 38-year-old enjoys sharing activities with five people.
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