Mommy Playdates

After almost three years of trying to find, finding, partaking in, falling out of, and finding enduring friendships through mommy playdates, I can say that I've graduated to the next level. What is that level and why? I am still redefining what that level is for me and as to the second part of that question - it never really worked for me or to put it in another way - the positives never outweighed the negatives. This is my story.

When you think of all of the groups or clicks one can or has joined in their lifetime - be it in elementary school, high school, college, work groups, hobbies acquired, etc., I've begun to think that non are as elemental, in one way or another, as mommy groups. To understand why it didn't work for me, I would have to bring it back to my early years. I could never really fit into any groups during my adolescent years in school, especially groups dominated by women. Why? I don't know but think that bits and parts of me lay everywhere and not all in one place. Clicks in school were too exclusive - the artists (I drew), the druggies (I smoked pot), the straight A students (never), the class clowns (lacked standard humor), the ones who kept creating new groups trying to place themselves somewhere (I couldn't be too narrow minded or limited in my likings), the athletes (no athletic bone in this small body). So if I tried to join, they didn't let me in and I just wondered by myself or with a friend or two. But girls just didn't like me. Fast forward to pregnancy.

When I was pregnant, my sister and a friend were pregnant at the same time. I had just miscarried (where they hadn't) and I was a bit anxious to say the least. Then I met a woman whose husband worked with mine and she was pregnant with her 4th child. But that wasn't until I was already bedridden due to having no cervix and dilated at 17 weeks. We all went through our pregnancies together, sharing our stories, and sometimes in very intimate details, but it was different for me. I was confined to a bed for 120 days, 60 of them in a hospital bed no bigger than a 8x10 room. The only group that I could have belonged to were the women in the adjacent rooms that I never got to meet. And behind it all was the fear of how early our son would come. Fast forward to the birth.

Liam was born at 34 1/2 weeks and directly into the NICU. We were lucky that his health was great and that we could bring him home after 10 days (10 long days of looking at the empty blue-yellow plaid bassinet that Jay had bought and placed right next to my side of the bed, waiting. Going to the hospital every moment that I wasn't sleeping and waking up several times during the night to call and check up on him. This compared to all of the healthy perfect bringing home baby stories I heard all around us and had watched on TV during my whole pregnancy. The only great thing about this was the beautiful birthing experience I had, with no Lamaze and living mindfully in the moment of every movement he made in my belly. I was lucky. This should have been a preparation for the mindfulness required in raising a child who cannot see past this very instant and this very desire. Fast forward to Liam's personality.

Getting to know Liam has been such a wonderful, yet anxious experience (for me). While Jay trusted that the universe would know where to place Liam or where he would fall, I couldn't. My controlling nature got the best of the first 2 years of Liam's life, sadly to say. With his preemie status all I could think of what could go wrong. You name it, it crossed my mind. At first I was obsessed with SIDS. I dreaded that every time he went to sleep he wouldn't wake up. Then my mind centered on the Autism spectrum since he was 6 months old. I read books on vaccinations (which I still hold on the knowledge conveyed in them), I looked online and did tons of research. Being a librarian can sometimes be a curse. It brought so much anxiety about the delusions I was seeing that were not there, I ended up in counseling and on anti-anxiety medication. I worked daily on raising Liam and trying to not get anxious when he rubbed a shoe string for too long, padded his blanky for a while, didn't respond when I called his name every time, and later when his speech was delayed because of his confusion with the Spanish/English dynamic we had in our home.

During all this time, I tried to go to mommy groups, but Liam was too shy, too afraid of the other children, and his tantrums were fierce. He would cry and scream the minute he heard another baby cry and it took him so long to reset that we'd have to leave (a library book baby event, hospital group, coffee house meeting). Then he started head banging and it was over. His head banging drew in the rolling eyes and the "What's the matter with your son, is he okay?" Meaning, is he normal and make him stop before he gives himself a concussion. Yes, the pounding of a skull on a tile floor of a gymnasium can be resoundingly loud. And going back they just remembered who we were and stayed away. This seemed to happen everywhere. Now we didn't fit in. And it was quite lonely.

Then there were the comparisons that didn't help. Mothers are an obsessive bunch, let me tell you. We can size up a child in no time. There is the initial phrase, "You're son/daughter is so cute," followed by the inevitable question, "How old is he/she?" This serves two purposes:

1. To compare that child to yours,
2. To see if you make a connection with this other person whom you know nothing about but could in 2 seconds be exchanging the most gruesome mucus exchange of the birth story.

Before you know it, you have already learned the pregnancy and birth story, sized up where your child is advanced/behind theirs (and decided that you will worry about that later, right now you are having a much needed moment of adult conversation) and learning all about how motherhood has changed them, their careers, dreams, and marriages. You then walk away, sometimes with a phone number or email, promising to call to schedule a playdate, all the while you are comparing them to yourself as a mother: breastfeeding v. formula, Gerber v. home made, cry out method v. holding them all night, great marriage that will make it v. this one will last a year, etc. Are you a better mother or a worse mother? Will calling them make you feel better or worse about yourself. But you do call. Because nontheless, you need this to go on. Nobody but they understand what it's like. Not even the man of your dreams who helped you, in a moment of passion to create this perfect little person you are so in love with, can understand exactly.

And while you may say that I am bitter or cynical, you are right about the cynical, realistic I think. But not bitter. Just think back. You could call it sharing, but was it really? Are you still sharing past your child's second birthday and maybe have been lucky enough to make a friendship out of other similar interests that you have together? Otherwise, you keep getting together because staying home all day with a child will wreck your mind and you need an adult conversation about anything, including yes, mostly revolving around your child. All this while your child runs around and you have to just make sure they don't hurt themselves while you keep your sanity. If you don't agree with me, please let me know how you did it better so I can learn and then club myself over the head with my son's baseball bat.

If the play date is small enough and you attend it often, the dynamic is different. You share more. Very quickly - after you have sized up all the children - you start learning about the women's marriages, divorces, prior careers, if they plan to return to work, their parenting styles, the way they were raised, their dreams (if they can remember them and plan to carry them out v. defecting now that they are a mommy) etc. We share more with these women in a short period of time than we do ever again in our lifetimes, and do so desperately. We crave this contact. More so than at any other point in our lives - before and after. It gets us through the sleepless nights, the cracked nipples, the what did you do to get your child to keep nursing?. And yes, it gets you through the day and night because you know at the end of the day while you could share this with the love of your life he doesn't quite feel the same way you do and really doesn't want to know the minutia of how you were pumping and when you stood up the milk (that is as precious as gold) spilled all over the floor. And with your crazy hormones you cried for an hour about it. All they want to know is when will you be over the baby enough to remember to take them off the back burner, which is now cold, or be in the mood to have sex again, without excuses of tiredness, hormones that haven't come back to normal, dirty because you haven't showered in three days, etc. And we can't blame them, they went along this roller coaster with us, but one of us rode in the front and the other in the back and we didn't share the same thrill.

So where is your mommy group now? Do you see them regularly? Do keep in touch via email, phone, or have you gone in separate ways after returning to work, having another child (which happens much too quickly after the first one)? Have you made a life long friendship with these other women who at one point were your lifeline? Or are you sad to see them go, but know that the only common interest that held you together is now growing up and you have moved on? I think about this all the time and wish that I could have made more friends and miss one dearly that moved away. I still have three who keep me sane and am lucky as hell to be able to call on them, day or night, with a question or a bitch session about anything, and they will listen. And then there's my sister, who goes along for the ride with me every time, holding my hand, even when she doesn't agree with me or when she has to put my anxiety to rest. No judgment, just love and compassion.