As I’ve mentioned, I have two babies – a 22 month old and a 9 month old. I also still work part-time in Marketing. As many moms can attest, the part-time work situation is usually satisfactory since it allows for the majority of your time to be with your family, but also provides the ability to flex some of those cranial muscles that start to slacken after 4 days of conversing with small humans whose favorite words are ‘fart’ and ‘Elmo.’ Oh, I’m talking about the kids, not G…And, bottom line, it brings in some cash to pay for the extras, like clothes and that obviously-early-admission-to-Harvard college fund.
But there is a problem to part-time careers as a full-time mom (beyond the 1am packing of babysitter bags and arriving to work with Cheerios stuck to your arse). It’s that feeling of hovering betwixt two worlds, having one foot on the shore while the other is still on the boat. I might be a resident of Momville, but I constantly feel like INS is going to revoke my papers. During the infant stage, I neglected bonding with other mothers and forging friendships for my kids because it wasn’t necessary; They were happy to watch me make Jim Carrey faces all day long. As D got older, I put him in one of those Little Gym classes where they make you feel like you’re molding Olympic gymnasts every time they do a somersault. But I never met any kindred mom souls – it’s hard to connect to other moms in 45 minutes when your son spends the first half wailing like you’ve shipped him off to ‘Nam and the second half saying, “Mama, bagels?” So, like my son, my interest in carbohydrates outweighed my desire to find future play dates.
Seemed harmless at the time, but now I’m seeing that D seems reluctant to play with other kids at that popularity contest parading as a table train set at Barnes & Noble. Thus, I have been complaining to G about finding other women with children for weeks. It’s been met with the kind of enthusiasm and support one would expect from a piece of dryer lint.
G: “He has a sister. That’s the point of siblings. They play with each other.”
E: “His sister is 9 months old and barely mobile. The only thing they have in common is a fondness for applesauce. And there’s only so much of that they can eat in a day.”
G grew up in a family of 7 children so the idea of ‘organized play’ or activities that you ‘pay for’ makes him look at me as if I’m from some yet-to-be discovered planet in the universe. Needless to say, Little Gym, swim classes, Mommy & Me, music classes, ballet, and Baby Yoga weren’t on the agenda. And for the record, I get that! Kids are over-scheduled these days, but when one can only come up with a single invitation to another toddler for a birthday party, it’s time to branch out.
So I joined Meetup.com in hopes of finding the perfect posse of O.G.’s to roll with my peeps. It was exhilarating to receive invitations to play groups within moments, like being picked Class President without having to campaign! But then I paid closer attention to the fine print about age restrictions on siblings and the fact that 90% of them were slated for the days I work. Sharing this frustration with G proved fruitless as he immediately began questioning why I can’t just meet other moms organically at the playground – oh, right, why didn’t I think of that??? I don’t really expect G, or any man for that matter, to understand the considerations behind forming friendships with other moms. It’s a little more complex than both being ‘skins’ on the b-ball court and agreeing that Derek Jeter has bigger cohones than A-Rod.
After reading aloud one invite to a play group, which admittedly sounded like I was being sold Amway products, G stopped me halfway through and said, “This is stupid. You need to just put up a poster at the Little Gym.”
I can’t even describe the look that I gave him. I, myself, don’t even know the portrait of this look as there was no mirror. I can only say with certainty that my face actually hurt and I considered voluntarily blacking out. And now I will forever think that my husband believes I should solve any problem by posting my name, address, and phone number on a public POSTER. How ’bout a headshot? And my cup size?
I’m pretty sure there’s a place for declaring your freaky pleas to find others. It’s called Craig’s List. Not The Little Gym.
[Note to self: add new category...'advice'.]
Have you tried the chatboards on TheNest or TheBump? There are local boards and I know people tend to be pretty open to getting together in real life. I’m sure if you put it on there you’ll find someone looking for the same.
I also thought you lived vaguely near where G is from (I could be totally off on this) – if so, does he have any friends/acquaintances from high school who are perhaps in the same life place? I’m not even pregnant but I’m already thinking about my future momtourage – which right now consists of people I was barely acquaintances with in high school, but through Facebook and geographic proximity, we’ve started talking and hanging out and were all already planning on having kids around the same basic time period (2 of them already have kids, they just want more – 2 of them will be first-timers like me). If you tap into G’s network of old friends, they might have wives who could become your friends – if I was able to bond with these near-strangers over geographic proximity and place-of-life (in this case, it was primarily that we’re all new homeowners), I’m sure momhood is an even larger bonding factor.
Not to be discouraging, but after a couple of years of agonizing about this and failing miserably (despite many flirtations at the playground), my solution was to just wait for preschool. That will secure playdates, at least, though not necessarily *friends* in the proper sense. Even then though, you’ll run into the new problem of your kid being friends with the kids that have moms at home all the time and who want to schedule playdates on the days that you are at work. Or the flip of that: your kid is friends with the kids who have nannies, so if you want to do a playdate on your days off, you have to hang out with the nannies… I’m beginning to wonder whether anyone really makes *new* mom friends. I think most people just have kids at the same time as their pre-children friends. And if that’s not the case, then it seems like you’re out of luck.
All good points, V. I already fall into the nanny trap a lot. Christine, not nearby family or old friends, but I hadn’t thought of those two message boards. Meetup.com was my first foray. Thanks for the advice!
Another mom-group-thing I just heard about – not sure if you’re into exercise at all, but a friend of mine does this:
http://www.strollerstrides.com/
Hey – I saw this post recycled on BaristaKids and linked over here. I live in “Baristaville”, near the park. I, too, have tried a local Meetup.com group with little success. The trouble is, you have to meet someone who you like, which means being similar ages (as a just-shy-of-30 mom in this area, I’ve been snubbed by more than my share of 40-somethings who think I’m a teenage mom) and having similar tastes, but also their kid has to be near your kid’s age, and (hardest of all) you have to LIKE their kid! (It may sound evil, but there are just some kids I don’t want in my house…the excessive droolers, the destructive ones, and the whiners, for example.)
My point is – you called it. It’s hard. And I agree the age restrictions and “ads” for play dates are creepy. And the husband thing. You called that, too. I just try to blame it on the Mars/Venus thing.
Anyhow, if you live in/near “Baristaville” – at the risk of sounding like a creepy ad – my 21 mos. old daughter is lovely and we go to the local playground often. We’d be happy to meet you some warm day and see if the kids play well together!
thank you for jumping over from BaristaKids. While I fear I might have both a drooler and destroyer, I would love to get together some time. We’re the same age and have kids close in age. I will email you from the business email!
Sounds great – hopefully we get some more warm days coming soon!
I’m a full-time working mom and I totally agree on the impossibility of finding playdates. (And I’m in the 40+ category in an area where it seems like a lot of people had kids before turning 30.) Every so often on the local Mom’s web sites someone posts that they’d like to start a book club. My book club has been great because we all have at least two things in common– we read and we have kids. This seems to have been enough to generate some real friendships. Not all the kids are in the right age group to be my daughter’s playmates, but at least I have people I can invite to her party until she makes some real friends of her own.