You know how sometimes a friend or family member calls and delivers such a perky everything’s perfect call that you can almost feel the gloss on their tongues? A friend was over yesterday describing such a call from a friend of hers as “the PR call.”
Rarely would I write OMG, but OMG I felt like my day had new meaning, simply because I now have a way to describe those calls. It’ll be my new codeword when appropriate; I think it’ll make them that much less intolerable to receive.
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Parenting is filled with moments when you are sure some other parent’s life is way more perfect than your own. How is it that other people’s children clear the dishes or do the dishes or do their laundry or never need nagging about homework because they come home and do it first thing?
A few weeks ago at a bar mitzvah for a mutual friend’s son, a friend and I were remembering the mothers’ group we’d met in some 16 years earlier—and how we’d both had firstborn boys we were struggling to breastfeed. She said, “I just couldn’t take it, all those fat, happy babies.” I concurred, “I always say that I was a mothers’ group dropout. Truth is I was too busy pumping eight times a day to hang in.”
Years later, I ended up in a different moms’ group: we’ve been going since third grade and our shared age kids are in tenth, now. We don’t hang with kids. We get together periodically in the evenings. Sometimes, alcohol loosens tongues, but really it’s not that; it’s more like we’ve just let ourselves ride up to the same point for so many years that we can really let ourselves say what we want and need to say. We do have a name: MOTE (Mothers on the Edge).
Doesn’t Mothers on the edge capture it? That feeling of not being sure whether you can keep from tumbling over into a sea of laundry or cracker crumbs or crumpled up homework sheets?
During my PR call I responded that the kids were doing beautifully enough, getting settled into new school year and busy and back to health. Had the call occurred at nine that evening during an interminable bedtime with the three-year-old—think, Bedtimeageddon—while there were teenage miseries of the I-hate-you-I-need-you sort I guess I still could have reported that overall the kids were doing beautifully enough. Emphasis in my report: overall. The truth, my truth, is that every single day I spend some time at the edge in fear of going over and some time ignoring the laundry and the crumbs and the grumbles and soaking in the other part, the part in which I see my four lovely, interesting, complicated humans as that—and just love them.
*If you arrived via my guest post on Moonfrye, welcome! Click on the older posts (to the side) & read some more.
