Last night, this mama got out of the house and got her some wine and good, good food with the girls. It sounds all Sex in the City when I say it that way, and let me be clear: we are so not the Sex in the City type of group. No cosmos, no talking about fellatio, no ridiculous fashion unless you count my wacked-out, am-I-really-30? wardrobe. We’re just four ladies who don’t all see one another often (weird grammar there because I see Karen just about every day, but the rest us see one another at varying frequency) but get sprung from our houses and lives once a month to eat, drink and chatter. This group was much larger at one time, but people moved away or got busy, and the four of us are the hangers on, which is cool because I don’t think we would have otherwise stayed in touch as well.
I’m still in the motherhood honeymoon stage, and maybe I always will be: I’m not exactly desperate to get away from my kid. I am desperate to get away from my laundry and the black hole that is my TV, however, and I love getting to talk to people with whom I do not work or live and to whom I am not related. Debby and Lisa are some of the only people I roll with socially that fit this bill these days, and they are the only—and I mean ONLY—mothers of young kids I know in the area. Pathetic, no? I feel bad for Karen sometimes because the Great Life of Mommy often dominates the conversation, but she’s a good sport and has a front row seat for the myopic turn one’s life takes when you squeeze out a kid or two. It would be nice, I imagine, to talk about something else, but since I can’t really do current events (no time to read the paper), literature (no time to read period), movies (huh? like in a cinema? if it’s not on HBO I don’t know it), we’re kind of stuck with kids or reality TV (and we sure did talk about Project Runway last night).
One of the reasons I really like the way the four of us groove is that we are all so different. Karen is running around half out of her mind in love, Debby is resourceful and knowledgeful about everything (maybe two kids and a perfect husband help), and Lisa is a fashionista, gorgeous and with a sick, dry sense of humor that absolutely kills me. I am the rogue of the group, I think—totally disorganized and forever unprepared. We all have full lives but somehow manage to come together (and keep wanting to come together) to talk about a little bit of everything. We’re hardly best friends, but their friendship and the regularity of our outings is something I’ve come to depend on. It’s hard to explain. Sometimes people who aren’t all up in your day-to-day can give you needed perspective and humor, I guess.
Friends like this can also be just what you need when you don’t know what the hell you need. I swear, without the four of them I might have fallen apart when Clementine was born. They brought me food when I didn’t realize how hungry I was or how hard it was to cook, gave me advice, listened to me whine and basically gave me permission to stop listening to the parenting machine and just do what I wanted. Sounds simple, but I needed all the help I could get. We’re all pretty different in our parenting styles (yes, Karen too with her cats), but there is no judgment, which I have found is pretty darn unusual with other mommies. It’s just a good group.
But enough gushing. We went out, ate too much, spent too much money on wine and had a lovely time. It was the perfect end to a nice day where I had gotten enough sleep, breezed through a mountain of work, hung out with Nate and C. and felt like everything was clicking. Hooray for nights out.
And from all I can tell, Clementine missed me while I was gone. She woke me up at 5:30 a.m. to tell me so. She’s been soaking her diapers at night lately, so Nate stripped her of her wet jammies, put her in a disposable and plopped her in between us to coo and roll back and forth, stroking our faces and doing her best imitation of kisses. We tried to sleep and play with her at the same time (it’s amazing, this new multitasking), but eventually she was too cute to ignore and we all spent a happy morning rolling around together and laughing. How can we get up that early and still be late to work? I’m blaming it on the traffic (which was totally shitty because there was more than one flake of snow in the sky and everyone turned into a grandma driver), but really it was because you can’t pull yourself out of bed when your sweet little daughter is inches away and smiling her gummy best. I don’t care how important you are at work—some things are just too good to miss.
We’re taking another midnight jaunt to Chicago this evening to hang out with my sis and her brood. I’m sure I’ll have some reports from the road (but hopefully they won’t be about blood C.’s blood-curdling screams).
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