Just a few more thoughts, but not about the drinking
The whole playgroup thing is so beside the point for me. I don’t even belong to a playgroup, nor do I have any desire to start one. Lila, at 3 ½, has never had a group play situation outside of the daycare/preschool that she’s attended for almost six months. I just couldn’t get into it this time around. All that earnest parenting, talking about the best way just became a way for me to hide what I want behind a transparent layer of insecurity.
Also, I’m less insecure and less desiring of a uniform reflection of my values in the people around me. More importantly, less concerned that my parenting fits within any kind of a mold that holds the shape of any one set of values. I’ve discovered that I have more dimensions to me than any labels can describe. Whenever I’ve gotten together with a group of mothers and children for the purpose of the kids playing and the grown-ups talking, I’ve always walked away from the day feeling questioned, judged (positively and negatively) and wishing for something more.
Dawn wrote so eloquently about what she’s learned in a decade of parenting last week and what she said resonated for me. When Ty was born I lived in Park Slope (I know, Gawker’s favorite mothers to mock). I found a La Leche meeting (amen) and out of that grew a mother’s group. We met in each other’s living rooms or in Prospect Park once a week for a snack and to sit around nursing, complaining, laughing and looking for validation. We had opinions. Breast is best, of course. So is organic. And natural fibers. And attachment parenting. And…and…and… Now that I think of it, at least we occasionally softened our sharp edges with a glass of wine.
My boy didn’t nurse so great because he experienced an early taste of formula with rice milk fed to him from a bottle while I was in an antihistamine and pain-killer haze. I read about the wonderful benefits of almond milk. Rather than buy it, however, I went through the weekly process of soaking organic whole, raw almonds in water, pureeing them in the food processor, then straining it all through a coffee filter over a Tupperware jug. I hated doing it—it was a huge pain in the ass, but told myself it was the best thing I could offer this baby who nursed so haphazardly. I looked to the group for validation and never came up empty-handed.
We had one mother whose milk didn’t let down and was still nursing her 16 month old with fresh, organic goat’s milk that was delivered by refrigerator truck to the old-fashioned metal box on her front stoop every three days. She wore it in a plastic sack and he nursed it from tubing taped to her breasts. Even after more than a year, this mother still cried at playgroup when she fed her child. That to me is the epitome of earnest parenting. No pressure there.
I spent Tyler’s early childhood in a fog of idealism that prevented me from connecting with anyone who wasn’t just like me. It was hard to make friends, especially because I loathed myself so completely and then surrounded myself with people who were so much like me that it was difficult to love them unconditionally.
But this time around, with all of that experience to draw on, I find I can’t connect with those same mothers I sought out before. I don’t want to get together with other mothers with children Lila’s age so we can all sit around and worry it all to death. I haven’t met anyone with the big age spread my kids have. My few friends now have older children and Lila just hangs out with the adults.
Becca said it best in the comments on the previous post. I just want time away from all of the bullshit, and maybe even the kids, thinking about something other than the thousand ways I’m screwing them up with my imperfect parenting. If I could find a group of women (locally, I’m sure I could draw on the terrific women who read and comment here and form the best playgroup ever) who not only wanted to, but committed to getting together so the little heads played and the big heads used their noggins for something outside the realm of motherhood, well, I’d be all over that. Too bad Dawn and Eve live 3 hours away!
Weekly get togethers to talk about reading, writing, art, politics, food, gardening, education (our own, not the kids’), sex, work, money, meaning. And if there’s serious snackage and buzz-enhancing bevvies? Where can I sign up?
"In summer we live out of doors, and have only impulses and feelings, which are all for action, and must wait commonly for the stillness and longer nights of autumn and winter before any thought will subside; we are sensible that behind the rustling leaves, and the stacks of grain, and the bare clusters of the grape, there is the field of a wholly new life, which no man has lived; that even this earth was made for more mysterious and nobler inhabitants than men and women. In the hues of October sunsets, we see the portals to other mansions than those which we occupy."
~Henry David Thoreau
