When Eli was born in August of 2012, I was lucky enough to connect with a network of other new moms. So most of my friends' kids have birthdays between June and December, which means throughout the summer and fall, we attend a lot of birthday parties.
One thing I didn't necessarily consider about having a baby was that it would open up a whole new social circle for me. Now in addition to work friends and school friends I had mom friends...a label I eventually shortened to "the moms" (as in, "Phil, I'm having dinner with the moms tonight").
Making mom friends is a little bit like dating. When I was on maternity leave, I joined every meetup group, every playgroup I heard about; I said yes to every playdate. Fortunately, mom friend relationships move a lot faster than romantic relationships: At the beginning of the playdate, you're shyly scrutinizing each other's diaper bags for clues (is that a bottle of formula? A Mam pacifier? Puffs, she lets her kid have puffs, that's a good sign); by the end, you're swapping birth stories and describing in graphic detail exactly what that last cervical check felt like.
When Eli was an infant, I relied on the women of my Google group to get me out of the house and give me something to look forward to. On Mondays, we did mommy/baby yoga at New York Sports Club, usually followed by a walk through Forest Hills Gardens and — if we were feeling daring — lunch. (Have you ever seen the look on a waiter's face when 5-10 women with strollers haul themselves into your restaurant? It's something!) On Fridays, we convened in the children's section of Barnes & Noble or at the park, laying blankets end-to-end to create a patchwork where all our babies could roll, spit, grab and faceplant onto each other.
We did stroller exercises and formed a book club. We glammed up for moms' nights out and brought each other pastries for day playdates in. We compared notes on solid food, sleeping through the night and teething. We traded horror stories about spitup and screaming fits. At night I would text them photos of my glass of wine sitting atop Eli's high chair — a perfect epitome for bedtime — or Paranormal Activity-style shots of the baby monitor in night vision mode.
Can I make a confession? When I went back to work, it wasn't staying at home with Eli that I missed, the day-to-day routine of changing diapers and playing peekaboo. It was all that socializing with "the moms" who had become my close girlfriends.
Now that our kids are older, it's not so easy to chat with other moms at the playground because our kids no longer stay in one spot long enough to get a good conversation going. ("So the other day I was at the — be careful on that slide — supermarket on Queens Boulevard with the — you have to get off the slide if someone wants to come down it! — guacamole and I noticed — no, we just got off the swings, I'm not putting you back on them right now — what was I saying again?") And it's interesting to see parenting styles develop and evolve from the days when all we all had in common was that we had new babies — it can be awkward when you find yourself at the playground with someone you haven't seen in a while and you realize, Oh, she's totally a helicopter mom and I bet she's judging me because I'm not paying enough attention to my kid! Wait a second, where is my kid?
But on the flip side — and this is where birthday party season comes in — another thing I didn't realize about becoming a parent was how much I would genuinely love my friends' kids, too. I love hearing about funny things they said or outrageous fits they pulled (bonus points if it makes me feel better about my own kid's outrageous fits). I love chatting with them (now that they can chat!) and watching them navigate playtime with each other.
When our kids were really small, before they had friendships of their own, I considered an invitation to a 1st birthday party an honor. After all, I reasoned, since the party was really for the parents, not the kid, and the parents were the ones doing the inviting, it must mean they liked us! So birthday party season feels, instead of a chore, like an affirmation: These are our people.
When you Google "mom friends," the top results that appear are all about how to make them: Why is it so hard? Why don't you have "good ones"? Poor Googlers. Am I allowed to brag about this for a moment? I have mom friends who have offered to get Eli from school for me when the subways were fucked and neither Phil nor I were going to make it to school on time. I have mom friends who I can talk to about poop and cervical mucus without blinking. I have mom friends I can drink bottles of wine in my sweatpants with and mom friends I can run for miles with (and sometimes they're the same friends!).
In family trees, children always appear as leaves growing out from the tree. But what I've been thinking about lately is that children are also roots, pulling us deeper and closer to where we are and to each other. At the first birthday party of birthday party season, I got to hold all these babies and I thought, I may not have another kid, but I hope someone will always lend me a baby to hold. I was walking to the subway on my way to work and a guy in a suit smiled and nodded at me — I have no idea who it was but I assume it was the dad of one of Eli's classmates. I've lived in Forest Hills all my life, but I've never felt more a part of the community than I do now that I'm "Eli's mom."
But when you have good mom friends, they become more than just mom friends; they become your community. I have friends who will text me to make sure I don't get on the E train if it's running slowly, and friends who will text me to make sure I walk Eli down 108th Street so we can see all the construction trucks. I have friends who tease Phil about how much he loves Legos and friends who chat with my mom in the bagel store. I was out of town during the most recent birthday party and someone texted me a picture of Phil and Eli riding around in a racecar; I sent it on to Phil, joking, "My spies are everywhere."
So that's why I love birthday party season. I love looking around at all these families I love whose kids have grown up with mine and thinking: We created all this. Three years ago, we couldn't have dreamed who these children would be. And how sweet it will be year after year as we get to see who they become.
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