It sounds so self-helpy, right? Mom group. So desperate. So fluorescent overhead lighting. So awkward folding-chair circles in Baptist church basements, with Styrofoam-flavored coffee. Women taking polite turns speaking their “truths” about cracked nipples, nutty grandmas, shitty babies, and FUPAs. I mean, in the end that’s pretty much it. A bunch of strangers banding together to struggle through their shared obsession. “Group” as a verb. How super lame. How very uncool or urban or whatever random adjective got snipped from an old copy of O: The Oprah Magazine and glued to my mom vision board. There are so many stories we tell ourselves about who we are, who we’re supposed to be, and who we should be with. To me “mom groups” always sounded like something for white women, period. But why? Are Black women not moms? Do we not love a good group?
To get to the bottom of those questions I asked my Black friends who are moms and who also happen to live all over the country to weigh in via a completely unscientific Google survey, because I was tired of texting. The responses I got from these women who unfortunately don’t live down the street, and therefore can’t be in my day-to-day mom clique, were equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking. One mom called her local group a “nice sanity check” and repeated the African proverb, “It takes a village.” She had intentionally joined a group specifically designed “for Black mommas.” Another mom, who knitted together an informal Black mom group, still said the very term was like nails on a chalkboard—“sounds like a bunch of white women doing stuff to make the world in the shape they want it for their specific kid.” When asked who exactly “mom groups” were for, one mother answered, “Stay-at-home/gently employed white women who make Goldfish crackers from scratch and decorate their front porches for every season.” This same mom admitted that “it would be nice to have women to get advice from and vent with” but her “wack” schedule wouldn’t allow it, plus she didn’t feel like being “judged by type A women.” That was the general perception of the women who populate the twenty-first-century baby bee. When I mentioned maybe possibly joining my friendly neighborhood mom group, my day ones scoffed—like literally scoffed—at the idea. “For what?” But for real, wasn’t I too, ummm, Black for this? Is that a thing? Didn’t I know my own kind of people with babies? What would eleven-year-old Helena, who vowed never to let the sixth grade Stepford-wives-in-training make her feel small again, say about all this? Would she high-five me or slap some sense into me?
It began innocently enough.
After I got pregnant with my first daughter, Sally, one of my colleagues at The Washington Post, told me about this Facebook group I had to join: Bloomingdale Mamas. It was for all the ladies “in our hood,” a zip code that was basically gentrification ground zero. We had been living in a cute condo in Bloomingdale for three years, and three-quarters of my take-home pay. Then two lines on a pregnancy test meant more space, and Rob and I managed to find a former party house to rent that had room for a baby. There were deep black gouges in the dining room floor, caused by either a pissed-off dragon or DJ equipment. No two doors were the same in size, functionality, or style. One closet smelled murder-y. And all the windows on the first floor were more decorative than operable.
But it had a “finished basement” for my mom, who planned on moving in to help us save money on daycare for a few months. (Who were we kidding? We were never going to be able to afford daycare.) The new house was on a quiet street curved like a rainbow and lined with single family homes. The block was dotted with elm and red maple trees—I know this because I looked them up. Grown-ups know the names of trees. One giant American elm shot up some sixty feet right in front of our house like a gnarly hand pulling down the sky. Tree-lined. That’s a thing. We could carefully step out onto the rotting wood of our Wardman-style porch and hear birdsong instead of the homeless-man a cappella group in residence at the last condo we rented. It felt suburban. It felt like a step up, even with all the cracks. It felt like the kind of place parents would live.
So, the Bloomingdale Mamas, the online chrysalis from which I would emerge transformed. Because if it was all about the mothers of the neighborhood—the perfect backdrop to the family photos of the future—then I was all in. I had to be. Wasn’t this my identity now? Helena, soon-to-be mother. Helena, in charge of vacuuming a three-story house and looking out onto our malaria swamp of a backyard and envisioning children therein. Helena, the grown. I joined the Mamas a full five months before my firstborn arrived.
After sending the group’s moderator a message with an embarrassing exclamation-point-to-sentence ratio, this was my first post: “Lost Keys: I’m blaming my preggo brain on losing our old house keys somewhere along First Street between Channing and Florida NW. If anyone happens upon them (they’ve got about four actual keys, one black electronic key and a Washington Post key ring) please ping me. Thanks!” I was announcing myself. Pregnant. Check. Lives in a house not an apartment. Check. Has a big important job. Check. Is very fun and self-deprecating. Check. What was happening to me? Was I so desperate for validation from randos? Yes, yes I was. Thankfully, that post got zero likes, hearts, sad faces, or comments, which further proves the theory that obsessively checking Facebook does not make the comments come faster. I found my keys in the front yard later that day, but I kept it pushing. The Facebook group was still a nut that needed cracking into.
Plus, there were the offshoots to consider. There was a neighborhood parent email listserv that required your full government name and address to join lest you be some outside-the-zip interloper sneakily devouring posts about the local soccer league and summer nanny shares. There was even another spin-off Facebook group aimed at “new moms” who wanted to “meet up” once the weather got nice, and an additional email list for the same. Workouts in the park for the shrinking of postbaby bodies. Library story time you had to get tickets for in advance. There was also a new language to learn—FS (for sale), FFPPU (free for porch pick up), and ISO (in search of)—because the baby-crap black market is booming among folks who could definitely afford to click “buy now.” Plus, loads of advice (all fervently solicited) to comb through about sleep training, pumping, and “school lottery-ing.” There were hundreds of members, more moms than I knew existed in our two-by-thirteen-block wedge of Washington, and hardly any of them Black, which was eerie considering we lived in walking distance of Howard University. The Facebook group was like an alternative dimension where the realities of the world outside rarely made an appearance, except in the annual Fourth of July posts entitled “Fireworks or Gunshots?”
Once Sally landed on solid ground, lurking online became my favorite maternity-leave pastime aside from, you know, taking care of her. I’d logged on from the maternity ward right after my daughter was born, despite my best efforts to stay off the internet for six weeks in accordance with my “confinement”—a Chinese postpartum practice I learned about on the internet. But there I was in my hospital bed, thumbing through post after post as if they were puzzle pieces that, collected together, might make this whole motherhood thing make sense. And there I was at home on our hand-me-down couch with a tiny Sally nestled in the crook of one arm while I stared at the palm-sized idiot box cradled in my other hand. This wasn’t neglect, okay? This was me learning—as vital as the baby books stacked in a totem pole by my side of the bed.
But as much as I craved my daily (fine, hourly) peeks into the lives of women who looked nothing like me but were living near parallel lives to mine (married, working, crashing), I also resented their freedom. I don’t know what else to call it. Here was a forum for all things big and small—clothing swaps, home-renovation advice, wake times—that was clearly so necessary, a ray of light for creepo postpartum Gollums like myself. But it was also so blindingly white, and so unaware or unconcerned or even to blame for that fact. What was I doing caring so much about these thumbnails? Was I buying into the lily-white version of motherhood or disrupting the feed with my presence? Oh, the internal conflict! Like these women, I had briefly imagined myself better than I was and considered cloth diapers. Emily Oster, the economist turned “you can drink wine while pregnant” evangelist, was also my spiritual guide. I was dutifully steaming and blending organic vegetables that painted pretty pictures on our dining room wall at dinnertime. Being Black didn’t inoculate me from being a maniac. There wasn’t some latent mammy gene that made me an expert on child-rearing and therefore not prone to poking my kid ten times in as many minutes to make sure she was still breathing. I needed this space as much as they did. Who didn’t?
The inescapable fact that the vast majority of all these “mamas” were white really pissed me off. It felt like an exclusive club where motherhood and whiteness were one and the same. It gnawed at me. The babymoon was over. Enter my hate-scrolling phase. I spent precious downtime shitting on said group and all the unknowable women therein. It was like a nervous tic or something.
“They’re going to ‘stroller strides’ on Wednesday. Stroller strides?!” I’d call from the couch as Sally napped in her swing nearby. “Bitch, y’all walking real fast around the block! Why does everything suddenly have a new alliterative name?”
“Just say you want to go. It’s fine.” That’s Rob, my husband, for whom the politics of mom-grouping is not, and never will be, a thing.
“I don’t,” I shot back.
Silence.
“I don’t! I swear.”
“So unsubscribe then, crazy.” Why, oh why, do men offer up solutions nobody asked for to problems no one has?
“No. No. I have to know what’s going on. I need to be informed,” I maintained. “Plus, I can’t go anyway. We didn’t get the jogging stroller. It was too pricey, remember?”
“White people are cheap!” I shouted apropos of nothing.
“In what way?” Rob asked.
“All they do is give stuff away or ask each other for stuff ‘before I buy new,’ ” I exclaimed while scrolling through a gaggle of posts proving my point. “They don’t wanna spend any money. This is how they stay rich.”
“Ummhmm.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay.”
“Someone is giving away her nursing bras. Bras!”
“What size?”
“It doesn’t matter, fool. That’s nasty.”
“Right.”
“Now they’re up in arms about that shooting on W,” I point out, even though I was similarly indignant the night before. “Like, hello, we live in D.C.”
“You know that’s not normal, right?” said Rob.
“What’s not normal?”
“Shootings. Like, that isn’t something folks should want to get used to. Ever.”
“We are!”
“No, no we are not.”
We went around and around like this for weeks. Me reading aloud all the alleged faults I found with the Mamas and dragging my slightly amused husband along for the ride. He’d only taken two weeks off when Sally was born, so he owed me. Six weeks into maternity leave, I still hadn’t met the mothers I’d been stalking for months. I could point to the Big Ole Race Thing, but it’s not like I didn’t have white friends. Who doesn’t? I could say it was the class divide, but hadn’t I crossed that bridge busing into private school for over a decade, followed by the Ivy League, the master’s, the legacy media job? I could claim the utter uncoolness of it all, but seriously, grow up. Despite all my arguments to the contrary, I knew these women would help usher me through the isolation of the newborn stage, the next five months of leave, the transition back to work, and then the endless debate about “the next one.”
At thirty-seven, I thought I was done making new friends. Full stop. There were already too many boxes cluttering up my friend closet—the day ones, the homies from high school, the friends from college, the work wives and husbands, the neighbor friends, the liquor store friends, and now the mom friends. Marie Kondo would not approve. I kept trying to talk myself out of the whole thing. Weren’t mom friends the worst of the bunch? Like you, they’ve expelled a screaming life-form from their bloated bodies and lived to tell the gunky tale. Can you imagine a grosser icebreaker?
Really, there is no relationship as flammable as the female friendship—at least that’s what the man would have us believe, to keep us apart like Mister did Celie and Nettie. Catty, bitchy, judgy. Those are the adjectives we get. All versions of the same alleged problem—women don’t mix well. Add in postpartum hormones and the cocktail has the potential to poison. But mom friends were supposed to be different. They were supposed to make the whole experience, this life change, more bearable, right? So shouldn’t I feel less excluded, afraid, and stupid when considering them? I swear, after an obligatory awkward phase, I had all the friends in high school. All of them. But something about making new female friends in adulthood turned me into that bumbling dork who breastfeeds alone in a restaurant while a cemented squad of ladies with babies laughs hysterically a few tables away. It was like a private club. I should’ve been let in; my membership card was strapped to my chest. But I couldn’t walk up to the gate.
To cope, I’d convinced myself that as the loud and proud only child of a loud and proud lesbian single mother I didn’t need no stinking regressive women’s-only club that reinforced the patriarchal view that mothers do all the work. Wasn’t I raising a feminist! I’d show her by werewolfing myself. Plus, I was used to being my own best friend. Lots of latchkey-kid alone time will do that to you. Watching The Handmaid’s Tale with the baby was revolutionary. Until it wasn’t. After a few weeks’ protesting at home, I gave up the fight, longing as I was for some sustained daytime adult interaction that wasn’t lunch with a childless friend who, let’s face it, was completely useless, or a friend with giant older kids who might as well have been baby-eating trolls. The Facebook group was riiight there. The women lived within walking distance. All I had to do was actually go to one of the outings the New Moms thread kept going on about. They were meeting in the park, at the beer garden, the coffee shop, the movie theater. I just had to show up and declare myself one of them. Why was that so hard?
Well, there were a lot of reasons. My insecurities—both real and imagined—for one thousand. Motherhood so often gets sugarcoated through a white lens. They’ve got June Cleaver, Donna Stone, Murphy Brown, hell, even Daenerys Targaryen. We’ve got Clair Huxtable. Oh, and Michelle Obama. Perfect and perfect, such a range. Switch over to the nightly news and the spectrum gets stretched to include welfare queens and baby mamas. I wasn’t just afraid to go, my feet were reluctant participants—weighed down by stereotypes no one admits out loud but that play on a mental loop all the same. And as the only Black girl in the group, I had to be twice as good at something we all suck at.
One day, not too long after we brought my daughter home, while my mom and I watched Rob outsmart yet another useless baby contraption, Frances casually let slip that she’d been on welfare for a year after I was born. After seeing my reaction, which in my defense I am not proud of, she immediately started backpedaling. “I mean, I looked for a job. I did! But I’d left you at one babysitter’s with like five diapers, right? And when I came back at the end of the day, all five were still in the bag,” she remembered with a quiet blue chuckle as my husband “Jesus” and “Christ”ed his way through instructions. My mother explained that she figured staying home was the smarter move. “You never told me that,” I said, trying not to let my voice crack. Frances shrugged her shoulders, letting the memory roll off her back, and then grabbed a box cutter to slice open the next package from Amazon.
We overcompensate. It’s the reason why every name we considered for Sally had to pass “the résumé test.” It’s why Beyoncé, a woman who folks accused of faking a pregnancy, went full on Father/Mother Earth Goddess while carrying twins and why Serena Williams, who folks accused of faking being a woman, posed for the cover of Vanity Fair belly butt-naked like biiiiih. Black motherhood has been exploited, erased, vilified, and denied, so it’s no wonder that when we choose it, we go fucking ham.
Which brings me to my next point. Wanna hear about the time I almost murdered my firstborn child? I was trying to mother. Like, a verb.
After stalking them online for weeks, I finally decided to shut up and show up to one of the group’s “fun activities”—a “crybaby matinée” of the garbage film Baywatch. There was just one thing standing between me and success—the K’tan. K’huh? Never heard of it? Like most newborn gadgets, the K’tan—or the Boba, or the MOBY, or all the other vaguely ethnic-sounding baby wraps out there—is a deceptively simple method of mental torture. Remember those “convertible” dresses that were basically just yards and yards of fabric that promised dozens of different styles so long as you had a PhD in human origami? Yeah, the K’tan is sort of like that—an instant idiot quiz marketed to unsuspecting millennial women who normally crave instant gratification. The K’tan consists of two large loops of fabric held together by a smaller loop that you wear around your torso like a breastplate and that is just as fearsome. After countless YouTube videos and a few test runs involving an empty water jug as a Sally stand-in, I got my baby in that sucker and triumphantly set out for the movie theater about a mile and a half away. My baby, strapped to my chest and stomach, was safe and secure, and I was a fucking superhero. Our friendly corner-store loiterers spotted me catwalking down North Capitol Street and pointed to my middle. “Eh, you got a baby in there, sis?” I responded with a highfalutin head nod. Yes, yes, I do got a baby in here! Making my way through the D.C. streets, I was a mom on fire.
Did I mention it was the middle of June? Nearly 90 degrees? I conveniently ignored the sweat snaking from my brow to my neck and down the valley of my tits, a salty River Nile. Sally, her tiny body pressed to my human space heater, was looking a little wet herself, but that could just be nerves, right? We were out! Finally. Don’t ruin this, kid. About halfway there it was clear that humidity, infant, and fabric did not go well together. Why would I carry a squirming eleven-pound animal straitjacketed against my engorged boobs? Because I wanted to prove to a bunch of white girls I’d never met that I could. I could mother like all the other women I was surrounded by, with the latest overpriced gadgets and ding-dongs meant to make you feel accomplished. So, no, I did not do the smart thing and turn back to seek the refuge of our window unit. We kept it pushing, power walking through the panic as I blew my hot breath on Sally in the hope that it’d cool her down. This was dumb. I knew it. But I kept going.
Once we finally got to the theater, baby girl was sopping wet. Not soaking. Sopping. It was bad. Real bad. Like “Why would someone try to waterboard a baby?” bad. And “Is the side of her face supposed to be that red?” bad. The six o’clock news kept replaying in my head as I rushed to the bathroom to get her out of that $59.99 death wrap. She slid off my chest like a drunken slug as I whirled her around the ladies’ room thinking the stale air would help. It didn’t. Long story short, the kid got overheated. She puked. I cried. And the two of us sat sobbing in a stinking bathroom stall at the movie theater.
After the credits rolled (yes, we stayed to watch that dumb-ass movie), I fled in shame to the nearest coffee shop, the very place all the moms went afterward, bulldozing in with their gigantic jogging strollers like a biker gang. They boobed their babies while sipping lattes, performing a choreographed dance number I like to call “We’re All Really Good Mom Friends.” It looked complicated and beautiful, and I’d never—including that time in eighth grade when I spent a month’s worth of lunch periods perfecting the Tootsee Roll—wanted so badly to learn a new step. Here I was, more than two decades later, huddled somewhere in the way way back to feed my dehydrated child free of judgment. One mom—later I learned her name was Meghan—glanced in our direction expectantly, and before our eyes could awkwardly lock, I quickly turned to gaze lovingly into Sally’s. The kid was asleep. I was a fraud.
We waited there until long after their table had cleared out—until the temperature had safely dipped below “Keep old people and babies inside”—and then the two of us hobbled home together, deflated.
“Just try again next week,” suggested Rob in his dumb man way.
“They’ll recognize me! You think there are any other Black chicks in this thing?”
“So what? Just tell them you have social anxiety. They’ll get that,” he said before shrugging and adding, “White girls,” as if that explained it. Perhaps it did.
I grew up the only Black girl in our small town of two thousand—and by only, I mean only. Look up the census data of the city of Avalon on Santa Catalina Island from 1986 to 1991, and you’ll find two checked boxes for Black—me and Frances, my mom. So I spent an inordinate amount of time in elementary school being jealous of sun-freckled little girls with blond highlights. Maybe jealous isn’t the word. More like obsessed. Or fascinated? Enthralled? Enraged? All those things. I don’t know. Either way, I clocked in and out of an existence run by girls who didn’t look like me, observing how they worked. What they wore—shell necklaces, checkered Vans, or Uggs, even in the 70-degree weather. What they said—like and bitch and my gah. And how they moved about the world in general—not so much as if they owned it but as if it owed them. There was this one girl, Wendy, a sharp-tongued elf of a sixth grader whose moods came to determine how my days would go. Aha! Meghan—the girl from the movies in more metaphors than one—reminded me of a grown-up Wendy. Innocent-looking yet quietly powerful and universally cheered.
White girls. They were my muses and my tormentors before I knew any better, dominating my frame of reference for…everything. Remember, we lived on an island. There was no escape. Even with a lesbian, hippie, super-Black mom who let me read The Color Purple at ten and once snatched the “pretend hair” towel off my head when she caught me preening in the bathroom mirror. “What grows out of your own dang head is perfectly fine!” After I finished elementary school we moved from Santa Catalina to South Central, and the culture shock was like a defibrillator’s zap reviving a racial identity that had flatlined. Thank God for the Black girls in seventh and eighth grade who teased and dragged my sense of self into existence. By puberty I’d learned that other women could either bulldoze or rebuild, and safe havens weren’t hard to come by as long as you knew where to look. The mirror was a good start. Imagine then the cold shock that came when nearly thirty years later, after growing up and allegedly growing past the white girl gaze, I once again found myself submerged in it.
But I wasn’t a kid anymore. I was a grown-ass woman with direct deposit, a whole husband, and a baby I’d planned. Dipping my feet into the mommy pool of Bloomingdale didn’t mean I’d drown, right? Right? I figured holding my nose and diving in was better than doggy-paddling alone in the deep end. Okay, enough with the water metaphors. In the end, I knew I had more in common with these women than I wanted to admit and that admitting it didn’t make me less Black, down, militant, or whatever. I’d googled “Gwyneth Paltrow’s pregnancy” and pinned a million images of “gender neutral” nurseries too. And Black card not revoked, because there isn’t a government agency for that. I was assuming that their pins weren’t so much aspirational as they were shopping lists. While I, on the other hand, was trying to outrun a lifetime (make that generations) of poor-kid impostor syndrome. They’d all grown up in the kinds of homes that produced Gerber babies and Family Ties plot lines. Hadn’t they?
All this mental hemming and hawing was mine alone. No one, besides maybe Rob, knew the angst bubbling up in my guts and polluting my breast milk (if internet chat rooms were to be believed). All these big questions were swimming around in there when I finally got out of my own way long enough to make it safely to our first official mom meetup (I took a mulligan on that Baywatch debacle). According to the Facebook group, there was a regular mom hang at Crispus Attucks Park, a reclaimed acre of gentrified grass hiding between four city alleys. It was named after a formerly enslaved man who was the first to be killed in the Boston Massacre of 1770, which subsequently kick-started the American Revolution. So, like, no weird racial stuff going on there. Sally and I arrived in perfect condition for adult circle time under a tree. That’s how most mom group meetings shape up—an impromptu ring of swaddle cloths, coffee-shop chairs, or strollers. Circles are binding. They’re strong. Impenetrable.
As I walked up with Sally strapped expertly, and dressed weather-appropriately, in her K’tan, I did the requisite scan of the crowd, immediately clocking that we were the “only ones”—a state of being most Black folks are used to. This, of course, put me on alert to dial it down, be nonthreatening, Black but not too Black, basically never too comfortable. I didn’t know these women.
We introduced ourselves baby first. “Hi, this is Sally and I’m—” Nobody cares, Helena! At this fragile rung of conditional friendship, there is only one character trait that really matters—your tiny human proxy. Their names, ages, genders (or non), poop color, rolling-over ability, potential career choices, etc. The whole thing reminded me of when I used to go to the dog park with my pug, Miles, and the disparate group of weirdos known as dog owners would stand around commenting on their pet’s ability to do people things. Now we actually had little humans, but weren’t they still just wild animals who couldn’t talk? Here’s what we talked about on those bright Wednesday mornings:
Doulas, like a basketball coach but for your cooch
Why cry-it-out is absolutely not child abuse…when you’re white
Nanny shares, or how to find out how much other people make
Music class, because you gotta have rhythm to co-opt the future
Pre-K lotteries, in which gambling is not only acceptable—it’s encouraged
“Two under two” or “The condom broke, and we were just, like, whatever”
Much like the night I lost my virginity, the whole thing was a memorable blur. What we talked about mattered less than how we talked about it—with a familiarity and ease only real friends should have. Boobs were out and loose. Tongues even more so. Vaginas were discussed. Surgeries dissected. Extreme exhaustion went unmasked. I even asked the woman next to me, who’d just gone into the gory details of her harrowing birth story with the women next to her, “Did you guys know each other? Before?” Because my God. The fact that I’d overheard that she’d almost died after two blood transfusions seemed like an invasion of privacy. “Oh no,” she said. “We met here last week.” Not ten minutes later I was deep into a conversation about how my mother, who was living with us for the year, was driving me completely nuts. “Oh my God, me too,” replied the girl I had confided in, my ten-minute best friend. “My mother is a fucking maniac,” she said. We smiled at each other while bouncing our babies to sleep. Just when I thought I wasn’t one of them, they pulled me in.
You’ve heard of the boiling frog metaphor, right? The theory starts off like this: Put a live frog in 100-degree-Celsius water and it will immediately hop out, because duh. Why would a fly-eating fun-loving frog, who was otherwise minding her green-ass business, suddenly decide to end it all simply because the opportunity presented itself? Self-preservation and all that. But the metaphor doesn’t end there. Say you really want this frog to take its final bath. Instead of chucking it into boiling water, try placing it gently into a tepid soak, then slowly but surely raise the temperature degree by degree from spa to slaughterhouse. The frog won’t know what hit her. The change is imperceptible—right until it’s not.
After that first meetup in the park I was officially cooked. I hadn’t found my “people” per se, but I’d found something more than just a simple distraction, the treasure after all that creepy Facebook digging. People. Real live people. Within weeks, maternity leave was starting to feel as dreamy as that summer Sandy spent with Danny Zuko. Eventually I got the hang of things and became a full-fledged Mama, dutifully showing up to our tree in the park with my pristine eight-week-old child and making small talk for an hour with women who’d previously passed me on the street without a second glance. I began to open up, excavating my hopes and anxieties and frustrations and joys as a new mom in front of these women because they were available, if not exactly my type. Sure, our meetups were ridiculous and bougie, but I looked forward to them every week, waking Sally up if she was napping so that we’d make it on time. In that little hidden park, these women showed me this shadow world—one free of men, demanding bosses, and, for a time, racial anxiety—that I reveled in. And it wasn’t just the free therapy—the necessity of which can’t be understated. Park meetups soon turned into Mondays at the Ethiopian coffee shop, middle-of-the-week music class, and baby yoga sessions on Friday, which always led to lunch and a long, lingering stroller ride home with someone new to confide in. These bitches took up my whole week! And I didn’t mind one bit.
There was Jenn, who liked to kick each meeting off with a question that not-so-subtly revealed everyone’s “status” (socioeconomic or otherwise), like “So how are you handling kitchen remodel and the new baby?” Then there was the Other Jenn (the Mom Vet), who was on baby number two, wore Daisy Dukes with abandon, and repeatedly soothed my fear that an ant would crawl into Sally’s ear if I laid her on the ground like everyone else did their kids. “And then what would happen?” she would ask. Leah was a professional hippie, in the best way, whose regular Instagrams of family mountain treks are the reason there’s currently a hiking baby carrier collecting dust in our basement. Her commitment to the connection between bare feet, dirt, and energy reminded me of my mom’s “healing white light philosophy,” which often replaced Tylenol in our house growing up. Carly appeared to be a trust-fund kid who worked herself to the bone to hide that fact. She’d been hit with the Shit Got Real wand and experienced every nightmare newborn scenario there was—nipple confusion, colic, sleep regression, you name it. The poor girl was exhausted and clinging to our meetups like they were NoDoz pills. Tiffany was an infectious disease doctor from a Mountain Dew town in Appalachia who would later convince me that face masks were bad for verbal skills. I admired her pluck, if not her occasional Trumpian slip. And, my personal fave, Mira, had a voice like Janeane Garofalo, with the midnineties nihilism to match. I ran into her once at the playground and watched slightly horrified as her daughter happily munched on a nearby tree. Mira just shrugged her shoulders. “She must be hungry.”
And, of course, there was my grown-up Wendy: Meghan, whose daughter’s name I gave up trying to pronounce—and who I believe secretly hated me for that fact. In my defense, this was my one-woman protest against name discrimination. White folks could name their kids any collection of letters in the known alphabet and everyone else just dealt. But let a mom of any other color get “creative” with spelling and pronunciation and such, and suddenly your baby is unbankable. (For the record, Sally’s name has deep family history and is résumé-approved.) Anyway, Meghan. She had a resting bitch face, like me, and a designer diaper bag, unlike me. She posted on Facebook about donating school supplies to kids who’d been separated from their families, and all I could think was “of course” before opening my PayPal. What’s the opposite of a Woman Crush Wednesday? A Made-Up Competition Monday? In the story of my life, she was my literary foil but had no idea. In the beginning her omnipresence—bouncy and blue-eyed—would make me go all scrunch face whenever I spotted her dipping into the expensive Italian place next to the bodega next to the yoga studio with her Botero baby in tow. Never able to put my finger on why she bugged me, I just assumed we weren’t the right charge. Some people just don’t magnetize, you know. Destined to push rather than pull. Something about her bleeding heart/renovated row house just rubbed me the wrong way. I felt judged even though it was me doing the judging.
The Mamas. Like a monster that eventually makes you laugh. They weren’t scary, and I happily made room for them because they were a respite from everything else—work, husband, my “real” friends. I knew something had changed when I started referencing these former strangers in polite conversation elsewhere. “Well, my friend Meghan.” Wait, what? Your friend? Yeah, I think so.