It feels like I'm in the slow lane. And I'm annoyed when I'm reminded of it. And then I wonder why I'm annoyed: am I afraid of being left behind? Or is it because I want people to leave me alone?
A lot of my friends are having their first kid. Every few months or so I get an email with a baby album attached. Each album carries 200 photos of the baby in various poses. There she is, sleeping! Oooh, and there she is again, sleeping -- and her left pinky is curled up! Amazing!
I dutifully go through the first couple of batches, but now I hardly skim through the photos. I get it. The kid is precious.
My friends have moved on. The center of their lives is their children. I don't mind that. What I do mind is the incessant need to remind the rest of us.
I don't know too many people in SF with kids. I've only recently begun to hang out with other couples – and I still feel the most comfortable with my single friends. I love singles – they're more interesting, diverse and open to learning about things. For the most part, anyways. But there's an intangible struggle with singles that I need – the family folks are so settled as to give the impression of giving up.
Talking to friends with family is kind of like talking to pre-law or pre-med students. Their lives are so consumed by that one point of identity that there's hardly anything to build a conversation on.
The last time I went home I met up with a good friend who brought her first kid along. Before, we really connected – relationships and ambitions and sex and all that jazz – but now our conversations revolved around the how to's... how to shush nighttime crying, how to get back in shape, how to introduce solids into the diet... I don't go home much anymore. Most of my friends with family are in Houston – and they scare the beezjus out of me. I'm perfectly content to inch along, living a selfish hedonistic lifestyle without the baggage of slimy kids. Oh – I know that eventually my kids will be the center of my life – but I'll try not to subject my friends to the little tyrants.
there's many of us in the slowpoke lane :)
at least when you have kids, they won't think you're crazy. i have yet to meet someone who doesn't think their mother is crazy! and you have to think - all these women, some of them must have been normal cool people at some point. is it motherhood that makes them crazy? or does being a mom mean you're automatically viewed through the crazy filter no matter what?
And is it mostly women who are doing this to you? or is it the men also?
Posted by: susied | November 19, 2008 at 06:00 AM