I have been kidnapped by the Mommies of the Serengeti.
Their approach was cunning, and their will strong. They lurked in wait behind the bamboo flower arrangement at a chichi Thai restaurant. They made me have a birthday party for my son.
The Mommies are a loosely structured coalition of women assigned to one another as part of an age-segregated playgroup, the assignment determined by the playgroup coordinator of our local chapter of the national nonprofit organization Mothers and More. And this is the defining characteristic of the Mommies of the Serengeti. They come in groups. I am not a fan of the group, any group.
Humans tend to name groups of any other species in somewhat abstract terms. A group of fish is called a school, a group of lions is called a pride, and a group of crows is called a murder. A group of mostly Caucasian, middle-to-upper class American women is called a playgroup. To me, a playgroup is the social equivalent of surgery without anesthesia.
My stated goal was to not give my son a birthday party until he asked for one. Since he was just turning two, coherent asking was a few years into the future. Publicly, I deplored the materialism and the hype of birthday parties. All that unnecessary packaging, I would groan, all those noisy toys, not to mention all the stress that comes with planning a party where the guest of honor will probably behave more like Russell Crowe on a bender than Queen Elizabeth at a coronation.
Privately, I feared (as we all do) rejection.
It is very fashionable these days to write about one's alienated state in the populous world of motherhood. Fast-track corporate moms freak out at home; harried would-be homemakers stress in their office cubicles. Hippie moms and hygienic moms gaze at one another with equal parts of pity and terror. And let's not enter the precarious territory of racial diversity, special needs, foreign adoptions, or socioeconomic disparities. In every arena of motherhood, there seems to be a mother proclaiming (to a national audience of avid listeners) that she's the lonely, only one.
But what if, like me, you were pretty alienated before you ever came to motherhood? Before I was a mother, I was a high school English teacher, and a good one. I'd start the year, however, by playing out in my head an imaginary scenario where I gleefully determined which of my more-challenging students I'd hand over to terrorists demanding hostages, and I'd continue the year by reminding my students frequently that I didn't actually like teen-agers, or even people, all that much. In six years at the same school, I ate lunch in the teachers' lounge once.
Since I rarely socialized or spoke to unfamiliar people, I'm still a little unclear as to how I got married. The fact that I shared a classroom with the guy in question probably helped. For the longest time, when my husband tried to spoon in bed, I'd echo Janeane Garofalo's old mantra: "Make love, and go to your corners!" Over time, though, I learned to like the spooning, and the making love had the predictable result.
Other pregnant women nested, mooning over little socks. I nested . . . but in my classroom, preparing lessons at school until midnight every night, two weeks past my due date, praying not to have my baby until I could get the children I subconsciously thought of as my "real" kids past the last chapters of the novel (oh-so-symbolically named for my current state of mind) Things Fall Apart.
I quit my workaholic ways so I could spend more time with the new little person, primarily because I felt profound sympathy for his alienated state. Yanked from the warm, happy place into the cold, loud, cranky place, Atticus instantly proved himself the child of his relentlessly introverted mother. He looked around the party that is Life, picked three people to bond with (that would be me, my mother, and me again) and then, in the words of Emily Dickinson, "closed the valves of his attention, like stone."
I took the gross, the sad, and the ugly of his babyhood pretty well. The usual maternal terrors--that your child will choke on an inappropriate food item, be dumb, or mean, or be snatched off your picnic blanket by a giant hawk--didn't faze me. But I woke in a cold sweat at the thought that my child needed friends and that it was up to me to make them.
Babies don't speed date, or even know their astrological signs. You only make friends with other babies by making friends with their mommies. While I griped ferociously, I also realized that, for introverts like me, a structured mom's group, where I would be forced to interact with people on a weekly basis, was my best option.
The first meeting was every bit as bad as I'd imagined. Everyone else wore pastels and khaki, everyone else had sensibly bobbed hair, no one else had the giant hawk panic. I, on the other hand, have mastered my innate fashion deficiencies by adhering to a single rule: black, white, or gray. While my hair is sensible and easy to care for, that's because it's super short, in a spiky cut one of my exes used to call the Truck Drivers' Union Rep's Special.
I am neither strikingly beautiful nor strikingly ugly but I look tall and athletic, even though at five feet, eight inches and a ten-minute mile, I'm neither. I have been told by countless students, diner waitresses, and sweet little rabbis that my face is, at its best, severe. Ten thousand like me thrive in Manhattan, but in the Florida suburbs, we are a rare breed. Suddenly, I saw my avian panic scenario from another perspective. In this setting, I was the giant hawk, awkwardly flapping over to picnic with the chickens. And the chickens totally had the upper hand.
The Mommies, on the other hand, seemed to be telepathically connected, a nomadic society, following their maternal songlines from Gymboree to Chuck E. Cheese's and back again. These are not our people, I whispered to my son. This is not my tribe. Who were these women who seemed to relish the very aspects of motherhood I railed against--the dependency of the infant, the loss of individuality, the accumulation of plastic stuff? But I persevered, inwardly vowing to say only every sixth thing that popped into my head. I was taking one for Team Introvert, a two-person squad, me and my son.
Ever since Atticus's birth, I've seen a small loner rising, like John Fogarty saw that bad moon. This is a child whose self-selected lullaby is Lyle Lovett's "If I Had a Boat," in which the chorus goes, "And if I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean/ And if I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat/ We would all together sail away upon the ocean/ Just me upon my pony on my boat."
About three weeks into our childcare center's spring session, right before Atticus's second birthday, his teacher pulled me into the hall.
"We'd like your permission to recommend Atticus for Pro-social Class." Miss Linda is a miniaturized Dolly Parton and she nervously touched her blonde pouf as she whispered the name of the class, with the exact same inflection in which Dolly Parton whispered cancer in Steel Magnolias.
Pro-social is not an early pull-out program for Olympic-caliber minglers. Pro-social is twenty small-group therapeutic minutes, once a week, for chronic biters, hitters, screamers, and my child, who does none of the above but is so far from parallel play that he has gone beyond perpendicular into peculiar.
For Christ's sake, Linda, I longed to say (but refrained, as this is a Jewish daycare), He's only here two days a week. Cut him some slack. It takes me five years to make a friend. And, in an odd way, I'm pleased by Linda's diagnosis. Here, at last, after Atticus's developing the sort of blue eyes and blonde curls that lead strangers to ask if I'm his nanny, here is a sort of observable, external proof that he comes from me. Where the daycare workers see an alarming reticence, I see my miniaturized self through memory's backwards telescope, hanging nervously around the teacher's tree, longing for recess to be over.
Frankly, I see his pronounced disinclination to play with other toddlers as a sign of a discerning intelligence. Before he even started daycare, play group had already taught him that other children his age are a high-risk, low-return investment, more likely to hit him over the head with a book than read with him. On his first visit to daycare, when Miss Linda urged him to go play with the other boys, he looked back at me and I could almost hear him thinking: Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.
I went home and called my brother, with whom I've always been absurdly competitive and whose eldest son has long held the alternating titles of family genius and family troublemaker.
"Guess what?" I said proudly, "Atticus flunked preschool. Look who's got the black sheep now."
But perverse pride is merely another form of denial, a stage in the grieving process. Raising a bright, healthy child in a first-world country, what on earth was I grieving? Perhaps the loss of my maternal innocence. Until Pro-social Class, I'd believed that two years in the trenches had hardened me to the streaming montage of low-level fears that is parenting in America. But, instead, Pro-social Class gave me a single, infinitely recyclable fear. I want him to able to choose solitude, as I have for most of my life, not get forced into it because he lacks social skills.
Far, far worse than anyone's personal rejection of me is the possibility of rejection of Atticus. He is small and slight, timid and trusting, generous and awkward. At two, he does not see the same things that I see in the casual hurly-burly of the playgroup. In every playground interaction, I see the seeds of all the rejections of the future. He sees friends--Zach, Malcolm, and Emma--but he's not quite sure how to get to them. Every time he stands aside to let a bolder kid go first, I see the humiliations of gym class for the woefully uncoordinated. Every time someone snatches a toy, I see the slights and shoves of the hallway in junior high. I fear his gorgeous sensitivity--easy to laughter, easy to tears--will leave him raw because he will be easily baited. His fierce attachments to a chosen few will break his heart.
That fear only grew as Atticus's second birthday approached, and the pressure mounted. In fact, that fear was the real reason I didn't want to have a birthday party for him. It seemed to me that if I gave a bad party and people didn't have a good time, I'd somehow be setting the pattern for all his future parties, when he'll care a whole lot more.
And I would give a bad party. My idea of a good time is a homemade game I've been carrying around since college. It's called "Spiel: The Art of Spontaneous Speechifying" in which players are given two minutes to verbally duel over such topics as: "In the mail-carrying world, no deed should be considered 'above and beyond the call of duty.'" Pedigreed geek from a long line of geeks, I was certain I'd passed on the Curse of the House of Doofus to my son. Why publish this fact unnecessarily early with a party?
But the Mommies of the Serengeti wouldn't take no for an answer. As we sat at our playgroup planning dinner, I was shocked by their persistence. I still am. Miss Manners, Ann Landers, Dr. Phil, and a SWAT team led by Genghis Khan couldn't have gotten me out of what the Mommies clearly saw as a non-negotiable maternal obligation.
At the beginning of dinner, I felt my black-and-white ensemble suited my status as the newest zebra at the watering hole.
"So," Laura said brightly, "When's everyone's birthday?" Laura is the Mommies' mommy. A Minnesotan Amazon, Laura has the shoulder on which to rest your head.
We went around the table. As it turned out, "everyone's birthday" was code for "your children's birthdays." I'm proud of the little man's birthday. He was born on April fourth, 2004, at 4:04 in the afternoon. 04/04/04 at 04:04. I shared my wondrous date. The Mommies did not pause to marvel but instead--this being late March--leaped into action.
Stephanie, Kristyn, and Leeann began recommending party supply stores.
Erin--Junior League member, scrapbooker extraordinaire--whipped out her planner. While she checked her dates, I checked her planner: faux alligator skin. I began to suspect I was trapped. "That means your party will be at Losco Park," she said. "But that's an open playgroup. Do you want to do it the next week or on the original date but at your house?"
I really tried to do Miss Manners proud, keeping my voice warm and bright, gazing neutrally around the table. "Thank you so much, but we really weren't planning on a party this year."
Nietzsche said you must be careful when you look into the Abyss because the Abyss is looking back at you. The Abyss likes pad thai, and her name is Adrienne. Adrienne organizes her church's annual fundraising dinner and, in her spare time, the lives of lesser mortals. When I tried to turn down the party, her eyes went all flat and reptilian. There are crocs in this water, foolish zebra.
"Yes, you are."
"No, really, I'd rather not." I struggled to make my point, offering a litany of excuses: small house, too much stuff; family party, quite enough; next year, maybe, this year's rough.
Adrienne was having none of it. "Of course you're having a party. Don't pretend you don't want a party. Everyone wants a party."
"We'll help you," Erin chimed in.
Laura smiled serenely. "It will make Atticus so happy."
I thought of Lewis Carroll.
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
I wasn't a zebra. I was sushi.
The only way I was going to get out of it was to be openly rude. And I just couldn't do it. I couldn't sunder these precarious connections I'd made so my son could practice friendship. I shut up, drank more wine than was good for me, and went home to plan a party.
I absolutely refused to embrace the concept of goody bags, opting instead for burning CDs and buying out Walgreen's supply of Snoopy band-aids. I purchased balloons, made little sandwiches, bought bug-shaped cookies, and burst into tears at three o'clock in the morning when I realized I'd used pink icing on the cupcakes. And then cried some more because I was taking this so seriously.
I'd meant to arrive before everyone else so I could set up the party but by 9:30, the parking lot looked like an event in synchronized minivanning as everyone arrived at the same time, all of them coming early to help. Effortlessly toting two, three, or more children, Stephanie and Kristyn grabbed up boxes and bags. Adrienne, Laura, and Leeann decorated the picnic table with pinwheels and balloons.
By 10:15, it was a party, a perfectly fine toddler party. Atticus's daddy showed up in his tie, looking just like all the other daddies do at parties, kind of like they do when their kids are born: open to anything and slightly bewildered. We fed some ducks and listened to Adrienne's latest saga of misadventure narrowly averted through superior multi-tasking. We took a pre-cupcake walk down a winding path until we came to a bench swing under a gracious oak tree.
Stephanie suggested a group picture of all the kids on the swing. Inwardly, I quailed. There was no way Atticus was going to get up on that swing with the rest of his boisterous, all-boy playgroup. It was too much crowding and too much distance from Mom in an unfamiliar setting.
"Great idea," I said, game face on, and popped Atticus up onto the bench.
Where, to my amazement, he stayed, and after a moment, gently reached out his hand and patted Erin's Henry on the knee.
We ate the cupcakes. Somebody's minivan disgorged a single, giant
package. My thoughtful playgroup respected my concerns about noisy toys and excess packaging, banding together to get a single gift: a toddler-sized basketball hoop. For playdates at your house, they said.
Toward the end of the party, as people were standing around making those get-home-for-a-nap noises, Atticus ran up to me, proudly announcing that he had shared with Malcolm. Just behind him, I watched a new mother enter the park. I remembered my initial suspicions, even contempt, of the very idea of joining a playgroup and becoming one of those conformist women. But time spent among the Mommies of the Serengeti has taught me how to identify my fear of rejection and begin, grudgingly, cringingly, to overcome it. Motherhood, like the plains of Africa, is a vast territory full of dangers and surprises. I am so grateful to my tribe.
