This is, ‘The Stories We Tell’, a weekly series of true accounts in all things motherhood. These 100% vulnerable, raw and ferociously honest tales are usually from the LA-based storytelling event, Mothers Unleashed. During the holiday season, however, we’re highlighting stories that haven’t been shared before. This is Amelia’s story about friendship as a new mom. Amelia is the co-founder of Mothers Unleashed.
It's a much-needed girl's night at a hipster diner. The four of us settle into the red pleather cushions. I'm wearing skintight black jeans and heeled booties with a flowing silk blouse. I'm feeling myself and not at all embarrassed that, despite being in a sticky-tabled diner, I put on jewelry and makeup for the occasion. Tonight is a celebration, a reclaiming of myself as an independent, whole wo-man! I'm out with my girls past 8pm, comforted by the knowledge that my one-year-old baby doesn't need my breast milk in the middle of the night and, even better, that she'll sleep until 6:30am. I can have a glass of wine. I can talk about politics, family, life, and forge deep emotional connections without the worry that a baby will interrupt me. It's the first time that my body and mind have been my own in an entire year… longer, actually, if I count the 10 months of pregnancy.
But at the start of the meal, before we've even received our menus, my best friend of eighteen years turns to me from across the booth.
"You're still breastfeeding? I read an article that said that nursing moms spend eighteen hundred hours a year breastfeeding." I stare at her, wide-eyed. She follows up for good measure with, "A full time job is nineteen hundred!"
I smile and nod, but words escape me. For some reason, I feel exposed. Misread. My best friend is trying to connect with an olive branch of understanding, but all her breastfeeding factoid serves to do is to make me feel like an outsider – an alien milk machine. Then, of course, once I start thinking about breastfeeding, I feel my goddamn breasts start to tingle, and I am consumed with worry about whether or not I remembered to put pads in my bra. Luckily I did, but while I worry about milk leaking onto my chic blouse, the conversation moves on. And I'm left behind. They turn to talk of work – something that, even though I'm still writing, precludes me. My good friends dish on what is ailing them at their Hollywood jobs, and I plaster a smile on my face and tell myself to appear gracious and interested. It's hard.
As the first of my close friend group to have a baby, I understand that we are, all of us, in a time of transition. They want to connect with me, and I with them, but I'm not sure how to bridge the divide. I'm also not even sure if they sense a divide, or if it's all in my head. As a result, sitting across the booth from them, it feels as if their lives are continuing on their merry way and mine is… meandering.
A month later, I reach out to an old friend who is planning a birthday blowout trip with all of the girls. Nearly fifteen of us are invited. In desperate need of more of that girl time, I text her: "Are you still doing the bday trip??" Response text bubbles pop up, then disappear, then pop up, then disappear… and then finally comes the overly cheery answer:
"Yes yes and it's all booked! So excited!"
I'm stunned. I swallow my pride and text a follow up: "Oh, did I miss out on the chance to tag along?? I’m so in need of a vacay!"
The response to that text comes nearly a whole day later. Basically, she didn't know if I would be able to make it, blahblahblah, so she "culled" me from the list. Now they're fully booked up with no space for little, old, Mama me. My friends who are also going, along with their significant others, it turns out, inform me how quickly she had to act to book the trip. How stressful it was. This perspective does not make me feel better.
Two months later, the birthday girl asks me if I am still interested in attending. Maybe someone dropped out and they had a spot to fill. I don't know, because I don't care to ask. Believe it or not, I am not over the moon at the idea of being a last-minute addition. The cynical, most definitely insecure, voice in my head tells me that I'm only being asked in order to make the trip more affordable for the "top tier" friends. Needless to say, I do not follow-up.
Don't get me wrong; I've made mom friends. They are all fabulous, inclusive, powerful women whom I kiss and hug when I see. Our babies play together. We air our grievances about this husband malfeasance or that baby time-suck over a short neighborhood stroll. Or, we celebrate recent wins, even if the win is as small as getting quiet time in the bathroom. My mom friends and I, we like each other. A lot. I value them, and I need them in my life.
But it's not the same. They're not my old friends.
It's true that the first year of motherhood is a time of flux. I hear that the first three years are, actually, but I haven't gone through them yet. And I can imagine that it's difficult for my friends without kids. My rational brain knows that we're in very different life stages, right now, and that this time of growth simply "is" – it is not good or bad. No one is at fault or to blame. It's just… life.
But knowing that I'm in the middle of what is essentially a life transition does not help to alleviate my feelings of abandonment, though I'm sure those feelings will fade in time. I think the emotional wasteland of my baby's first year is linked to my age. I'm 35. I spent my twenties and early thirties living a life of tumultuous romantic relationships and busting my way through day jobs as I found my "calling." I spent more than a decade crafting a life that I wanted, one that was tailor-made for having a baby and a career. My new mom friends did, too. In fact, so did my old friends.
That's why it's wholly unsurprising to me that as we women push having children into our mid- to late-30s, rates of depression are increasing among our demographic. To be clear, I'm not depressed. But I'm conscious of how quickly anyone could slip into a depression-like state during this first year. I went from a daily schedule of drifting in and out of the house at all hours according to my every whim and need, to:
Walk the dog. After that, feed and change the baby. Quickly. It's naptime.
Sing "Wheels on the Bus." Sing it again.
Race to an 11am activity. Baby needs stimulation.
Vacuum the rug. So much dog hair.
Cook dinner.
Clean that bottle, again.
Sing another round of "Wheels on the Bus."
Change a diaper.
Feed dinner.
…You get the gist. And in between, I'm juggling errands and, of course, paid work.
While I'm going through the motions of my day, I sometimes fantasize about a neighbor, a fellow mom, someone whom I can knock on her door, every day, and have coffee and cookies with while our kids play. It's an archaic, possibly sexist, 1950's image, but it would be a radical, beneficial shift in my life.
And that's when I realize – modern motherhood is wrong. We're attempting to do it all on our own. And that might have worked when we were childless. But childrearing is not an independent endeavor. It does, indeed, take a village. Instead, we've gotten rid of the community in exchange for the all-powerful shero. And it's kind of killing us.
It's been 14.5 months of babydom, and I've come to a conclusion: Expecting my friends to be my baby's village, when they themselves have jam-packed, child-free lives, isn't fair to them. Not only that, I've taken the path of least resistance and hidden my deepest feelings from them for over a year because I was afraid about the lack of a solution. I don't have a magical fix to combat the harried but isolating reality of our modern world. I don’t know how to get through major life transitions unscathed. But I do know that the number one way to feel better about the highs and lows of any experience, but especially motherhood, is to… talk about it.
Share. I'm going to make that my New Year's Resolution, for what it's worth. Sharing is how we will make a community, and that's how I'll bring my child-free friends into my child-heavy world. Because raising a kid is beautiful, rewarding, and filled with constant joy, but it's also relentless and a Sisyphean feat. So let's talk about it. Even when it's difficult.
