Playdating

Some day you’ll be thirty-seven and you’ll have this amazing, eclectic collection of friends all around the country. People who, even if it’s been months or years since you’ve seen them, always seem to feel like home when they come around. You’ll be lucky, you know.

But you’ll need to make more friends, specific friends — the kind who have children who go to the same school as your kid, who are in the same class as your kid, so maybe your kids can hang out together sometimes outside of school. Otherwise your kid will be on an island, socially, at school. Or something. You aren’t really sure.

Your neighborhood, while lovely and quiet and safe and green, will not be full of kids his age. Or many kids at all. You will learn, probably later than you should, that the Spielbergian neighborhoods you envied growing up are not reality, really. But you wanted something closer to that than the relative isolation you experienced as a kid growing up in BFE. At least you had cousins and siblings around. Your kid won’t, at least during the time he’s at your house.

You’ll know that he will need this, the unstructured playtime with children his own age outside of school hours. He won’t ever ask for it by name but you will know in your bones he craves it.

So you’ll be surprised and delighted when another mother at his school emails you out of the blue to set up a playdate. She’ll have found your contact information from the directory and identified that you live pretty close to one another, and she’ll say, “Our boys are in the same grade, let’s get them together!” You’ll eagerly accept, laughing to yourself about how it’s almost like online dating. Maybe we could make an app called Kinder (rhymes with “Tinder”) or just “Playdating.” Ha ha, you will be so pleased at how funny and clever you are!

You will show up to the playdate and you will think things go well. The mom will be nice (but a few minutes late; her husband will let you in the house) and you’ll enjoy a fizzy water and some light conversation while the boys play upstairs. You’ll be similar ages, you’ll seem to have similar values, and you’ll feel pretty comfortable once your social awkwardness wears off. You’ll be as charming as you can be. Which, well. You know.

You’ll hang out for a couple of hours and then when the sun starts going down and dinner time creeps up, you’ll figure it’s time to scoot. After all, there’ll be a newborn in the house and you remember the days of having a newborn and how you weren’t keen on having folks in your house once the witching hour arrived. So you’ll thank your hosts profusely, wrangle your son (who will be sure to talk mad shit to you, as he is not interested in leaving), and get out of there so the family can go on living their lives in peace for another day.

You’ll think, “That was fun. They seem nice.” You’ll get in the car and you’ll ask your son if he had fun, if he’d like to do that again some time, or even have that kid over to our house to hang out. He’ll be excited. You’ll feel like you earned a Mom Achievement Badge. The one for forcing yourself out of your comfort zone for the social fulfillment of your son.

On Monday you’ll send an email to the mom, thanking her for having you over and telling her you’re looking forward to getting the boys together again. You have been trying to practice gratitude and you are genuinely grateful she reached out to you.

But she won’t say anything back. You’ll think back to the time you chuckled about how close this experience would be to dating. How you wanted to make a good impression, to find something that stuck. You’ll wait a week, then a couple of weeks. A month. You’ll see the mom at school functions and she won’t say anything to you. You’ll wonder what it is you said or did. Did she see inside your car, see how dirty it was? Did she not like how mouthy your kid got when you told him it was time to leave? Did she develop a strange a rare form of amnesia that covers just one day?

You’ll feel increasingly pathetic at how rejected you feel. How you had basically no stakes in this relationship and still feel like a total moron. You’ll make a note to tell your therapist about this … eventually … when you get a new one, so you can figure out how to let people go. How to be okay with people not liking you or not needing you in their lives. How not every person you encounter needs to be more than a one-time deal.

You’ll feel bad because whatever you did killed your kid’s chance at regularly hanging out with a kid he likes. And even though your own wonderful friends have kids he adores that are around his age (even if many of them skew younger), there’s something distinctly failure-flavored about how he doesn’t hang out with anyone from his new school, where all the parents seem to already know each other and their children seem to live at one another’s houses. Your weird inferiority complex will nag at you like a shitty slip. You won’t like it, but you will at least call it by name.

Several months later, you’ll have no answers so you’ll write about it.