As
dreaded Monday-morning drop-off rolls around again, I trudge out of my kids’
school, trying to avoid pockets of moms chatting and giggling over weekend dinner
parties, ski trips, and ladies’ nights that I wasn’t invited to. It feels like
junior high all over again.
I call my mother—the quintessential
stay-at-home mom who always had fresh-baked cookies waiting for me after
school, who drove carpools before they became trendy—on my way home, to ask
what life was like for her while she was raising my sister and me in suburban
Washington, D.C., 30 years ago.
“Oh we had mean moms,” my mother tells me. Not everyone was invited to play bridge or attend the
neighborhood Tupperware party. But moms were much less intense with each
other. “Honey, you have to understand
that my generation of women got married younger, and we knew that once we had
children, our ‘job’ was to stay home and take care of them.” My mom was two
years out of college when she got married; she had me two years later. In her experience, if a woman’s interests differed from the
group, she might have been isolated, but not outright bullied.
“My friends and I just wanted
to get through each day, but I think former career women today expect more out of life,” my mom says. “It’s
probably why you and your friends were so successful in your jobs, and you’re
bringing that competitive attitude into your social lives.”
She’s got a point. I can’t
remember my mom ever leaving us in the care of my dad to go off with her girlfriends
for the weekend. My dad would have looked at her as if she’d lost her mind.
“But who will cook the dinner?” he’d have asked. Conversely, my own husband
would be helping me pack an overnight bag, recognizing that I needed a break.
He wouldn’t worry about making dinner: he’d just take the kids out.
In contrast, a friend who
lives in an affluent suburb of New York City says that nearly all her friends
have a regular Saturday night babysitter. On Monday mornings, the topic of
conversation at school drop-off is, Who’d you go out with this weekend? And,
Where’d you go?
I stop her to clarify, “Every Saturday night?”
“Yes, and people book up
months in advance. It’s like couples’ dating. You see which couples are nice
but a little boring, which ones brag, which ones are offensive…”
“Wow, I don’t think it’s like
that in my town,” I reply.
“Or maybe you’re just not
getting invited,” she says. I laugh at her candor and concede that might be
true. “Most everyone moved here from Manhattan,” she adds, “so maybe we’re all
just very social.” Not to mention well-off, because the babysitter alone can
cost anywhere from $17 to $20 an hour in Larchmont, N.Y. (do the math on
that!). Most husbands, and some wives, work in finance, which affords them
regular nights out and multiple family vacations a year to places like Park
City, West Palm Beach, and Nantucket. The weekdays are no less busy with book
clubs, dinner clubs, and “outings into the city for everyone’s birthdays.” My
friend says she often has to catch herself “because, before you know it, you
can get sucked into this bubble and lose perspective.”
I’ve seen that happen in my
own social circle. I was talking to an acquaintance at a party recently, and
she prefaced her story by saying, “You know how in Aruba you have to reserve
your cabana first thing in the morning?” I nodded, just to keep the
conversation going, but did I actually know that? Absolutely not. I’ve never
been to Aruba. But she assumed I’d been there and knew exactly what she was
talking about. That’s called losing perspective.
But if everyone you know is
taking jaunts to “the Dominican” (my friends don’t even bother to say
“Republic” anymore, assuming we’re both in the know) for spring break, you
start to feel like that’s the norm. How you spend your leisure time has become
a way to declare your class status. There’s an unspoken competition for who
goes on the coolest vacations, who entertains the most, who throws the biggest
bashes, and who tries the newest hip restaurant first. Among people who work
hard and play harder, it’s a way to establish a pecking order.
Like my mom said: “I feel
like you girls are afraid to be bored. You and all your girlfriends went to
college and graduate school and had successful careers before you had
children—more so than my generation of women. So when you stop working, you
have all this pent-up energy and ambition, and you have to direct it
somewhere.”
Though these are the same
issues that my mother and her friends dealt with 30 years ago, they weren’t
bombarded with endless Facebook photos as evidence. All 400 of our “friends”
know which fabulous party we were at on Saturday night and, more importantly,
with whom. If you’re tagged, you’re “in.” A friend recently admitted to me that she monitors who likes her posts. If
only four people like a photo of her, say, zip-lining through a Costa Rican
tropical forest, she’s bummed out—and even more so when another guy posts a
picture of his cheeseburger at Shake Shack and gets 37 comments and 70 likes.
“Is it really because people like that photo? No,” she says, answering her own
question. “People want him to like them, so they like his posts,” however
uninteresting they might be.
Our mothers didn’t have to
experience a mix of envy and sadness every time they hit the “refresh” button.
During rare moments of leisure, they baked, read, sewed, or did some other
handcraft. Or maybe they’d go for a walk. They didn’t go on Facebook and scroll
through photos of acquaintances looking like they’re having the time of their
lives. They didn’t post photos of a party they hosted and tag everyone who was
invited. They accepted their assigned roles as mothers and did the best that
they could to raise us. And you know what? They were probably a lot happier for
it.
