Day 16, #reverb10, Prompt: Friendship… How has a friendship changed you this year?

I don’t even WANT to talk about PLAYDATES. But this post is reminding me that so many things I thought I knew about friendship got themselves imploded in 2010 when I really had to start to understand the intricacies of PLAYDATES.

Are they for Mommy? Or for the kids?

Can I them drop off? Who is this kid again?

What do I do with my other kids while this one is playing with her friend?

Why do I need them? (you can ask that question a couple different ways.)

What do I do if I like the mom but not the kids?

What do I do if the kids like each other but I can’t stand the parents?

What do I do if the none of these people seem to like me or our kids?

And then there’s the whole “I have a nanny” vs. “Yours go to daycare?” issue, which means some kids aren’t available. Or I’m not. Or they feel weird about dropping them off. With the nanny.

My crash course in finding friends for the kids is happening in the midst of trying to make friends of my own: through work (most of my colleagues are older with kids in college or none at all) or through common interests and the neighborhood. Most of those friends are younger, with no kids of their own. So these friendships have, naturally, been stunted by our posse of small people.

Which leads me back to the original dilemma: Where are all the interesting, fun parents with young kids? And what are they doing with their time?

People With Kids Are Everywhere, But Where You’d Like Them to Be

Well, they seem to be circling in these strange modern extrapolation of fun called “playdates.” These are generally awkward “get-together” of moms, their kids, and goldfish crackers — often arranged merely because the kids are the same age — where everyone makes half-hearted attempts to talk about anything else but teething, A.D.D. meds, and nutrition.

But no one is able to talk about anything interesting at ALL since:

1. You don’t actually know each other and may not have anything in common and

2.  the conversation swirls around preschoolers. So hence it sounds like a stuttering Tourette’s sufferer who interrupts every nearly complete thought with things like “GET DOWN,” “No-no-no”  and “Not-in-the-mouth!”

Playdates, I think, are like a perfect metaphor for modern family life. I need them– to get out and see people who don’t drool and stomp their feet — and yet they come with all sorts of unintended consequences. Like if I have a playdate with friend Billy and his mommy, but it doesn’t go well, now what? Do I have to keep calling? How does one break up with a playdater? It’s as if we moms, having been married awhile, got lonely for the nasty break-up heartache. And decided to torture ourselves again.

Two good things have come out of the Year of Playdates: I realized that the kids (despite their clamoring for Chuck E. Cheese excursions) are far happier playing with the neighbor kids in our yard or theirs. Regardless of age and gender differences. Big surprise.

And at least one of the regular playdates has started to sound more like a tuned in radio station and less like loud static. The kids play together without the use of cattle prods or bribery most of the time, and the other Moms and I don’t have to say things like “What’s your husband’s name again?”

Or god forbid, “What’s YOUR name?”

Which I’d say is progress.

You might also like:

1. The Word for the Year: Denial
2. Three Questions for the New Year: Part One
3. The Unfinished Basement is Not Worth Examining

I have a tendency to slip into foul language when little people are asleep. It’s the side effect of a past life working in the restaurant business where half the employees never escape a room below 110 degrees and only hear the words: “You screwed my order up again” as the nearest thing to praise.

I’ve noticed, however (especially in the last 10 months since there have been lurkers around this place who have ulterior motives), that my natural writing voice has gotten constrained and tight. I’d compare it trying to sing Madame Butterfly while laying on the floor with Tony Soprano standing on my neck.

And while that might give some of those readers a bit of ghastly glee, it actually doesn’t concern me all that much. Mostly because as a result of feeling my own voice constrained, I’ve spent unnatural waking hours looking for someone else to vent for me.

Last night I found a fabulously shameless hothead over at finslippy who instantly shot herself to the top of my blog reader by using the F-word in the same rhetorical breath as “crudite”… . Yes, Alice, I will pardon your French–any time.

I found the blog by way of Babble’s list of Top 50 Mommy Blogs, the sort of thing that makes me absolutely cringe in its desperately honorable attempt to give a subset of  highly talented and relevent bloggers the recognition they deserve, while hopelessly tossing all of them together under one culturally busted-down bus.

But my buddy finslippy was only named #8 funniest, so even though the cadence of her voice and her wracking humor grabbed me by envy-balls, I sauntered over to #1 funniest, Heather Armstrong, whose Dooce is so well established with accolades and acknowledgements that her thick sarcasm is starting to sound like church bells. I liked her photos alright, but they were so perfect, I almost thought I was scanning iStock for the perfect vision of familial goofiness.

But that’s not to say she isn’t worthy. In fact, the glory of blogs is the torrent of content. From the ages and pages of Dooce, there’s undoubtedly some raw edge that cut into her loyal readers, hooked them, and kept them returning. Blogs are like mood swings–  if you are faithful to the one you love, even on those horror days, there is comfort in the sound of the voice.

As for my voice, well, I’ll have to assume the stiltedness of my posts are excusable to those who know my whole story. And for the those who are mystery friends, you’ll just have to wait until the day the stilts are burned in freedom.

You might also like:

1. Garrison Keillor’s Voice
2. Robert Sean Leonard’s Voice
3. On Finding Things Lost…