Do As I Say And Not As I Do

A stranger no longer greets me and that hurts my feelings.

I first met her when she closed my son in a sliding gate, but that’s not why I hate her. It was clearly an accident, which compelled me to make sure SHE knew that I knew that she hadn’t intended to injure my sobbing child before turning my attention to said sobbing child. What’s the opposite of maternal instinct? Me. I am. It’s bad enough that I prioritized an adult’s feelings over my kid’s physical well-being. But the fact that they were the feelings of this particular woman who I would sort of come to know and definitely come to hate marks this moment as a parental failure for which I cannot forgive myself.

The gate incident went down at Baby Happy Hour, an informal event my family frequents in what was once the parking lot of a bar, and is now just outdoor seating for that bar. I’m not exactly sure why this space became a hangout for parents of young kids, but we flocked to it like rats, like the vermin we are, and the bar has been tragically uncool ever since. Regardless, there’s a camaraderie felt between us dead-eyed regulars who sip beer in silence while our children ruin the afternoons of any child-free patrons who showed up expecting an actual bar experience. That’s why, when this woman closed my son in this former parking lot’s vestigial sliding gate, I brushed it off, I smoothed it over. I’d seen her at Baby Happy Hour a lot, so while I didn’t know her, I knew her, and felt she deserved grace.

But there were red flags. Her long blond hair appeared to have been brushed with a thousand strokes of a golden comb. Her sunglasses were very expensive. She brought healthy snacks for her children instead of letting them order french fries. Once, when we were exchanging pleasantries, which we started to do after Gate-gate, we realized we knew some of the same people. She described one woman I was sort of friends with as her “best friend” which immediately made me less interested in being friends with that woman. But more importantly, her diction offended me. BEST friend? Excuse me? Come again? Agrownupsayswhaaa???? No no no my dear we are NOT still ranking our friends from “best” to “second best” to “third best” to nothing because no one has more than three friends. And it would be different if these women had known each other since childhood, when such titles are bestowed and tend to stick, but she hadn’t known this “best friend” any longer than I had! And look, I get it. Every minute feels like an eternity when you’re parenting young children. But your best friend cannot be someone you just met, no matter how timeless your relationship may feel. I don’t make the rules. I just judge people for breaking them.

I know what you’re thinking: she doesn’t sound that bad. But reader let me assure you, she is that bad! Picture a woman who has long conversations about how particular she is about her jeans, who gives you a half hour play-by-play of how she plans to get to LAX tomorrow. Picture a woman with a first name so awful that from the moment her parents chose it, they doomed her to a destiny of utter lameness. I won’t share this hideous name because I don’t want to alienate anyone who might know and love someone who had the terrible luck to inherit it, although I can’t see how that’s possible, because people with this name are simply unlovable.

At Baby Happy Hour, we continued to say hello with great affection when she rolled her Uppababy past my family’s table, and I thought we’d fallen into a wonderful groove. This was the platonic ideal of what our relationship could be: I could gleefully say catty things about this stranger to my husband while still feeling confident that she liked me. The seasons they went up and down. Fall came, and our children started attending the same school. Suddenly, she was more of an extra in my life than ever, —at drop off, at pick up, at BHH. Her laminated blond hair became a permanent fixture in my peripheral vision. Then at some point, I don’t know what happened, but we stopped saying hello. I didn’t even realize it til one recent school day when I passed her, heard her say hello, turned to respond, and realized she was greeting some other mom. That hurt my feelings.

The instant baby number one was reluctantly extracted from my womb (see: vacuum delivery) I felt a surge of empathy for any woman who had ever carried and/or birthed a child. I’d walk down the street and feel immediately connected to any woman with a Baby Bjorn (but obviously more connected to the ones with off-brand Bjorns.) It was like we all had bombs strapped to our bodies and none of us knew what would set them off. Once in those early days, a woman with a baby several months older than mine approached me, presumably recognizing the fear and pathetic attempt to mask it on my face. She said, “I hated it at the beginning, but it gets better I promise.” I immediately burst into tears. All of the sudden, life seemed so impossibly difficult, I felt a palpable need not to add to anyone’s difficulty. I wanted to take back every pettiness, every unkind thought I’d ever had about another woman. I was so desperately lonely, and the only thing that comforted me was knowing that other new mothers were also wandering the streets like hormonal zombies, feeling desperately lonely too.

But now, here I am, sweating my ass off in that special place in hell for women who don’t help other women. I’m publicly shitting all over a FELLOW MOTHER who has extended no unkindness toward me except accidentally compacting my son like a beer can, which I’ve already admitted was totally fine! And the only thing that’s making me check myself (unfortunately long after I’ve wrecked myself) is that she’s no longer gracing me with a warmth I never deserved in the first place. Why am I doing this? Where did my empathy go? Why did it wear off like the fear, with time and lots of Zoloft? How do I get it back?

Here’s the thing I find most offensive about this woman: she really looks like she’s enjoying herself. There appears to be nothing she’d rather do than take care of her obscenely blond children. I don’t know if that’s true, because again, and I cannot stress this enough, I DO NOT KNOW THIS WOMAN. But if it is, what does that say about me? I think I’ve made clear that there’s nothing I’d rather do than NOT take care of my (similarly blond) children. And if we don’t ALL hate doing this most of the time, doesn’t that make me a uniquely bad mom?

I tell my children that more than anything else, it is important to be kind. I say this because it sounds good, but also I believe it. So I’m gonna do better. I’m gonna say hi. I’m gonna smile. I’m gonna stop whispering catty things to my husband when this woman walks by. And I’m gonna pray that she never ever reads this newsletter, because even though my intent is to call out my own bad behavior, and to acknowledge that any negative thoughts I’ve had about her are unfair and unfounded, I’d be pretty fucking pissed if someone wrote this about me. Especially if they said all that mean stuff about my name.