Candid Camera

My sister had a baby four months ago.  One evening about seven weeks in, she called me in a bit of a fluster.  Her in-laws wanted to take them out for dinner, avec bebe, and the Little Niece simply wasn’t having it.

“So do you just, like, never go out after 6:30pm?” my sister asked.
“Are we seriously having this conversation?” I replied.  “When, in the last 4.5 years, have you ever seen me out after 6:30pm?  Obviously I never go out after 6:30pm.  Unless I have a babysitter, or a hall pass.”
“I guess so…” she hesitated, but I could hear her thoughts.
“You totally thought that wouldn’t be you, right?”
“I mean, it’s just so strange.  I’ve never just bailed out of a dinner.”
“But the baby was a mess?”
“She was a total mess.”
I sighed.  “Here’s the secret: Everyone thinks you lame out on social activities because you’re ‘letting the baby dictate your life.’  The truth is, you lame out because being in a bar/restaurant/public place with an exhausted, screaming baby when everyone else is having fun and you’re bouncing like a maniac with the Ergo Just Plain SUCKS.”

Fast forward five days, when we attended a our friends’ son’s First Birthday.  The party was held at a neighborhood Rec Center, and billed as 11am-1pm, between naptimes.  Around 12:45, our friend started fretting.

“I have some business school buddies who are supposed to come.  They’re running late, and we’re running up on The Nap.”
“They don’t have kids,” I stated.  (It wasn’t a question, because obviously if they had kids they would have arrived precisely after the morning nap and departed precisely before the afternoon nap.  Duh.)
“Ha, no.  I actually emailed them in advance to warn them that there wouldn’t be any booze here; I didn’t want them to be disappointed.”
“I’ll be honest, I’m a little disappointed there’s no booze.  I like a little booze at a birthday party.”
“Park and Rec was very emphatic about the booze.”
“We broke that rule for a couple of years.”
“Then you’re the reason Park and Rec is so uptight now.”

Touche.

Here’s the bulletin, people.  Late-breaking news.

HAVING KIDS MESSES WITH YOUR MOJO.

Let me be quite clear: Having kids messes with your mojo on such an epic scale, they literally haven’t come up with a way to describe it yet.  Hence the age-old cliche: You’ll understand when you have kids.

For a long time, my husband and I were the only ones in our social cohort with a kid (LittleMan).  And we tried.  We accepted invitations.  We put that child to bed in more Pack ‘n’ Plays in more back rooms/guest rooms/offices than I thought possible.  We took that Pack ‘n’ Play on BART.  In other words, we fought like hell for our mojo.  But man, we were exhausted.

Fast forward four years, and eventually our friends all moved in/got married/had kids (and, in most cases, moved to the ‘burbs, damn them), and just the other day we found ourselves standing at the end of a driveway in Oakland while no fewer than four children rode bikes and scooters in the chilly twilight after the 49ers game.

When we were dating in college, my then-boyfriend-now-husband and I were riding home from a football game on a bus one evening in the late Fall, and I was kind of dozing off, and somewhere on the Jersey Turnpike he started musing about how interesting it would be if you could see a random snapshot of yourself in the future: no explanations, no descriptions, just a picture.  Who would you be with?  What city would you be living in?  Would you recognize the people, the place?  Would it make you happy (It’s just how I imagined it!), or make you sad (Wait, where’s so-and-so?  Why is he/she missing?)?

On nights like Sunday I think about that snapshot, think about if someone had shown me a picture when I was 19 years old: me, at 34, annoying flat hair still pulled back in that same ponytail, standing sentinel between the driveway and the street with my beautiful, petite dark-haired friend, while our husbands — lifelong “brothers” that they are — tended hot dogs on the grill.  The children in the photograph, because they are constantly in motion, would just be blurs of varying height.  The Spiderman helmet would obscure LittleMan’s white hair.

So I wind up with him, I might say of my husband.  And the presence of his best friend suggests we head back to the Bay Area.  But is that our house, or theirs?  Who is the other woman in the picture?  Why am I wearing her coat?  (I can tell it’s not mine, because it’s visibly too small.)

Which children are mine?  


What are they like?  What are WE like, now that we are parents?  

In the end, the photograph makes me happy.  It is not glamorous or even, really, exciting; to be honest, while there is always the possibility of the glamorous photo — maybe a snapshot from a wedding, or a benefit, my husband and I in formal wear with champagne flutes in hand, city lights in the background — a picture like that would be misleading.  It would say “Look, you grew up and you still have fun, you sassy thing!” and not much more.

But Sunday’s snapshot is a picture of a full life: marriage, children, old friends, new friends, good food, warm lights coming from the house.  Shown that picture while riding on a bus on the New Jersey Turnpike, 19-year-old me would rest her head on the shoulder of the man sitting next to her and fall asleep, knowing that if all else fails we will have each other, and so much more.