For those who don't know, I am a member of the DINK (Double Income No Kids) society. However some of my friends have left DINK-dom for SIYK (Single Income Yes Kids) land. So I benefit from gaining lots of valuable tidbits of this lifestyle that could potentially be very useful for when/if I have little tykes of my own.
Recently at a New Year's party, I was part of a conversation with my childhood friend aka Tall Girl and Karen (Tall Girl's cousin in-law). We were talking about something light like the interesting martini drinks the bartender was serving up and all of a sudden the conversation took a sharp turn towards serious fare. Karen asked Tall Girl (not in these words but the gist) what her deal was - living in New Orleans raising 2 young kids and not working plus not having any family around...YIKES!
At this point I was all too familiar with what was going to happen. I was going to quickly become an observer adding zero value to the conversation while the two moms who've gone through the same life experiences were going to connect and have lots of head-nodding moments of understanding each other. While I couldn't join in the head-nodding, I found the conversation pretty interesting. Tall Girl remarked that all of her activities revolved around the kids so things like going to the park, zoo, museum and other Mommy & Me type stuff. Of course when you do these things, you're bound to meet a lot of other mommies. And much to my surprise, Tall Girl said she wasn't interested in being friends with most of those mommies because either they had different philosophies on child-rearing or their kids didn't get along. (Btw, Tall Girl is one of the most open-minded accepting people I know, so there is no snobbiness in that statement. If I made that statement, yes assume I'm being elitist).
All this time, I thought there was an automatic Mommy club and that kids were such a strong commonality among women that all moms were content to hang out with other moms. Obviously now that I think about it, that's just ridiculous. I have made comments myself like "So and so would never let their kids do that..." which clearly indicates not all parents are created equal.
Anyway I was grateful to be part of the conversation because it gave me an insight into Tall Girl's life that I don't think she would have told me if it was just the two of us talking. I was a little sad though because it made me realize how much I'm missing of my friend's life while she's going through things that will never repeat themselves and I'm not there to provide support or just experience them with her.
It's commonly believed that knowledge is power. For me the jury is still out. I sometimes wonder if I'd be better off going through life blissfully ignorant. Btw, was that a total non-sequitur?
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