Thursday, 07 January 2010

• Finding Mindy- For the Lonely Moms

  Guest post by bizeemom

   

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  We all need to connect. For some of us, myself included, motherhood is a lonely, isolating business.
  I moved from Taos, New Mexico to Hoboken, New Jersey when my daughter, Lilu, was five months old. The change was more of an adjustment than I had anticipated. Forget the culture shock “how YOU doin’?” aspect of it, or the fact that I had no car, or even that I was suddenly financially dependent on my husband, Cory.

  Since moving to New Mexico at fourteen I had had the same friends. I had added on a few in college, and friends came easily, friends of true soul level satisfying connection. I was horribly spoiled. In the absence of those friends, Cory had always been there to make me laugh, or listen to my day, but once we moved, his job took everything. He would likely argue with me, but from where I stand, those first years, when he was trying so hard to make his company a success, he nearly vanished. When he wasn’t traveling for business, or working, he was sleeping.

  After we moved, I became desperately depressed. I remember one week in particular when the weather was bad. I spent hours and hours watching the rain beat against my high-rise windows. After five days, I realized I hadn’t left the house once. I just sat there with my baby, all by myself. Though I spoke to my amazing, irreplaceable friends from home on the phone almost everyday, my real life was empty. All I did was nurse my baby and clean my house.

  The day the fire alarm emptied everyone out of my apartment building at mid-day, I knew I couldn’t stay there. The other mothers traipsed down the stairs, coiffed and composed, toting snacks and juice boxes in neatly labeled plastic containers,and diaper bags filled with the day’s necessities. I ran, panicked, onto the sidewalk in a T shirt that read “New York f$#@in city” and an old friend’s scrubs, my hair a total disaster. As for my baby, she had been sleeping and was covered in squash remnants and sweat. I wasn’t like them. I didn’t judge them, but I was never going to blend.

  I lobbied to move. We looked all over. Finally we settled on a small town on the border of Pennsylvania. It was no Taos, but it had coffee shops, and antique stores, it was cute, and we moved onto a block filled with new families. Also my neighbor was a tattooed up hottie with multi-colored hair and two small children. That was a good solid start toward something recognizable. I was determined not to spend another year and a half where the Iranian guy who owned the store down the street was the only person who asked me how I was doing in a day.

  To that end, I took my daughter to a library class every Tuesday. The women there were nice, and it gave me something free to do with myself. After maybe six months of sitting through art projects and eavesdropping on other people’s conversations, Mindy showed up.

  I noticed her from the floor, where I sat with my kid, beating sticks together as we rhymed. Mindy towered over me, sporting some terribly fashionable sweater. She was gorgeous, had good hair, and was laughing too loudly for the library. I watched her flit from mother to mother, having easy conversations and chasing after her daughter, who looked to be about the same age as mine. She lacked polish. She was stylish without veneer. I liked that. I like my friends with a side of messy; less crap to sift through before you get to the real stuff. But more than that, on sight I felt like I already knew her, and for me that is always a sign.

  Once she approached me, we chattered all the way through the class. We got shushed, and retreated into the adjacent room. Before the hour was up, we were talking astrology.

  When class was over, I wanted to hang onto her pant legs to keep her from leaving the library, afraid that she would disappear. But some part of me knew that like every hot guy I had ever scored, she would surely flee if pursued. Over-eagerness would nauseate her. I resisted the temptation to drop to my knees and tell her that she was the only person I had been able to relate to in over 600 lonely days. I didn’t say, as I wanted to, that the fact that we both had gaps in our front teeth and liked astrology made us kindred souls.

  On my way home, I thought how happy I was to have met her, even if it was just the once. It was enough to know that my ability to connect wasn’t dead. I sent out a quick prayer that if we were meant to be friends, to please make it happen. In a stunning act of rapid fire response to my plea for friendship, she ran down the other side of the street from me, pushing her stroller, and yelled that we should have lunch.

  I crushed on her like a schoolboy that day, as I watched her indelicately snarf a quesadilla. She was in soft focus as she wiped avocado and sour cream from the corners of her mouth. By some miracle of grace, I had been delivered someone who stained her clothes in an unapologetic way, someone raunchy and well read, someone expressive and thoughtful. Thank goodness my feelings for her were mutual. Once that connection was made, it grew exponentially. That friendship, that sense of being seen and accepted by someone was infinitely important, and its reverberations have been too numerous to count.

  Everybody should have a Mindy to see them through raising their babies; someone who can be called on amid diarrhea and vomit, and bad days with the husband. We all need that friendship that goes above and beyond, where explanations are unnecessary, because you just know each other so well. So for all the mommies out there who are sad or lonely or lost like I was, I wish for you, a Mindy.

  Have you ever felt lonely since becoming a mother?  How have you found ways to reconnect with other people again?

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