There’s a mom I know at Baby Girl’s preschool. Her name is Luna’s mom — because
nobody has their own names when you have a child. It’s all the child’s name and
then your relation to them. I see her every day. We do the thing — the lobby
small talk, the smile, the nod. Half the time I have absolutely no idea what she’s
saying because there’s a gaggle of four-year-olds having the time of their lives
approximately four feet away.
I need subtitles in real life at forty-two.
So, I just smile. She’s making an effort. That’s my effort back.
We did this for an entire school year.
Baby Girl’s fourth birthday party was coming up. Four means you understand
things are happening, you get to make decisions, you are a person with opinions and
a vision. Her vision was a ballerina astronaut on the invitation to match the
trampoline park theme. We printed them. She handed them out like she was
running for office. Every kid was thrilled. One little boy walked up to her, completely
serious, and said thank you for my gift — because that invitation was the greatest
thing he had ever received.
She was so proud.
Baby Girl’s birthday was the last birthday of the year, which meant there had been
many birthday parties before hers. Baby Girl wanted to go to all of them — because
she is a social butterfly who is best friends with everyone, and I went to every one
we could to let her fly. At all of these parties, basically every parent showed up. This
was the event. Some parents, this was their outing for the week. Maybe the month.
Who knows.
Luna’s mom was never at any of them.
I noticed the pattern. Luna didn’t do birthday parties, and that was fine. But Baby
Girl loves Luna, and I genuinely like Luna’s mom — enough that I wanted both of
them there to celebrate. It was at a trampoline park. Kids like bouncing. Adults like
eating.
Win win.
So I made a point to let her know I was expecting her to show up.
I walked up to her.
“Hey. I noticed you never come to these. This one you gotta show up for.”
She laughed. Told me social stuff is hard. Anxiety, crowds, small spaces full of
people.
I understood Luna’s mom more in that moment than I had all year pretending to
hear anything she had to say about peptides or allergies or anything else I caught
every other word of. If I have to go to a new place
and I don’t know the parking lot, I ensure I get there early to make sure I can park
far enough away to not have to be near any other cars. So, I absolutely get going to a
new place, bringing your kid, not knowing the environment, and kind of knowing the
people who are going to be there that you kind of don’t want to see.
A week had passed when Luna’s mom came up to me in the lobby. She’d lost the
invitation and needed my number right then so she could text me.
I gave it to her immediately. Because I know how this goes. You either do it in the
next thirty seconds or it doesn’t happen. I am the same way. I wait either seconds or
weeks. There is no in between.
She texted before I got to my car.
Hi. It’s Heidi.
I had to think. I looked at the number, looked at the name, and didn’t know either of
them. In my brain I’m like — who the fuck is Heidi? I had to go through my day, which
honestly had just started. It was barely nine AM. I had to work backwards through
the last two hours to figure out who would be texting me, and it took my brain that
long to connect the dots to the lady I had just seen in the lobby who texted me in
the two minutes it took to walk to my car.
Once it all connected, I typed back: Hey. It’s Jerra.
We had been standing next to each other every single morning for an entire school
year. Same lobby. Same gaggle of chaos. Same two minutes of adult human contact
in an otherwise completely kid-centered existence.
Neither of us knew the other’s name.
It was then I realized I only knew one other parent’s name, and that was just by
happenstance because I wanted to know who her family photographer was for
Christmas photos. I understand dropping off children, picking up children — it is
about the child. You don’t necessarily go to make connections, make conversations,
or make friends. But I genuinely liked Heidi, and I never made the effort to even
know her name because that is how this works. When you’re the parent of a child
doing the child things, you are that child’s name and the relation. I am Baby Girl’s
mom. That is what everybody knew me as. And that is what I knew everybody else
as — their child and relation. And that’s fine. But I realized somewhere in between
Halloween and Saint Patrick’s Day, I could have put in a one liner saying hey, I’m
Jerra, and made some sort of effort to be a human to another human as opposed to
just a sidekick to my kid.
It’s funny when you realize after the fact how you hand your name over without
even noticing.
Not bad for a Tuesday.