Graduating 8th Grade

So, the thing is… I think maybe I’m still in eighth grade.

I’ve been a stay-at-home mom for four-plus years now. During that time, a lot of things have changed –some for better and some for worse. For the Better: I don’t have to wear pantyhose now, I recycle more and I feel more compassion for people less fortunate than I. On the Worse side: my waistline seems to have permanently disappeared, I am frequently too tired to find the proper nouns to communicate with people over three feet tall and I can’t seem to drive well in rush hour traffic anymore.

But the worst thing, the really, REALLY worst thing, is something I hadn’t even suspected until recently.

See, I made a new friend. A new family moved in on our street and we met in passing a couple of times and then one day, the mom came and knocked on our door. Her name is Joanne and she has one child, Kate, who is two months older than Jane and another one due in August. And she is so… COOL! She’s hilarious, for one thing (I routinely make that snorting pig noise —how embarrassing), and she’s smart and she seems like a great and relaxed mother and for added coolness, she and her husband are both very athletic and participate in various triathlons and marathons around the country. He’s very cool and funny, too, and my husband really likes him and therein lies the problem, sort of. Because this is the first couple we’ve found in our own neighborhood that we both really like and with whom we have a lot in common. And she’s exactly like me, except, well, cooler and funnier and fitter and much more well-adjusted. Anyway, she knocked on my door and came in for a little while with Kate to play.

And then I basically laid siege on her house.

I’m blushing as I write this. The girls and I started dropping by her house on our morning walk. We invited them for dinner, to go to the park, to go grocery shopping with us –I’m sure Jo was thinking that soon she’d be turning down invitations to watch me pump my own gas. I’d known her about three days when I offered to take Kate when she has the new baby. I was just so incredibly over the top. I could NOT stop talking. One night I had her family over for dinner when my own spouse was out of town. I talked NON-STOP. I told all of my stories, all of my HUSBAND’S stories, I quoted my own columns. (GOSH, that’s so pathetic, I’m BEET red.) I think the two of them said exactly three sentences the whole evening –they simply couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I KNEW I was behaving like a drowning person who had been thrown a life ring but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.

And then it happened.

I read a “Dear Abby” column about these people who had moved into a new house and were befriended by their new neighbors and then unable to get rid of them. The neighbors invited them to dinner, to go to the park, to watch them pump gas… you get the picture. I hadn’t actually resorted to STALKING Joanne but I definitely saw myself in that letter. I was stunned to realize that my four years of staying home had resulted in about a 23-year regression in my social skills. I was fourteen years old again and had just met the popular kids at my new school and gosh, I just wanted to eat lunch with them SO BAD.

There is a book by Josephine Humphreys called “The Fireman’s Fair” and in it one character is describing another character and she says, “…she’s dangerously lonely.”

“What do you mean, dangerously?”

“The kind of lonely that makes you latch onto anyone who shows you the slightest kindness. All I did was lend her forty dollars. You’d think I saved her life.”

Gosh, have I really become “dangerously” lonely? I mean, Joanne came over to play and you’d think she saved my (social) life. But how can that be? I have so many friends! Well, okay, I have so many friends but I rarely see them due to the difficulty of trying to arrange the social lives/nap schedules of two small children and then trying to integrate that with the schedules of my friends' children. I really do spend a lot of days alone with my kids, connected to the world only through my computer and there’s not much time for that. And the other thing is that I’m a little shy. No, really –in person I can be shy. If Jo hadn’t knocked on my door would I have continued my hermit-like existence? Would we even have met?

So, not long after I assimilated Jo (“Protest is futile.”), my husband and I went to a fundraiser social event –one which required me to be seen almost wearing some cocktail dress and meeting and greeting many of my contacts from my days in the work force. I was just a lee-tle too excited: I drank too much and talked too much and had there been a lampshade in evidence, no doubt I would have worn it on my head. Clearly, not only do I not get out enough but now I know WHY.

It seems that when I wasn’t looking, I suffered some kind of total attrition of social skills. Do you think this just a natural by-product of having two kids in less than three years? It’s a chicken and the egg thing —am I not going to parties because I’m out of the social habit or am I out of the social loop because I behaved like this BEFORE I had children? Assuming it’s the former, is this a reversible trend or am I destined to remain in eighth grade forever? And what am I really modeling for my children –how to be a good friend? Or how to be a psychopath?

And the $64,000 question: Must everything I do be in such a completely spastic, over-the-top, throwing-dignity-to-the-wind kind of way?

Well, eventually, I calmed down a little and then Jo and her family really got to be friends with me and mine. Like normal people. And Jo paid me the ultimate compliment the other day when she said, “This is just how I always thought it would be when we lived in a real neighborhood with real neighbors.” I promise. She really said that. To me. And she was sincere.

Imagine how great NINTH grade is going to be.

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Barbara Cooper is the mother of Ana (4) and Jane (20 months). She lives in Austin, Texas and is less dangerous than she is lonely.