My Life As A Mom-friend...

Twenty years ago, young women of my age would send their husbands off to work in the morning, get the kids settled playing in the yard or bundle them up and bring them along in a sort of game of house swap. They would all show up at one house or another to “have coffee” while the hordes of the neighborhood played in the yard. I watched my mother and her friends around the kitchen table enviously so many times, wondering what they had to say to each other that took all that time. With so many young women having careers and waiting to have families the very nature of these interactions has changed.

Instead of the kitchen table, the office and the closest coffee shop are the new venue. The standard office kaffee-klatch will have single people, married people, divorced people, single parents, different genders, you name it. New ways have to be come up with to deal with those different circumstances and the restrictions it can cause. People have begun to develop their own new words for the various kinds of situations as a sort of shorthand to explaining all those various circumstances.

I was once told I am a “Mom-friend” by a colleague. With a subtle cynical air, I asked what that meant. She explained that this means a friend with kids that you can only see when they manage to dump the kids on a spouse or babysitter or whatever. Used in a sentence in place of the term “girlfriend”. She doesn’t seem to make any separation between single parents and married parents. I nodded wisely and let the subject drop, quailing a bit inside.

Later on, I got mad. How dare she pigeonhole me like that? It made me want to throw up. A little delicate probing at another time brought out the rest of the story. This one gal has a whole new hierarchy based on how much time the people can spend with her and what they can do together. Mom-friends rate lower than single-friends, since the Mom-friends can’t just drop everything on 20 minutes notice and come over and watch movies at her house at midnight on a weeknight if they want. Male-friends are guys she sees in social settings but for whatever reason aren’t suitable to become Boy-friends. There is a sub-set called Dad-friends, but I don’t know what that is all about, and I’m fairly certain I don’t want to. Everyone she knows is categorized and pigeonholed and her interactions with them are run accordingly.

One of the side effects of the Internet has been an explosion of writing, from all walks of life. Our society has changed in so many other ways as well, and in many cases the Oxford just doesn’t seem to have the right words. Everyone chipping in can make for some interesting discovery, but it also means that with no editorial resources, some interesting usages are getting out there in front of people, and from sheer repetition can become part of our language. Since then, I have seen the term a couple of times on newsgroups and message boards. It still makes me a little sick inside.

But I don’t like the term. I just don’t. It's her call, though. As cold and mercenary as this person’s approach to life seems to me, there is an uneasy germ of truth in it. I am a friend and I am a Mom, and I truly can’t just drop everything and go play whenever I want. If she wants to categorize people to manage her investment of time, then so be it. I have other friends who are happy to see me when we can get together and understand when I can’t.

I have a term for her, too. Former-friend.