I don't want a "moms' night out."
I want to be a person.
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “moms’ night out?”
Do you think of this?
Or this?
Or this?
When I was a four-year-old mother, I wrote a piece about shopping in which I imagined typical “moms out” were mostly invested in drinking sweet wine and staying skinny.
Perhaps the most awful of all the awful people are the smiling, bright-eyed young(ish) women who toasted each other to a fun-filled girls day over glasses of sauvignon blanc at brunch (“Drinking before noon—just look at us!”) and giggled about how naughty they were to include fries with their orders of seared salmon instead of mixed greens. These women, these grownup field hockey darlings, so content in their small suburban worlds, so much happier than I am. These women, I come to think, are the worst part of shopping outside of my cozy, safe, controlled internet world of one. They are nothing like me. They are exactly like me.
Now, though, when someone utters the phrase “moms’ night out,” I think of the person from whose lips the phrase emerges and wonder exactly what they imagine moms to be. Some of them are married to moms! Most of them have moms. Do they imagine the act of mothering fundamentally changes a person’s interests and desires? Do they think all mothers drop whatever gave them pleasure upon having children and only find joy in clinking these glasses together and gabbing about soccer practice, Bill’s adorably inept attempt at making dinner, and, like . . . laundry?
Or do the people who use this phrase do so to tacitly communicate they believe most mothers’ lives are defined by a sense of entrapment? That we’re all desperate to break free of our mommy jails only to taste a few hours of sweet freedom at the local sports bar nibbling uninspired Caesar salads topped with dry grilled chicken and doing our best to eat around the browned edges of the most wilted pieces of Iceberg? The assumption that a “moms’ night out” is a brief, paltry reprieve from a life of drudgery is gross, but so is the unspoken acceptance of the “moms’ night out” evoker that a mom’s life being one of thankless servitude is right and proper.
A few days ago,
made the startling claim that mothers are people, that we have inner lives, that we have secrets, that we are bad, that we are good, that we feel feelings and want things.I am no better, no worse than those who refuse to acknowledge that they, too, are human. That they, too, mothers, wives, are also SO MANY OTHER THINGS. Complicated. Heartbroken. Social. Sexual. Ambitious. Impulsive. The worst. The best. All of the above, etc.
The fact that Rebecca still feels compelled to insist that mothers are people makes her “head feel like it will pop off her body,” and I felt similarly when a friend texted me this utterly heartbreaking post she found on a Facebook group for moms.
Now listen, I concede that this poster could simply be new to the area and looking for local recommendations. That’s perfectly possible. But it’s also possible that something about her transition to motherhood or something about her responsibilities as a mother has made her forget that she was a person before she had children and she continues to be a person after kids. And this isn’t her fault.
Maybe she grew up with a mother who was forced to efface herself at the altar of Good Wifehood and Good Motherhood. Maybe she’s single and working three jobs and dealing with chronic stress. Maybe she’s partnered and quit her job after becoming a mother “because it just made sense” and finds herself wildly ill-suited to days spent entirely invested in caregiving and domestic labor. Maybe she’s working outside the home and also responsible for the entirety of the Second Shift and is so burnt out she forgets what pleasure even is. Maybe she’s lonely so she hauls herself to a breastfeeding support group in the hopes of connecting with others only to find that the support group is populated by people determined to bond solely through their interest in lactation teas, proper latches, and nipple shields. Maybe her identity as a mother feels like a straight-jacket.
I interviewed Eve Rodsky, the author of Fair Play and Unicorn Space, for this newsletter, and was completely depressed to learn how often Eve hears from mothers, who, when confronted with free time, have no idea what to do with it. Mothers, who, once released from the duties (and identities) of partnerhood and motherhood, have lost touch with what makes them feel like their most authentic selves.
It would be ridiculous for me to claim that there isn’t a shifting of priorities and maybe even interests after becoming a mother. But we should still feel whole enough after becoming mothers to HAVE PRIORITIES AND INTERESTS. We should still find ourselves bound to people (mothers or not) because of those priorities and interests, and we shouldn’t be so unpracticed in asking ourselves what we want that we’re unable to answer the question at all once a free afternoon or evening presents itself.
Because so many societal and cultural forces attempt to drag us away from ourselves once we have kids, it’s up to us (it always is!) to resist. This means doing the work of extracting our selves from the cultural identities of Mother and Wife and tapping into what makes us people. It’s not necessarily easy but it is crucial. And luckily, we have the work of Eve Rodsky (unicorn space needn’t include chardonnay), Pooja Lakshmin (real self-care is knowing your internal landscape),
(a radicalization of carework can reveal rather than obscure our individuality), Jenny Odell (doing nothing is actually doing quite a lot), (motherhood is more than an identity!), Helena Andrews-Dyer (mom friends can be real friends), Kate Baer (prioritizing platonic love can be life-saving), and so many monstrous mothers to help us along the way.As a hearty “fuck off” to the phrase “moms’ night out,” here are three weird-as-hell activities that instantly make me feel like the me I’ve always been. Kids or no kids. Mommy Juice sippy cups not required.