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.