When you get married, finding other couples with whom you have great friendship chemistry isn't easy to do. Finding a couple with kids with whom you share laughs, is even harder. I've hosted way too many dinner parties where all the parents sit and talk about their kids and diapers and toilet training and it makes your head hurt after awhile.
But the real issue is a shared approach to parenting and knowing when to cease all kid-speak. If someone talks incessantly about diapers and pee pee, I lose interest quickly. I live in a small town two hours North of Seattle and perhaps that's part of the problem. If you want to discuss the many health attributes of wheat-grass, this city is for you. If you want to meet silly laid back parents who drink (DRINK) in front of their kids, stay away.
Apparently, I'm not alone. Creative-Type Dad discusses the difficulty of finding like-minded parents with whom to socialize. Since he and his wife had their daughter, they still enjoy their kidless friends, but want to meet other parents so they can occasionally talk about kid-stuff without encountering incomprehension and glassy-eyed stares. So he was quite discouraged when his new friends stood he and his wife up at the Baby Loves Disco party in their town.
Chemistry and philosophies of childraising aside, there's also the small matter of being busy and tired and beleaguered, which makes developing friendships even harder. I've become quite used to relying on my virtual friendships to fill the gap, but you simply can't replace the joy of laughing out loud and long with another live human, especially if that person is a parent.
[Picture: Natalie Dee]
