Olivia Brochu
Before your baby shower, you gather your girlfriends in a careful row—one to stuff envelopes, one to seal them shut, another to add labels and stamps. They drink wine while they work. You sip a sparkling water.
The chore takes just minutes. It goes much faster than you thought it would. They are experienced invitation stuffers. They helped with the same task for your wedding a couple years ago.
You haven’t had to return the favor. None of them are married. None of them have kids. They don’t want any of that yet. But you wanted both, so much. Those opposing desires pull them further and further away from you—a strong current overpowering your affection for them.
They are restless when the job is done. They like to spend Friday nights out. You haven’t joined them in a while, and you won’t tonight. It isn’t fun to be pregnant at a bar. Everyone around you melts into a different state of mind while you stick to Diet Coke.
You can’t remember the last time you saw 10 PM. You can’t imagine starting your night that late. But you did, not even long ago. You were the girl dancing on a table, walking home in the earliest hours of a new day with your bare soles on the sidewalk, your high heels dangling from your fingers, meeting your roommate on the floor of your tiny apartment to eat cereal right from the box.
The cereal habit remains, still right from the box. Now you eat it now on the couch, where you often fall asleep before 9. And that’s what you’ll do tonight, when your friends finally pack away the extra stamps and empty wine glasses. They’ll go out together. You’ll watch a movie alone.
***
You take your two-year-old to a new park. It’s the one with the zipline he’s too young for, and a slide he’s too small for, but you go there anyway because you’ve already been to the closer park two times this week, and you start becoming a little unhinged when everyday feels the same.
It’s always just the two of you. Until Dad gets home from work, you hardly interact with any adults. Your friends all work fulltime. They don’t have any kids yet. You are the only person you know to step back from your career to be a mom.
You’ve never been happier, and yet, a tingle of fear runs down your spine when you think about the promotions you left in the dust. The assistant producer whose every sentence required your editing is now working in a top tier market. The recent grad who took over your role writing for the 5:00 news just won an Emmy.
Your brain starts that dangerous spiral, the one where you wonder if you’ve really accomplished anything of value. Then your son wraps his pudgy digits around yours. They are sticky from chocolate or syrup or lollipops. Maybe all three. The spiral stops short, and all you can think is, you hope he never let’s go.
But he does—to run to the swings. So, you must run after him, to make sure he misses a boot to the face. You help him into a black plastic seat where he slides from front to back while you push him gently from behind. His belly flops onto the front of the seat, and instantly pushes out a loud burp. You both break into a cackle.
You wonder if the other moms at the park think you’re nuts, giggling like that with a little boy. They are two swings away, their kids lined up one next to the other at a distance from yours. It’s clear that they know each other. That they chose to meet up this morning.
You wonder how they met. You wonder when you last had to try to make a friend. You wonder if you can still do it.
But you stay off to the side. Pushing your boy—a smile spreading from his face to yours.
***
You go back to the park with the dangerous zipline and slide. This time, instead of groups of moms, you find just one other mom alone with her son.
You both avoid each other, leaving a wide berth. There’s plenty of space to claim separate slides.
But your sons are the same age, and they gravitate towards each other. The promise of shared menacing on the playground is too powerful for them to ignore. Now you can no longer ignore each other.
That turns into a good thing. You find out she’s a nurse, or was, before she decided to stay home with her son. She tells you that she loves being home more, but she worries she left some part of herself in her old job, and she might never get it back. It’s like hearing your diary read aloud.
You ask if she comes to this park often, and she says it’s her son’s favorite. They come all the time, just the two of them. You can sense she’s missing the one thing you covet the most too: mom friends.
When it’s time to go, she waves, and asks, “Maybe we will see you here again?”
You agree, and drive home with a buoyant feeling in your chest. You think, Maybe I can make new friends!
***
When your head hits the pillow that night, you realize you never got her phone number. You don’t even know her name. That earlier feeling of hopefulness evaporates, replaced by a sharp sense of failure that keeps you awake in the dark.
The next morning, you decide to recreate the events of the previous day, in hopes that she too will be at the same park at the same time.
Of course, your son decides his favorite sneakers are suddenly the worst. And then in a rage, he spills milk all over his shorts. So, you change him and negotiate with him and finally get in the car.
You are fifteen minutes behind schedule. You try to make up time by zipping along back roads.
When you finally get there, you rush to the swings, that same hope from yesterday fluttering beneath your ribs. But no one is there. The swings creak as the wind pushes them back and forth.
You look down and notice what is likely a small smear of poop on your white t-shirt. Your coffee is spilling in your diaper bag. Sweat beads on your upper lip.
You look up and scan the slides and the zipline. They too are empty.
You are alone once again.
***
Years go by, and you are suddenly a mom of four. It really happens that fast. You are busy now with school drop-offs and baseball games and chess tournaments. It is there, in the moments running from one event to the next, you become friends with some incredible women.
Sometimes, when your second son stays up a little too late, he bursts into tears when his head hits the pillow. He tells you that going to kindergarten has been so hard, that he has no friends, and that he’s so lonely. You can’t say for sure if it’s just the inane ramblings of an overstimulated brain, or if it’s his deepest secrets spilling out just before he shuts off for the night.
Either way, you know the feeling and wish, you could reach back and hug that younger version of yourself, the one with just one baby, and an empty calendar. You love him the way you wish you could love yourself, he way your own mother loves you—reminding him there is no shame in loneliness.
So, you wrap your sensitive boy in your arms, and you tell him, “Everyone feels lonely sometimes. It’s just part of being alive. But look around, and you’ll see other lonely people, and if you reach out to them, you’re both not alone anymore.”
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Olivia Brochu’s work has been featured by Anti-Heroin Chic, Feels Blind Literary, The Inquisitive Eater, and more. Her essay about her father’s heart attack was a WOW Women on Writing contest finalist. She is a fan of gut-wrenching prose, rollercoasters, and baby feet. You can read more of her work at oliviabrochuwrites.com.