Girls’ Night Out

When my friend Teri invited me to a girls’ night, my first idea of what to do was panic.

There was a time when I was all about the girls’ night out.  When I believed in a sort of aggressive-defensive-sexy Woman Power and cosmopolitans and thinking my friends and I looked like the gals in Sex and the City even if we weren’t wearing Jimmy Choos or having nearly as much fun.

Apparently, I have aged as much as the Sex and the City franchise.

Because, I should be ashamed to admit but am not, I almost didn’t accept the invitation because I couldn’t fathom leaving my fourteen-month-old at home with her dad for a night.

This is, I understand in a deep, painful way, a long, hard fall from my glory days of the girls’ night out.

The peculiar thing is that the very day I received the invitation I was busy complaining about how I don’t know how to be me right now.

I’ve entered into that unexpected and exhilarating postpartum stage where I’m not only feeling like “myself” again but I’m actually starting to get a glimpse of a Me who isn’t just bobbing along between bouts of Mommyhood.  I’m starting to buy clothes in colors that aren’t calculated to hide spit up stains and to wear shoes that aren’t designed for running after toddlers.  I bought new make up last week because it actually seemed to be worth the effort.  I have decided that I am allowed to wash my hair daily if it makes me feel good.

In other words, I am in prime shape for a girls’ night out.

And yet there’s the struggle that comes with being back in Girls’ Night Out Land.  The sense that I am still supposed to be searching and striving the way I did when I was single.  Where, I wonder, is the excitement and energy of not knowing what’s around the corner?  (I mean for me, not for my kids, who obviously will surprise me daily in ways both good and not so great.)  What am I supposed to do if I’m not switching jobs, switching cities, shopping for a new home — as I am wont to do every three or four years?

Sometimes, I have to admit, when I am in the middle of it all — the kids who bring me constant joy, the house that brings me peace, the yard in which I watch my children play, the neighbors, the preschool, the play dates, and, of course, the husband with whom I have built this life — I forget about the beauty of it.  I recoil at the notion that I may be — gasp — content, settled, MIDDLE AGED.

And I run screaming from it all — in my head at least because my children would be quite alarmed if they were to see me run screaming from the house.  My husband might not be because he knows me.

This is when I imagine a girls’ nights out in which I am ten years younger and ten pounds lighter and wearing an outfit that makes me feel neither self-conscious nor dowdy.

Which maybe is what scared me about this girls’ night out.  I am not, nor in a real world do I wish to be, 28 years old with legs free of spider veins and a giddy belief that talking to inebriated strangers is fun.  How, I wondered, do you do girls’ night out when everyone’s settled and happy and over the age of, say, thirty-two?  By a good margin.

What you do, I felt certain during those moments of panic, is not even try.  You decide that your baby girl can’t possibly go to sleep without you at home — even though she does it once a month or so when you leave her with a sitter whom you can’t possibly trust more than you trust your own husband.  You figure the cool Tahari top that you bought thinking how you never have anything cool to wear out can continue to hang in your closet turning dusty gray on the shoulders and waiting for an outing more inspired than sitting in a dark movie theater with your husband.

When I floated to Mike the idea that Lily is just too young to have me go out at night without her he informed me that perhaps I am suffering from a somewhat inflated sense of my own importance.

Which concept, I had to admit, possessed a kernel of truth.

Then I worried about poor Jake, having to sit alone in the living room in front of Sesame Street while his father put Lily to sleep and his mother went out partying.

Although I had to allow as how he has rarely complained about watching Sesame Street ever, even if he has to do it by himself.

And so I said yes to Teri and got just a little taste of the excitement and nervousness that going out used to mean when I hadn’t spent the last seven years waking up next to my date every morning and didn’t expect that I would start nodding off by eleven or so and bothered to wear shoes that hurt my feet because they looked good.

I opted for the cautious outfit — the one I could feel reasonably confident  wouldn’t feel edgy and fashion magazine-like until the second I got out in public at which point I would glance at myself in a mirror and see how it emphasized the fact that my butt is nearly 44 years old or made me look like someone with neither the money nor the fashion sense to try to be fashion magazine-like.  This means, quite simply, that I wore jeans.  With that cool Tahari top and cool Stuart Weitzman shoes, both purchased at Marshalls because — in case you haven’t been paying attention — that is what my life is right now.

With my hair blow dried and my new Chanel eyeshadow and dangly earrings, I was feeling pretty girls’ night out-y as I sat down at the dinner table to wait for the titular girls to come pick me up.

“Why aren’t you eating dinner, Mommy?” Jake asked.

“Because I’m going out to dinner with some friends,” I answered, marveling and sad at how my three-and-a-half-year-old had never heard these words come out of my mouth.

“Why?” he asked with the full power of that word.

“Because Mommy has friends of her own she likes to spend time with,” Mike offered, gracefully supplying the answer that he knew would escape me as I stared into my son’s big, round, blue eyes.

Jake considered this for a moment as I smiled bravely.  “I’ll miss you Mommy,” he said with just a whiff of sadness in his voice.

I give myself credit for not changing into my jammies right then and there.

Instead I found myself in a car on the way to a Jamaican restaurant with Teri, another woman I’d met once before, and two new friends.  I found myself ordering a glass of wine before dinner even though I hardly ever bother drinking when I’m out with Mike.  And I stood there at the bar in my moderate heels and somewhat modest top talking to my friends about kids and school and work, never once glancing around to check out what the men looked like or, for that matter, the women.

At dinner we talked about yoga and men and dating and we couldn’t help talking about our kids some more.  We stayed late — well past the time I knew my darlings had gone to bed without me and even through a particularly difficult period when I heard a baby crying in the restaurant and fought the urge to run home to my own girl.

It was, in short, a lovely time, a time to be me in jeans instead of a short skirt, with a few lines around my eyes and a little extra flap of skin on my belly and none of the anxiety of wondering what the night would bring.  It brought friendship, which was all I needed from it after all.  I already have my life partner, my children who are so much more fun than a bar full of big hair and drunk men, my home that I will not only live in for more than three or four years but, I hope, for the rest of my life or close to it.

What I realized, as I said goodbye to new friends and now-better friends, is that I truly enjoyed the ease in being who I am with these women who know who they are as well.  That I loved not caring — not really caring, in a way that suggests it matters all that much in the end — whether a single man in that restaurant found me the least bit attractive, whether I was as skinny as the woman at the next table, whether my life would continue to be a string of frivolous, flirty, party-like nights out.  That not caring does not make me old and dried up and destined to live my life vicariously through my children from here on out.

No, I haven’t given up anything up to be where I am now.  Rather, I’ve earned it, this chance to find myself in a life that doesn’t need fixing.

And all it took was a girls’ night out to show me that I really don’t miss those old girls’ nights out as much as I sometimes like to think I do.

And so, in honor of that extra flap of skin on my belly . . .

I offer navasana, or boat pose.  Don’t think about it as being all about rock solid abs (which, in part, it can be). Approach it as finding your core, your center, your strength. And unfold from there.