Mom’s Night Out
Last week I had the chance to sneak out for a few hours with a friend, and it was just enough to recharge my batteries and be ready to roll for another week. This girl is a friend from high school, and we reconnected about six years ago when we happened to be in the same infant-child CPR class while we were pregnant with our first kids. Since then, we’ve both descended into the realms of insanity together, as I now have four kids, and her fourth is due in a month. We also both work with our church youth groups, so we have a ton in common and deal with a lot of the same challenges and can support, commiserate, and laugh through them together.
Our big, long-awaited night out wasn’t anything thrilling or exciting, just a Starbucks run after the kids were in bed. The Starbucks halfway between our houses is right across the street from a college, so we were some of the older people there. As we sat sipping our drinks and catching up, a few college girls walked in: cute, perky, skinny, seemingly not a care in the world. All things that reminded us of a previous life that’s a distant, sleep-deprived memory to my friend and me.
These girls recognized some friends on the other side of us, waved to them, and struck up a conversation (with our table in the middle). It went a little like this:
Skinny girl #1: Hey! Did you guys just wake up? Skinny girl #2: Yeah, we just got up from a nap! It was 9:00 p.m. on a Thursday night. Seriously. We rolled our eyes a little.
Skinny girl #1: That’s awesome. I don’t have class tomorrow, so I’m looking forward to sleeping in.
Skinny girl #2: Me too! I don’t have to get up till 11 tomorrow. My eyes met my friend’s. We got the giggles. Neither of us has slept in for six years, and we have 7.9 kids between the two of us. An inappropriate giggle fit was probably the gentlest way we could have reacted. But as the conversation continued around us, all the well-rested skinny perkiness got the better of us, and we started coming up with a news report of how the evening could have ended. We began mumbling the story under our breath, laughing hysterically the whole time:
“A crazy pregnant lady and an over-tired mother of four were hauled off to jail Thursday night after an altercation at Starbucks with some perky, young, skinny college girls. They started talking about naps and sleeping in, and hormones and exhaustion got the better of the two women. They plan to plead temporary insanity, although those familiar with them question the “temporary” part.”
We were laughing so hard we had tears rolling down our cheeks. I don’t know if the girls noticed us at all, but if they did, I’m sure they thought we were completely nuts. Maybe you just had to be there and it’s not quite as funny second-hand, but it was hilarious to us at the time. We sat and talked till midnight, then headed home even more sleepless than we usually would have been that night. But sometimes mommies of many small children need a night out laughing with a friend who gets it–even more desperately than they need sleep.
