Community?
I was in Meijers yesterday, trolling through the pet supplies and then the office supplies, picking up random things like pencils and erasers, when I turned my cart and looked up, blinking as I saw children who used to be friends of my daughters. They were with their father Curt, one of the people who used to be in a community built mainly around the mommas who were friends.
I gasped inwardly, but felt too awkward to say anything so I just pushed my cart on towards the water aisle, hanging my head as I felt in that moment the defeated feeling I always feel when I think back to what it was, what it could have been, and how it all ended. I didn't look back, and he didn't say anything either. I didn't stick around to hear if the girls called my daughter by name.
When did the community really fall apart? Was it when we got the coxsackie virus and unknowingly got everyone sick at Hershaw's 6th birthday, and Tuesday jumped on the chance to declare social anathema on us so I wouldn't challenge her wise woman hegemony anymore?
Maybe it was when the Sister Circles just started becoming redundant, and people stopped coming as much. Perhaps it was all the growing tensions that blew small issues out of proportion, making our hip alternative to the suburban mom scene seem so ironic...and so much like all the things we tried not to be. Maybe it was when backstabbing became a spectator sport, and low self esteems drove gossip like fossil fuels drive our economies.
Perhaps it ended further for me when Linda, the mother of the two girls I mention above got mad over something minor and used it as a means to shove me over the edge of the social precipice, never having liked me to begin with.....or maybe it was when Ali and I had our falling out, and the whole thing went to hell. Ali was the last piece of the puzzle...the last connection I had to any of those people who attended parties with catty smiles and knitted tongues. I felt relieved at the time...two years ago next month...when I did not have to see them anymore, to feel out-of-place at a public gathering because I loved Ali and didn't want to ditch the rest of them on account of her.
Or maybe that was none of it...maybe we were just too close to something real and positive and amazingly powerful that we killed it ourselves before we had to commit to it...before we gave over our hearts and built a whole new world with our combined energies. Maybe I was just incredibly naive to think that we had a chance, that we were able to craft a community to replace all the PTAs and Soccer Mom's organizations where we didn't quite fit in.
Some days lately, I fear my nostalgia might swallow me whole as I look back on what we had done here in Dayton...what had started to grow before we hacked it down like so many choking weeds. Is it thinking of what has been lost though...or for what we could have been?
I would like to think that it isn't impossible to have a community like that.....like the one I knew when I was traveling, like the one I knew just over two years ago. Hope springs eternal, but damn....its hard to keep believing sometimes.
I gasped inwardly, but felt too awkward to say anything so I just pushed my cart on towards the water aisle, hanging my head as I felt in that moment the defeated feeling I always feel when I think back to what it was, what it could have been, and how it all ended. I didn't look back, and he didn't say anything either. I didn't stick around to hear if the girls called my daughter by name.
When did the community really fall apart? Was it when we got the coxsackie virus and unknowingly got everyone sick at Hershaw's 6th birthday, and Tuesday jumped on the chance to declare social anathema on us so I wouldn't challenge her wise woman hegemony anymore?
Maybe it was when the Sister Circles just started becoming redundant, and people stopped coming as much. Perhaps it was all the growing tensions that blew small issues out of proportion, making our hip alternative to the suburban mom scene seem so ironic...and so much like all the things we tried not to be. Maybe it was when backstabbing became a spectator sport, and low self esteems drove gossip like fossil fuels drive our economies.
Perhaps it ended further for me when Linda, the mother of the two girls I mention above got mad over something minor and used it as a means to shove me over the edge of the social precipice, never having liked me to begin with.....or maybe it was when Ali and I had our falling out, and the whole thing went to hell. Ali was the last piece of the puzzle...the last connection I had to any of those people who attended parties with catty smiles and knitted tongues. I felt relieved at the time...two years ago next month...when I did not have to see them anymore, to feel out-of-place at a public gathering because I loved Ali and didn't want to ditch the rest of them on account of her.
Or maybe that was none of it...maybe we were just too close to something real and positive and amazingly powerful that we killed it ourselves before we had to commit to it...before we gave over our hearts and built a whole new world with our combined energies. Maybe I was just incredibly naive to think that we had a chance, that we were able to craft a community to replace all the PTAs and Soccer Mom's organizations where we didn't quite fit in.
Some days lately, I fear my nostalgia might swallow me whole as I look back on what we had done here in Dayton...what had started to grow before we hacked it down like so many choking weeds. Is it thinking of what has been lost though...or for what we could have been?
I would like to think that it isn't impossible to have a community like that.....like the one I knew when I was traveling, like the one I knew just over two years ago. Hope springs eternal, but damn....its hard to keep believing sometimes.