A New Kind of Party

I unintentionally vented to my friend this morning, who made the mistake of saying “how are you?”

Bad question to ask today.

Another friend told me once that women don’t take over the world, because we’re all too busy one-upping each other and pretending to each other that life is, as she so perfectly put it, “all rainbows and unicorns.”  We don’t have each other’s backs.  We just like to think we do, and then we passive-aggressively rub in the fact that we make our own organic baby food and have a perfectly kept home and we lost the baby weight by the time maternity leave is over and we picked up seven pair of Tory Burch shoes and a bag this weekend just because we felt like it.

Guess what?  Life isn’t all rainbows and unicorns.  Sometimes it’s a combination of stepping in gum, then dog poop, then mud—all in the same walk.  Sometimes it’s craving a PB&J and opening up the cabinets to realize no one has been to the grocery store in a week.  It’s having amazing seats to a concert, and right before you leave for the show, you realize you’ve lost the tickets, and you never find them.

It’s like going to bed, getting five hours of interrupted sleep, and waking up angrier than when you went to bed (and you were angry when you went to bed), which was my rant of the morning.

As women, we need a break.  We need to stop pretending life is perfect.  We need to talk about things like stillbirth, and baby loss, and sensory issues, and autism, and how we only bought seven pair of Tory Burch shoes because we’re depressed and we really can’t afford them and we’re just crawling deeper into debt.  We need to talk about how we all see a therapist, and if we don’t we need to encourage each other to do so.  We need to all talk about how we’re often scared that we’re not doing this thing called life right.  We all need to talk about how we’re trying as hard as we can.  We need to talk about how we all have problems and triumphs and bounce back and forth between these two ends, multiple times a day.

Next time I’m asked to have a jewelry party or something similar, I’m proposing something different.  Nothing to buy, no pressure to make food for a crowd.  Come over in your sweats.  No makeup allowed.  Bra optional (come on, you know we take that thing off as soon as we can).  We’re going to have some wine and talk about the things we all want to talk about but feel like we’ll be judged if we do.  We are going to say “how are YOU” and mean it when we ask.  And then we will listen.

And then we’re all going to take a nap.