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I’ve been partying kind of a lot the past month. If you read that in an apologetic tone, please reread it as a neutral declaration of fact. The density of late nights is probably due to the arrival of spring in the cold climate where I live. But one thing about me is I’m not picky about the venue. For two Saturdays in a row I found myself in my neighbor’s garage, between the ATV and the gun rack, having some beers and playing cards until late, and then waving fresh beers around and singing along to “Tuesday’s Gone,” which is a Skynyrd song to which I was pleasantly surprised to remember most of the words.
And then last weekend, a dear old friend of mine came to visit for the night. She’s got three kids at home, the youngest of whom just turned 1. It’s a busy time of life for her, and she doesn’t get much time away from her obligations. So we did what felt necessary: We stayed out until the bars closed drinking tequila and singing karaoke at the kind of place where each person’s chosen song is a cathartic public experience shared by the entire bar. (I’ve never understood the appeal of private-room karaoke. I want to encourage strangers by singing along with them, and have strangers encourage me.) The next day we didn’t feel great, but we’re old enough to have seen it coming. We’d blasted out the cobwebs and shouted ourselves hoarse. No regrets.
And now it’s Mother’s Day weekend — a time “for” mothers, ostensibly. Once again Mother’s Day marketing has coalesced around a sweaty insistence on moms’ need for self-care, the implication being that moms sacrifice so much that they have earned the right to controlled access to their drug of choice. They have three to choose from: solitude, pampering, or treats.
Listen, I actually love Mother’s Day. It’s kind-vibed and sweet, but let’s please be for real: Pleasure does not need to be earned, by anyone, but especially not by moms. I’ll take one of each of the Mother’s Day gift categories, but I’ll also take myself out for a cocktail, at my convenience (and, yes, at the convenience of my family — I try to be a considerate partner) year-round.
It was last spring that I started going to the karaoke bar where I took my friend from out of town. Its intimate size, reliable rowdiness, and the fact that its patrons range from college kids to the elderly make it feel like a complete departure from my reality. I talk to strangers every time I go there, which has been about six times over the past 18 months. Every morning after, I wake up late humming a song I’ve never hummed before in my life (the frenzied chorus to “Unwritten” by Natasha Bedingfield, anyone?), having been shouting it in a crowd just a few short hours prior. Despite my aching head, I feel restored in a way that a spa can’t touch. A spa day (which I do love) is by its nature soothingly predictable, but it’s the unpredictability, the immediacy, of a night of partying with strangers that restores me. I want to be in the mix, seeing what people are like out there, eavesdropping and observing and touching people’s shoulders as I squeeze behind them.
Looking to hear from other mothers, I wrote to the only one I know who’s written about her love of partying, New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. Jia was my editor nearly a decade ago, when I wrote a parenting column for Jezebel. She didn’t have kids yet then, and this made me feel free to pitch her ideas like, “playing with your kids is more fun when you’re on a bit of weed,” which wasn’t as obvious a take then as it is now.
I asked Jia what she gets out of partying now that she has two young children. She wrote, “I feel very strongly about beginning parenthood with fully equal and mutual expectations about each parent getting time to do their own thing, and also feel very strongly about the way a mother’s time off is often expected to be structured around gendered activities (girls’ night, girls trip, etc.). I love a ‘girls activity,’ but I think we set ourselves up for failure as a society when straight people take parenthood’s on-ramp to gender re-segregation without blinking, and I think partying in all its various forms, especially in a place like New York, is a nice (important?) way out of that, back into the non-domestic world where anyone could be in the mix and people just have a wider variety of ways they live and organize their lives.”
I spoke to other parents, who requested anonymity, and who felt similarly that partying is as much about maintaining a foot in the world beyond the domestic walls as it is about enjoying altered states. “It’s about having an identity outside the house,” one mom wrote to me. Another said that she felt pressure to keep her partying low-profile, “so I’m not judged as a frivolous person, one who doesn’t take responsibility seriously.” But she continued, “Sometimes when I go out and it’s late, and my kids are going to bed and they’re surprised, I’m glad they’re seeing a person who exists beyond motherhood and being an employee. They may judge me too, but at least I’m showing them a different perspective.”
Our culture maintains an ambient pressure on all of us to explain how our choices make us “better.” This is stupid from a philosophical perspective, because the commonly held definition of “better” is usually along the lines of “productive and obedient” rather than satisfied and at peace. By this definition, partying can’t possibly make us better parents. I prefer to think that partying is innately good, that it requires no justification, as long as it’s not damaging your health and your ability to care for your people. But for many parents, probably me included, a love of partying makes us more alive to the joys of home life, too. “I feel more palpable gratitude for slow, sweet, tedious domesticity when I get to leave and return to it,” wrote Jia. “But I also, like you, think that partying is a good in and of itself.”
The moms I spoke to described their ideal partying scenarios, and no two were alike. Some prefer drugs to alcohol (shrooms, MDMA, and weed were the most commonly named, and I know coke circulates, but it’s not chic for moms to admit to enjoying it). Others, like me, love drinking, and try to partake carefully so as to keep it fun and not depressing. (I’ve come to believe, in my 42nd year, that alcohol is more dangerous a party drug than most drugs, as much as I love it.) Some moms are sober and go raving. Still more love live music and aren’t so much into substances, but the hours are late nonetheless.
There’s an almost gravitational pull, when talking about moms who love to party, to try to balance it out with a little tribute to all the early mornings they pull, all the breakfast and lunches they pack and all the books they read at bedtime. But this belongs to the habit of forced justification for pleasure, and I resent it. Why should I have to prove that a mom deserves to leave the house? We associate that disciplinary spirit with conservatives, but reputation-obsessed liberals are just as prone to jerking their knees toward describing mom as a martyr. Can we not?
Even though most mothers don’t tend to advertise our love of partying, we can usually smell it on each other. This is true, too, for sober people who used to party but don’t anymore. It’s a shared quality of being drawn to situations where one’s guard is forced to drop. The opposite, you might say, of the way it feels to sit on a bench in an unfamiliar playground and attempt to supervise your toddler in the presence of other parents.
I hope I live to see the end of the hagiographic era of Mother’s Day. In my dream of the future, mothers no longer request time alone as their special treat, because they already have plenty. Mother’s Day in my dream of the future is dedicated to celebrating moms for everything they do without reminding them that they’re on the hook for most of the work. In the meantime, happy Mother’s Day to everyone, but especially the moms who love to party. I’ll see you out there.
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