I Don’t Want to Be a Popular Mom

I don’t remember my mother being a popular mom when I was a kid. If I asked to go to someone’s house, she would ask who was going to be there. She would reach out to the mothers and get phone numbers and the names of every person in the house. If she was going to drop me off somewhere, she wanted to know exactly who I would be with and for how long. But I don’t remember her spending hours with the mothers of my friends while we played together. She didn’t seem to mind if a mother liked her or not, as long as I was safe wherever I was with whichever friend I had chosen.

Hell, she didn’t even care if my friends liked her. She would call a mom in a heartbeat if we were up to no good. Had no qualms about telling off a nasty teenager. A lot of my friends thought she was “mean” and refused to come around. That’s just the way it was back then.

Things have definitely changed since I was a kid. There seems to be this expectation in mom culture that we become friends with the parents of the kids our kids are in school with. If you are as confused by that sentence as it sounds, then you get what I’m saying. There’s this underlying pressure to be a popular mom. It feels important that the other moms like you.

Now, I’ve moved around a lot in my life and I can easily assimilate into many situations. I find it easy to “make friends” with other women…