The other day, someone approached me at the pool: “Are you Julia?” she asked.
I knew by the way she asked that she was someone etched in my memory but looking at her face I couldn’t place her. “What’s your name?” I ventured, hoping to jog my memory. “Mariam.”
It immediately fell into place. “Oh yeah, we went to elementary school together.” We chatted while my six-year-old got bored and periodically asked for me to play with her.
Mariam’s eight-year-old approached us with a twirl, “watch me mom!”
“I’m having a conversation right now,” Mariam responded. “But you have to watch me, you’re my mom!” the eight-year-old insisted.
Mariam just chuckled. “Can you imagine if I ever said that to my parents, with how strict they were?”
Could I imagine? Until that point in the conversation, I had only remembered her on a peripheral level—she was in French immersion, friends with Natalie and Sofie. Until that point, when she’d spoken as if I were in her inner circle, I had forgotten that we had hung out quite a lot—that I’d even been to her house several times. A few images flashed back: sitting at her dining room table while her dad served us kebabs, religious paintings on the walls, rowdy big brothers who always picked on her, her mom watching the news on TV, hanging out in Mariam’s bedroom. There was nothing in these memories that reminded me of her family being strict as she implied, but of course, I was only a visitor swooping in and seeing a snippet of her life.
Now that my daughter has started having playdates, I’ve realized what a privilege it is to be invited into someone’s home, what a leap they are taking when they let you in. Let you in to see the intimate day-to-day life of their family.
When my daughter started kindergarten, she asked if her friend Maia could come over. I frantically cleaned—not because it was too messy for my liking, but because I didn’t want Maia going to school the next day saying, “her house was so gross.” I could just imagine the shame if she told her classmates, “I saw her mom’s underwear on the bathroom floor. Eww!”
Seeing a playmate’s home is a window into another life. What’s that person really like? What’s their life outside of school? What are the house rules? Are they allowed jalapeño poppers and pizza pockets for after-school snack? Or does their mom present soccer oranges and kale chips? Can we eat in the bedroom? Do I feel safe or do the parents seem weird? Do they let us watch TV?
During one playdate, a little girl asked about a picture on the wall. It was a framed photo of my husband’s religious leader. I had a moment of panic. I remembered being at friends’ houses seeing pictures of Christ on the cross and thinking how strange that seemed to me, coming from an atheist household. How different that family seemed. It didn’t occur to me that now my multi-faith family might seem “weird” for another kid. That we might be the odd ones out. Just as I started to explain the significance of the picture to the little girl, she moved onto my daughter’s “special drawer” and started examining her favourite rocks and prizes from trips to the dentist.
I thought back to Mariam’s house from an adult lens. How hard it must have been being one of the few racialized kids in a white suburban neighbourhood. How this was one of the few townhouses I had been in as a privileged kid. How Mariam might have been self-conscious that her dad was serving kebabs instead of Kraft Dinner. I wondered what had been happening geopolitically in the ’90s that led her immigrant mom to be constantly watching the news. How the family handled moving to Canada with three kids.
Last year, my daughter had a friendship that turned south. When she lost her friend and we fell out with the family, I thought, “Oh no, they’ve seen everything. They know so much about me. They know that we have toys out of bins and an overbearing grandma and sports bras that are out drying on the rack. They’ve seen it all and now I don’t know if I can trust them. Will the entire class know that our house has spiders in the basement? Will this kid tell all the others about my patterned sports bra?”
How will my daughter’s classmates remember our home when they are grown up and run into her at the pool? Will Maia look back and think, “those parents were always on their computers, or they always gave us tasty Costco quiches, or they promised me mac and cheese and the water took forever to boil and I was so hungry?” Will she make the type of friends who like us despite our mess? Because of it?
Will they think back and remember “that home had a nice atmosphere, or her parents seemed like they really cared about her, or that was such a warm environment to be in?”
I hope so. Or maybe they will just block it out completely. Not wonder at all. After all, it’s just another playdate. Just another home.
Just another mom trying her best.
