The Mommy Mafia

There is a secret that they don't tell you when you start taking you kid to the park. It's boring. Your kid is having fun and doing his own thing. Sometimes they let you play with them, but mostly they want you to move away. So what is a parent to do? Well for dads, there's not much.

The first summer as a stay at home dad was an interesting one. The winter had been exceptionally cold and we spent a lot of time indoors. I tried to make up for at home boredom by visiting the grand parents and other friends. If you happen to have a boy, Home Depot is a great winter time play place.

Summer finally came around and things warmed up. I started taking my son to the park. I had lots of fun watching him climb. He was just getting old enough to really enjoy the big play structures. So he needed a lot of encouragement. This usually involved climbing them and going down slides with him. It was great fun, and a welcome change. Eventually, he wanted to do it "all by my self." He would point to a bench and say, "sit down daddy." Anyway, for a parent, the park get boring real quick.

I figured it would be a great time to meet other parents, get new ideas of what to do and generally have some human contact that involves full, well developed and complete sentences. So I started talking to the other parents.

The vast majority of parents at the park are women. Sometimes there would be some poor awkward dad their with his wife. Rarely though, was there a dad there, alone, with his child. So I tried to talk to the moms.

If I were to visualize this I would think of it this way. A car is driving down a freeway. There is a wall next to the freeway. He turns on the blinker, and turns right into the wall. I have never been ignored, rejected and completely insulted than when I talked to the mommies. It was like hitting a brick wall going 60 and not going anywhere.

I understand, as a woman who is probably married, and not looking for other male contact, that the idea of a man talking to you seems a little inappropriate. But it's not like we are flirting with you. We are not trying to get you digits, or be a playground Romeo. We just want something to do at the park. We want a little adult conversation.

So what was I going to do. Most of the time was spent milling around the playground, shouting at my son not to eat the sand, and picking up the pieces when hit world fell apart. The whole time I was doing this, I was trying to formulate a plan as to how to talk to the other parents. I thought it was me at first, but the men had no problem. I concluded there was some unspoken code, that the women could not talk to the men at the park.

I learned from my mother and wife that a lot of these women have mommies groups. I've heard of them from time to time. Before I started staying at home, I made fun of them. I concluded that I was going to join a mommies group. It kind of sounded like fun. A reason to get out of the house, a planned event so I wasn't trying to brain storm with a two year old about what to do. It was perfect. I thought maybe I could find out about some of them from the mommies at the park and that could be the perfect ice breaker.

Boy was I wrong, I was shut down. It was like a Irish cop trying to join the Italian Mafia. I concluded that it must have been a mafia. There was a some code which said, no man shall ever have access to this group. Okay, I'm repeating myself.

I guess what I'm asking is for the mommies to lighten up. Men are horrible at organizing such events. We don't get it. I've heard of daddies groups, but they all seem to be pointless, and really kind of lame.

So... mommies out there, calm down, talk to the men. We are not flirting with you. We are not checking you out. If you see some poor guy, alone at the park, and he keeps on looking at you, chances are he's trying to figure out some way to start up a conversation with you. Frankly, he's old enough that if he was trying to pick you up, he would have talked to you already.

Well that's it for tonight folks. I will probably post again latter today.