From left: Jennifer McGuire with Sylvia Neerhof, Bev Scheufen and Laura VanDrunen, the mom group that supported her through the trials of motherhood.Stephen C. Warner/Supplied
Jennifer McGuire is a writer, essayist and author of the memoir Nest: Letting Go from Italy, France, and Ireland.
I was not long arrived in Owen Sound, Ont., when I met the first of them, the mothers of the playground. Bev was her name, a mom of four like me. I was quiet at first, still bruised from leaving my husband. Not yet ready for the happy bigness of Bev. She asked questions I didn’t feel ready to answer. About the marriage I was shedding like a snake skin.
Bev wore me down with her constancy. She brought my kids Timbits to share, a double-double for me. She offered us rides home in the rain when I didn’t have a car, my boys sitting illegally on her van floor, laughing. She introduced me to new friends when I felt ready – Sylvia and Laura, the other moms. The schoolyard moms, we were called by teachers and other parents. The mom friends. The ones who stood too long in the shade of big trees by the basketball nets, surrounded by the detritus of the schoolyard: mittens and hats, scarves and indoor shoes that needed replacing. We raised 15 kids between us over the course of 20 years.
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In those early years, we were caught up in the drama of our kids and their head lice scares and their hilarious turf wars that interested no one outside of us. In those years, those mothers were my team. My de facto co-parents. We volunteered on field trips together and babysat for each other. We went to school plays and Christmas concerts en masse, passing babies and toddlers down the rows of our arms to give each other a break. We were more of a “we” than we were anything else.
They were my “we,” more than anyone else. They were witnesses to the life of my little family, which might otherwise have been witness-less. Movie night Mondays and Tuesday Teas, caravans of cars driving out to Sauble Beach to swim at sunset. Talking and talking on long walks around Harrison Park about the small details of motherhood that were bigger than all of us put together. These were our building blocks, our chestnuts stored away for the bad years.
Because there were years, many of them, when the “we” fell apart. When Laura’s life was filled with hockey games and Sylvia began to travel the world and Bev and I were not seeing eye-to-eye. There were fights, long text chains followed by stretches of silence until someone relented. I was adrift in these years, out to sea alone. Eaten up with resentment and jealousy. Left behind, tossed aside, a fresh divorce that was worse than my real divorce. How could they, is what I always thought. How could they just leave me here to rot? By the time my sons became teenagers, quiet breathing behind doors that locked me out, my group was a one-woman show.
I would have called our group toxic then. I would have written something very different about us. A poison pen letter, perhaps. A nose in the air, a turn of the other cheek to hide my broken heart.
Instead, I left room for the one-woman show to end its limited run and become an ensemble cast once more. Instead, I listened when Laura said to me, “Please don’t stop inviting me. I’ll be back, I know it.”
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Because this mom group was a long game. I had to let things ebb for the flow to return now, in our sweet spot. In our perimenopausal years. In our grace years. Now when we know each other. Now when we know we love each other. Now when we love each other’s children, one of the brightest spots of our friendship. When I stop at the Calgary airport for a layover and Bev’s daughter, so full of her mother’s beautiful big-heartedness, picks me up for an afternoon of coffee and laughing. When my son plans his wedding and makes space for the moms, without question. When Laura’s daughter works for Sylvia’s husband during her summer break. When we go out for karaoke night and I duet with Sylvia’s daughter, belting out Shania Twain’s Any Man of Mine off-key together.
I step back now and see it all, the fullness of us. Going through cancer, through the death of parents, through a divorce and new relationships and our kids leaving us to go be alive for themselves.
Here we stand in the detritus of the schoolyard where we met, the only ones left. Here we are, “we” again.