Bainbridge Mommies

Bainbridge Island is a weird place. It doesn’t act like you think it would: a place like, say, Bar Harbor, a seaside town with a fixed population in winter and tourists in summer, a place where the permanent residents all know each other. Instead, we don’t know much of anyone unless there is a definable connection: Nancy knows everyone from yoga, and I don’t know anyone unless Kate was in their kids’ class or on a team with a kid, and then what the daddy or mommy’s name is may be a good question.

And you don’t have constant contact with anyone. Nancy has said that there’s a weird vortex-y thing where you don’t see someone for six months, then you see them again every day. We didn’t see this sweet family called the Sauers for months, then we ran into them four times one day. I finally told Bob, “We’re having dinner at 6:30 if you want to come by.”

And then there’s the issue of the mommies. When Kate was first born, Nancy was still employed full-time, and I was Of Counsel to a small firm in Seattle’s Belltown and could make my own schedule. Thus I was tasked with spiriting Kate to preschool and back and to playdates (memo to self: center a blog around the dad who essentially invited raccoons into the yard while the girls were blissfully goofing around with plastic toys.)

The general state of affairs engendered all kinds of awkward situations. A lot of mommies pretended that I didn’t exist. There was another dad in the same situation that I was, and he said, “They just won’t even look at us. Are they afraid we’re going to hit on them?” His tone was frustrated. Like me, he just wanted to make conversation with another adult; speaking for myself, really young kids are kind of boring.

So the mommies were being difficult, I think: we’re married men in a small community, and all of our kids go to the same preschool. We’re going to risk blowing up our lives by coming on to some random mommy?

When you log on to some chat forum on Bainbridge, it becomes immediately apparent that there are a lot of stay-at-home mommies with lots of degrees, too many brains chasing around too few problems. So why shouldn’t they be paranoid about some strange men and go dive behind the parapet? When they were in the workforce, they were no doubt sexually harassed beyond forebearing. Now here comes some daddy. What’s he have in mind? I kind of get it.

What I recall most was a woman at an art class out at Strawberry Park, a lovely tree-shaded area with meeting rooms, an off-leash dog park, softball fields, and a couple of rickety tennis courts. Her daughter turned out to be a year younger than mine. Our daughters worked away at whatever art they’d been encouraged to try. Meanwhile the mommy sat across from me, studiously keeping her head down, ignoring me. Nothing would induce her to look up at me, much less engage in a conversation. Week after week, she never met my eye, never spoke, never admitted my existence. After enough time, it feels rude.

A more confident man might have chosen to shatter the silence. But, thanks to my mother, if a woman says yes, I hear no. So I crouched in a little kid chair, a symbol of my miserable isolation.

Yet years later, when our daughters were on the same softball team, the same woman greeted me a couple of times by walking up and hugging me and pressing her impressive breasts full bore against me. What changed in her thinking over a decade? Was it as simple a thing as knowing who I was?

A parent spent a lot of time at Battle Point Park. It’s a lovely huge place with a long running or walking track, a pond with ducks, soccer fields, a skate hockey rink, an observatory, and a lovely big playground with lots of quirky attractions for kids: slides, hidden corners, ropes, swings, high-up walkways, a lot of interesting nooks and crannies. You had to admire whoever designed it.

A woman showed up a lot there with her little girl, Kate’s age, and an infant son strapped to her chest. We never exchanged one word. She never looked at me but hid behind her bangs and chin-length black hair. Her aspect was so forbidding that I never felt comfortable venturing a word.

Time changes a lot. Now, her little girl and mine are close friends, even though her little girl annoyed their friend group with her conservative outlook. She’s moderated her views; how could any mentally competent, reasonably well-educated kid adhere to Trump anyway? But I still never see that mommy, seldom have contact with her. I doubt she remembers studiously ignoring me at the park.

The only exception to the Rule of Silence was the Rule of Supercilious and Unneeded Advice. A woman (whose brother, a prominent chef, had his spot exploded by charges of rampant drunkenness, excessive intake of foodstuffs, and, what really brought down the kitchen, sexual tomfoolery with the staff) spoke to me only when three-year old Kate exploded at some birthday party: “She needs a nap.”

A scenario that forced us all together: to make a long story short, those of us whose kids were under a certain age were deemed by the state to be too young to be left alone at their preschool. Thus a parent had to be on-site, a ridiculous outcome. A room above the school and next to the office was available to four or five of us. One guy, Kervin, was a nerd who did his own investing and ostentatiously recorded his stock prices by hand on graph paper. (Memo to Kervin: Excel.) One woman, an outspoken funny artist whose son and our daughter got to be good friends at this preschool, had bright red hair and blue eyes and a fun approach to the world. Another woman, Kervin’s wife Derby, was astoundingly stupid, and they eventually had an exceptionally acrimonious divorce. We were closeted in this little room, ostensibly overlooking our kids’ care.

The state of American preschool care is just stupid.

Here’s the ultimate irony: On our warm summer nights, the city used to host free concerts down at the waterfront. The downhill approach to the water was a natural amphitheater, at the bottom of which was a stage for the musicians. They were of a different genre every week: jazz, folk, whatever THAT group was.

People brought lawn chairs or blankets and salads and bread and wine from the grocery just above the park. An open space in front of the stage was reserved for dancing or just running around for the little kids. Oldsters, young parents, old hippies, and generic upper middle class daddies with glasses and over-packed mommies with their littles showed up every Thursday. The events made you feel like you lived in a friendly, close-knit beach town.

One night, I was walking from near the top of the park down a little closer to the stage. I forget why—I don’t dance at all, so I had probably seen a friend I wanted to greet. At one point I passed a couple of mommies, probably in their mid-thirties, who had kids in Kate’s classes in preschool. They were attractive; I’ll admit it without getting into the details. We had conversed in the grocery or the gym or school or wherever we ran into each other. They were genial, intelligent, fun, and spirited women.

As I passed them, I smiled and said hello. Each of them looked up at me, their heads slightly lowered, their lips parted, their eyes unmistakingly giving me a challenging look: so what are you going to do about it?

OK, you know my background: I am self-deprecating, and I’ve never thought any woman was attracted to me. But those open-mouthed gazes from underneath dark eyebrows. There was nothing ironic or ambiguous about those gazes.

Fortunately I am too old, infirm, and impotent now to think about such matters. And I have nothing edifying to say about them. As usual, I was completely lost. I don’t really have any idea why all of those mommies wouldn’t talk to me except to tell me what I already knew. It would be nice if home-bound, child-bound daddies were given a manual, written exclusively by mommies, about what is expected from us in public places. Thank you for your time.

The playground at Battle Point Park, where mommies ignored me.