`Mommmmmyyyyyy, I want a friend to come over and play.”
My daughter’s request seems simple enough. But it is Saturday morning at 9, and I know the odds. About one in a thousand.
We have committed the cardinal social sin of not booking ahead. Still, with the vision of playing 48 consecutive hours of Barbie dolls looming before me, I give it my best shot.
I call friends from her 2nd-grade class. I call friends from last year’s 1st-grade class. I retrieve a crumpled piece of paper from my phone book with the numbers of kids from her preschool. We try to remember what they were like and call them too.
Nearly 45 minutes of rejected invitations later, the situation is exactly what I had expected. Every 7-year-old in North America already has a play date. This play date has been booked one to three weeks in advance and, in the case of a few far-thinking mothers, while they were still pregnant.
Between these advance reservations and schedules clogged with karate, soccer, ballet, piano lessons and so forth, spontaneous arrangements have become extinct. That’s spontaneous defined as my daughter’s banging on a friend’s door and asking if she wants to come out and make a snow angel.
Play date. The very phrase is absurd. Play is a child’s muse; the sudden inspiration to construct King Arthur’s castle or launch a lemonade stand on a summer afternoon are not things that can be scheduled on a “Week-at-a-Glance” calendar.
When I was growing up, it felt like my unalienable right to run next door to Hope Needleman’s to play whenever the spirit moved me. I always planned my visit for lunch time, remembering her mother’s excellent grilled cheese sandwiches, exotically cut on the diagonal.
And you could always pick up a game of Doctor four doors down at Susan Marcus’ house. That is until her mother discovered all the kids on the block deshabille in the basement and closed down Susan’s practice.
I don’t believe my mother ever made a single phone call in my behalf. But I have become my 7-year-old’s social secretary, a task I do not enjoy. I used to let her make her own plans. But she was much too casual about it.
“Hi, Samantha, I was wondering if you can come over and play?” she would ask. Then if Samantha were busy, she would simply say goodbye and hang up.
“Did you ask her about tomorrow? What about Wednesday? What about next week?” I demanded like a harpy. This was serious business. I grabbed the phone list.
The job requires some finesse. One can’t seem too anxious or too available. I swear I once spoke to a mother who sounded positively smug that her daughter was busy for the next two weeks and mine wasn’t.
Then there is the matter of reciprocity. I seem to be issuing a disproportionate number of invitations compared to those we receive. It feels uncomfortable, but a friend who experiences the same phenomenon with her 6-year-old son in New York, reminds me that many mothers are simply overwhelmed by the demands of their multiple young children. Since I have only have one, I’ll cut them some slack.
Except for an occasional kid on a bike or in-line skater speeding by, our streets are empty. Even a block away at the park, there are never more than a couple of kids on the swings.
These are different times from when I grew up. I know it’s no longer safe to allow children to rove unwatched. But I would be happy to park myself on the porch and to keep an eye on the neighborhood gang — if only there were one.
Without ever really having had them, my daughter misses neighborhood friends. When we play dolls, she always directs a drama in which a new best friend moves in next door.
For a few golden weeks it appeared her dream had been realized. A little girl did move in across the street. She and my daughter raced to each other’s house to play for five minutes or five hours and ride bikes up and down the block. The screen door banged with regularity. It was like music.
But then the girl began camp and virtually disappeared. After trying to make arrangements with this child’s mother every day for a week, I gave up. My daughter and I mourned the loss.
