That's a phrase we've all muttered before and heard from someone close to us. "Call me if you need me." I've come to realize, as I get older, that this phrase is just said to keep up appearances or something to embellish sympathy. If a loved one of someone close to you dies it's almost second nature to say "Call me if you need me" without holding onto the promise that you'll be available and also with full knowledge that the person you've said this to will feel like too much of a burden to even bother with your request.
My son just turned a month old a few days ago. Most days are great and exciting, but when the days are bad they are really bad. What amplifies those bad days are looking at an empty phone and noticing that after about two weeks those "How are you and baby doing?" texts have almost completely stopped, with the exception of my mom. I have to hand it to her that she reaches out every day. It makes me wonder where is everyone else, but then I know that this is also something that is not new. I look back on when I lost my home in Chicago and had to come back to Dayton. Where was everyone? When my dad died my friends were scarce. When I miscarried twice there was nobody there. When I was laid up in a hospital bed for 46 days, waiting for my son to be born, majority of people were nowhere to be found. Now with my son here we are again. People think that a few likes on his pics will suffice or sending a onesie in the mail is enough. No. Where. Are. You? They say it takes a village to raise a child, but what do you do when your village is already small and with that small village I have to be the one who has to keep connections going because if I don't the texts dry up and even then they still do anyways. It's easy for people to say to reach out if I need anything, but unless it's nothing major I'm not going to be that person constantly reaching out because I need 10 minutes to myself or a nap. In the end, just someone's name popping up on my phone with the message "Are you ok?" would be enough, but I can't even get that.
I do realize that a lot of this feeling lands on my shoulders. I expect others to see me drowning because, to me, I am visably crashing and burning, while others might think it looks like I have it together. The other is, the main reason adult friendships diminish, which is that life gets in the way. People have to work, have kids or other family they look after, school, errands, etc and sometimes things get thrown to wind especially if they don't see them as important. I do understand these things, but even then all of this, for me, gets thrown out the window when I see that I'm ALWAYS overlooked. It adds extra stress to me because as my maternity leave winds down I know I should get busy on looking for another job or make arrangements with my current one so that I can still be around to watch my son, if my village seems to be a little unreliable.
I try by taking parenting classes and reaching out to other moms. Even the other moms that are in my life have almost completely ignored me (one I even told I desperately needed mom friends and I haven't heard back since) which makes me close in on myself when it comes to building friendships with other moms I don't know through these classes.
Moral of the story is it doesn't pay to be loyal in friendships that seem to have run their course, and it's ok to admit when some relationships have run their course. It also doesn't benefit growing up as the black sheep and letting that persona bleed over into every other relationship. Just because I'm the black sheep in my family doesn't mean that I have to be that in my friendship circles, but that way of carrying myself followed me everywhere. It became a part of me.
So I march on with mommyhood. Still the mpost challenging and rewarding job I've had so far. As soul crushing as it has been, sometimes, I would not change a single thing.