Posted on 01/16/2005 1:07:09 PM PST by nickcarraway
Making babies is great, but aren’t we all a little tired of couples who act like they’ve won a race?
A few weeks ago, I went to Pacifica (sic) with Jake. It was a Sunday night, and we were sitting outside under a heat lamp, drinking Patrón Silver margaritas, enjoying the fact that neither of us had to cook. (Scratch that. I never cook. Jake was enjoying not cooking, and I was into being out at a restaurant.) As I looked out onto the street, I saw Tracy, a woman I know, walk in with her new husband. The last I had seen her, a year and a half ago, she’d been single and frustrated. Since then, I had learned through the grapevine, she had met someone, married him a few months later, and had a baby. She was carrying the child in a pouch and wearing glasses, which I had never seen her in, and her husband, whom I had never met, looked haggard and miserable, like he was sleepwalking.
“Congratulations!” I said, cooing over the baby as the men introduced themselves. “This is so funny. You see what happens when you don’t see someone in a while? The next time you do, they’re married with a kid.”
“I know,” she said, smiling slyly. “We’re lapping you.”
As they proceeded into the restaurant,
I looked at Jake. “What does that mean?” I said.
“It’s a sports term,” he said. “It means she came all the way around and passed you.”
“But if it’s a race,” I said, “then what’s the finish line?”
“Death,” he said, and ordered another margarita.
I wondered about Tracy’s outlook on life: According to her, women chasing the bourgeois dream (getting married, having babies, buying cars and co-ops, renting summer homes) are winning, while the rest of us are losing. I had always thought it was the other way around. When I got married, I consoled myself with the thought that though I might have lost hipness in the eyes of my single friends, at the very least I was cooler than all the married parents out there. So maybe Jake and I didn’t go out all that much, or take spontaneous trips to Paris, but at least we could still stay up past ten at night. And yet Tracy was suggesting that we were coming late to the party. We were a young, hip, relatively fit, alert, happily imbibing couple, and we were being openly scorned by two walking zombies with a BabyBjörn. What had happened?
In the nineties, singlehood was so exoticized that even smug marrieds could admit that it might be sexier to be single than married. Couples pressed single friends for the down-and-dirty details, lamenting the monotony of their own staid (if happy) lives. Casual sex was hot, getting drunk and hungover was acceptable, and if you smoked you were in the majority. The great Sex and the City episode “The Baby Shower” portrayed a married young mother in Connecticut who longed to escape the suburbs for a night in a hot New York nightclub where she could flash her breasts at strangers.
But somehow in the past few years, with the baby panic, the IVF horror stories, celebrity-pregnancy chic, young families have become the new entitled class. Pregnant women look sexier than their svelte counterparts, and prenatal yoga beats ashtanga in cachet. The hottest guy in the park is not the slender flappy-haired emo with the Martin guitar but the slender flappy-haired emo with the Maclaren stroller. I know of two separate memoirs of hip parenting coming out next year. Everywhere you look, cafés, restaurants, and even bars offering “Tots and Tonic” have been overrun by Yummies and Yuddies—Young Urban Mommies and Daddies.
Perhaps all this ennobling of parenthood is women’s way of rationalizing how truly impossible it is. Like frat pledges who get locked in a trunk for eight hours and then insist it was all for “brotherhood, man,” people like Tracy must compensate for their own ambivalence by convincing the world that they are winning the rat race, or tot trot.
“I hope we never look that tired,” I said to Jake.
“We will,” he said. “There’s no stopping it.”
“Did you see how unhappy her husband looked?”
“Did you see the baby pouch? She was carting that kid like a trophy. You’ll never see me with one of those.”
Our entrées came, and we ate, slowly, tasting each other’s, talking about the coming week, and our parents, and this apartment we wanted to buy. Then he ordered a coffee and I got a Key-lime pie.
About 35 minutes after we’d sat down, I saw that Tracy and her family were coming out. I started to say something innocuous like “Isn’t the food great here?” because I was feeling guilty for talking about them behind their backs, but she jumped in before I got a word out. “We lapped you again,” she said, looking down at our plates, and led her entourage off into the night.
Amazed people pay for NY mag.
The vacuity of urban liberal lives in the Big Apple is opened up for all to see.
Not exactly what New York Magazine intended, I presume.
"We were a young, hip, relatively fit, alert, happily imbibing couple, and we were being openly scorned by two walking zombies with a BabyBjörn. What had happened?
In the nineties, singlehood was so exoticized that even smug marrieds could admit that it might be sexier to be single than married. Couples pressed single friends for the down-and-dirty details, lamenting the monotony of their own staid (if happy) lives. Casual sex was hot, getting drunk and hungover was acceptable, and if you smoked you were in the majority. The great Sex and the City episode “The Baby Shower” portrayed a married young mother in Connecticut who longed to escape the suburbs for a night in a hot New York nightclub where she could flash her breasts at strangers.
But somehow in the past few years, with the baby panic, the IVF horror stories, celebrity-pregnancy chic, young families have become the new entitled class. Pregnant women look sexier than their svelte counterparts, and prenatal yoga beats ashtanga in cachet. The hottest guy in the park is not the slender flappy-haired emo with the Martin guitar but the slender flappy-haired emo with the Maclaren stroller. I know of two separate memoirs of hip parenting coming out next year. Everywhere you look, cafés, restaurants, and even bars offering “Tots and Tonic” have been overrun by Yummies and Yuddies—Young Urban Mommies and Daddies.
The author's horror lies not in the arrogance of people who think they are hip - her horror lies in the arrogance of people who think they are hipper than HER.
FMCDH(BITS)
How did they lap them in the restaurant? wouldnt they have to be done and come out before the other couple got seated?
Feminist-socialists don't understand the purpose of marriage or family. This is the source of her confusion
Oh, I get it now, this is where the term "Lap" dancing comes from........no?
The writer comes off as insecure in her own social status. I think the mother in the story is beyond such musings and has given up on being so self-absorbed. A new day has arrived.
These are not real people. They are liberal Dems from the blue states. They will never get it...which is a good thing.
If you're happy, and take pleasure in seeing others are happy (even if they look tired), you won't spend your dinner making petty jealous cynical and belittling comments.
Today in his homily, our priest made a commentary about competition, and people trying to impress one another, etc.
He said the only real competition is in our hearts; between help and hindrance, love and jealousy (he was much more eloquent than that), essentially between good and evil. Too bad the people who need to hear such advice often never do.
When I saw the title of this article, I knew it was from New York.
"Seems to me the author, in writing so contempuously of her friend's shallowness, reveals her own shallowness as well."
BINGO
Husband, baby, family envy. Pure and simple.
God must be snickering.
It's been quite evident for too long that these monsters would rather see a bucket of baby parts than a real live baby.
It's interesting that she mentions a sort of "baby boom". I doubt that is actually showing in any actual statistics. Are births per woman significantly up since the 90's? It would be nice if there was one so that we could avoid Europe's demographic islamic fate.
What absolute BlueState BS
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