Girls Night Out

I had a girls night out tonight. What that entails, for any men reading, is women getting together and talking about (a) our children, and (b) our bodies.

The children topic covers how funny our kids are (when they’re little) or how exasperating they are (when they’re teens). Tonight we were all the parents of teens. The amazing thing is that each of us moms knows some inside dirt about the other mom’s kids that we can’t tell. So we’re listening to one of the other moms bragging about her kid and we know that her little angle has recently been naked on Facebook.

This is the awful thing about singing the praises of your own child. Someone else has volunteered at school and seen this same child hawking loogies across the sidewalk or making out with the toothless girl in the sophomore class. It’s a very dangerous thing to brag about you child to other mothers.

The second topic of conversation was the changes our bodies were going through. I know my breasts are heading south and my waistline is heading north. Others talked about hot flashes, weight gain in the spare tire area, the husbands getting diabetes, and so forth. We talked about a book called, “The Female Brain,” that one person praised at length because her book group had discussed it but she hadn’t actually read it because she kept falling asleep whenever she tried to. She highly recommended it to us, though, based on what everyone else said.

We drank a lot of wine, or some of us did, and we laughed, and my ears are ringing like I went to a rock concert because eight different conversations were going on at once even though there were only eight of us there. It’s a law of physics that women can talk out of both sides of their heads. We also talked at length about hair color, which is a given among women of my age except for me who is too cheap to dye my hair. Besides, I used to ask my kids, “Does my platinum hair make me look old?” They were sweet and always said no. Finally, I asked the question again, trying to figure out whether I should dye my hair or continue to keep it natural. My son put me straight once and for all. “It’s not your hair that makes you look old, mom,” he said, “it’s the wrinkles.”

Gotta love those kids. And thank goodness for girls nights out so that I learn from other moms that their kids are brutally honest too. And no matter what happens, if you’re losing your hair, losing your husband, or losing your mind, you’ve got the sisterhood of other women who will hold your hand through it, as long as they’ve got a glass of wine and homemade pizza in front of them. And it never hurts to have a platter full of mocha brownies, either.