That miracle called friendship

I think a lot about what it means, as a mother-adult, to conceive of the playground as a potential site for making friends. Representation pic

A few days ago, a Peruvian woman came up to me while I was in the playground with our child. A native Spanish speaker, she summoned all the English she could find to learn more about me. She was married to a German with whom she'd had two kids, both of whom were exuberantly playing on the carousel, the subject of our child's intense observation. They were in Tramin, on holiday. Apparently, the day before, when they were in the park, one of her daughters felt sure she had made a new friend. The next day, as we were entering the park, they had sighted us and the daughter apparently pointed out our child to her mother, declaring he was the new friend. The woman told me she'd wondered why her daughter had said that the ‘new friend' hadn't talked much to her. She could see, now, that he was still a baby learning to walk. After our conversation, she asked for my number so she could stay in touch. I was surprised by the exchange. Is this how moms make friends as adults, I wondered.

I've been thinking about mom friendships a lot because I now take our child almost daily to the playground, unless it is pouring. He treats watching other children as a leisure activity, his version of Reality TV. He is entirely absorbed by their every movement, dialogue, fight. If he is seated on a ride or a swing, he then watches everyone around him with curiosity, wonder, and suspense, as if he's taking notes.

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As a supervisor, which is what my role is in these moments, I try my best to fade into the background so he can ‘be' without my interference. It's ‘the' thing to do when you see your child concentrating, pretend they don't exist. When I began going to the park in early Spring, none of the other white, local mothers ever spoke to me or even smiled at me. I am certain it's because they thought I was our child's nanny. Now that I'm more regular, and ever since the local German language newspaper printed a massive one-page profile about me, I've been receiving a bit more warmth coupled with interest in my personhood. It makes me feel less like an outcast mother.

Because I am self-trained as a feminist writer, I spend my time in the playground also in deep observation, making mental notes. I notice, for instance, how the park is occupied by different groups of people at different points in the day. The early afternoons are for local mommy friend groups. I imagine they are all roughly around the same age and happened to have kids in close succession to each other. They're usually dressed well, wear sunglasses and hang out with each other while their kids play. There's then a break where they feed their kids out of tiffin boxes. Some feed them healthy things, like fruits, the rest junk food, like chips. These are the women I tend to wonder most about. Do they work at all or are they stay-at-home moms? If the latter, how do they manage to save money for their pensions? Did they work before they became mothers? Did they leave because they felt it made more sense to not work than to pay extravagantly for childcare while they worked? It's easy to view them as privileged, but I feel sure they're as oppressed as the South Asian women who usually come to the park between 5 and 6pm. It's exciting for me to keep meeting new people from this community, because I can speak to them more easily in Urdu and their kids are always really friendly with our child. Most of the mothers from this community come from villages in the Gujarat region of Pakistan and had kids soon after settling in Italy, which means they never found the time to learn either Italian or German and are therefore only suited for jobs as cleaners. They're usually surprised to learn I am married to a local and that, in the last three years, I've learned the two languages while having a child and continuing to work.

As I traverse the middle-ground between the ‘locals' and the immigrants, I think a lot about what it means, as a mother-adult, to conceive of the playground as a potential site for making friends. I've been asked my many friends who live in other continents whether I've made any mom friends in my town. I always say no, because I'm not even sure whether or how these encounters will amount to friendship. We have so little in common, our lifestyles are universes apart. Yet, when the Peruvian mother so optimistically extended our meeting into a digital space in the hope of getting together the next time she's around, I thought that maybe alienation is the common ground I have been overlooking.

Simone Weil speaks of friendship as a miracle. Indeed, it is. I'm wondering, though, what would happen if one also projected less onto it, if one thought of it as something also more mundane, a mother-friend as someone potentially invested in your life or who could benefit from interaction with you? Can reframing the domain of maternal friendship alleviate the loneliness I feel from not having my ‘real friends' around?

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper.