Meeting the Perfects

36 is an odd age to be lost. I'd always thought I'd have my shit together at 36. From the outside I do. I have published books and ran marathons and lived in many places. I work from home, freelancing while taking care of two very young children. I have a good husband. We own two decent cars and live (rent) in a wealthy town by the sea. But I have a secret:

I do not love being a mom.

That is not to say I don't love my children. I do. Implicitly. I could inhale them. But I can not wait for them to grow up so I can breathe again. I am afraid that when that moment comes, I will be too old to remember how to breathe.

Case in point: My husband has just stormed into my new office to yell at me for not going into the kids' bedroom across the hall to get them to go to sleep. They are yelling "POOPIE!" and "IDIOT!" and trying to push buttons because that is what kids do before they go to bed. At least, that's how I remember my childhood. (You see? I don't know how this is done. I am not good at it. I hate being bad at something; I grow to resent it. Like yoga.)

This month, we moved into a Perfect Town into the Perfect Neighborhood to live in (rent) a Perfect House. But the irony is, the closer I reside in the Perfect, the more I feel like a Freak. I thought I'd finally found camoflauge, but this disguise is not working. It is having the opposite effect; it is a neon sign. One of these things is not like the other, c'mon, can you guess which one?

How did this happen? How did I go from single in NYC to married with kids in the burbs? And why is everything in me supposed to be shoved down to live here?

The first day we moved in, our next-door neighbors--the real Mr. & Mrs. Perfect (they write the neighborhood directory, go on nightly family walks and weekend biking trips, the mom is a Girl Scout Leader, the dad is . . . well, kinda hot)--introduced themselves. Oh, and they are nice, too (or else they wouldn't be perfect). Yes, they are nice and happy and I am dying to find out where there cracks lie, what malfunctions they hide, so I can feel Normal again and not the freaky, wild-haired, quiet lady with the nervous laugh who lives next door--because I am shy and experiencing the Summer of Frizz-Ease.

Anyway, the Perfects . . . Mr. Perfect tells my husband, "We have a men's club. We get together for a darts night every once in a while."

As we are talking, we have paired up, you see, as Couples do--the man is talking to my husband. The wife is talking to me about baby names or Crocs or whatever the fuck.

My ears perk up when I hear "darts," that being a game often paired with alcohol, and I turn toward the husband to ask, "Do you all play poker?"

He looked startled before sheepishly saying, "Once. A long time ago."

So I turned back toward Mrs. Perfect, "Do the women play poker?" (A shot in the dark, but one never knows.)

"No," she said. "We have a book club, though."

Gah.

Then she said something more about baby names and how people mispronounce her kid's name all the time because she named the poor girl some yuppie bullshit and I mumbled, "Well, there are all different names"--with the "names" drifting off into silence at the end because I knew I sounded retarded mid-sentence and then, per usual when meeting new people, I fled the scene, a cloud of awkwardness polluting all in my wake.