The odd thing about this form of communication is that you’re more likely to talk about nothing than something. But I just want to say that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.

You’ve Got Mail (1998)

I don’t remember whose idea it was to sit down in the first place. The new playground at my oldest daughter’s elementary school had many features in its favor:

• Climbers in big and little-kid sizes (a thoughtful addition for those of us who brought our under-5s to pickup every day)
• Monkey bars that toed the line of impossible for about half of its elementary users, forcing them to relive an especially great episode of Bluey to even reach the first of an upward-sloping series of bars.
• A merry-go-round so gentle and safe-looking that all of us parents laughed, put our preschoolers inside it with older siblings pushing, and walked away reminiscing about the wheels of metal and mud on which we were forged in the 80s.
• A complete lack of splinter-filled woodchips or pea gravel the size of toddler nostrils, with gently-mounded astroturf underfoot to cushion kid falls.
• It was open after school, which was a new feature two years ago, after a year or so of a closed playground “for COVID reasons” that no one could clearly articulate.

What the school playground didn’t have, we realized, was benches. This is a reasonable choice, of course. You know who couldn’t care less about benches? Kids. And for the majority of the day, kids outnumber adults here by a margin that we prefer not to consider when we leave them here each morning. The adults who are on the playground at recess aren’t sitting down, I can tell you that much. There is literally a single bench, on the far side of the 2-5 year old play structure, tucked under the shade of some bushes. I’ve seen some parents sitting there, once or twice, but mostly I see fourth graders using the narrow bench-back as a balance beam. It’s a jungle out here, elementary school.

So on a warm fall day, soon after we met our brand-new playground and noticed its benchless state, we all decided to sit down. We lounged on sun-warmed plastic grass, our childrens’ backpacks scattered around us like boulders in a glacial moraine. The ones with sunglasses were happy they had them in this treeless territory of asphalt and play equipment. Those of us who lose our sunglasses the moment that the calendar turns to September realized that perhaps we’d need to find another pair, again. Our kids scattered to the four corners of the courtyard, pursuing soccer and climbing and pretend and biking and whatever else they could manage within the generous safety of a fenced space.

And we talked, the mothers.¹ About our kids and our days, our pasts and presents and futures. We shared notes on the school, classes and teachers, often pausing to compare their experience to our own varied ones in places as far-flung as England, Arkansas and the Upper Skagit Valley. We learned our kids’ names and ages and allergies, eventually starting to bring snacks for everyone, not just our own kids, knowing that a child was bound to be starving, and if it wasn’t my child today, it likely would be tomorrow. We squinted across the courtyard looking for our kids, listening for cries and asking for second opinions on bruises or limps. Our kids just called us “The Mom Corner,” and dropped their bags on top of us before running off to play.

I was halfway through Jennifer Breheny Wallace’s “Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic And What We Can Do About It,” when I recognized myself and my playground peers in her writing. In her study of children wading through the high-stakes, high-pressure environments of high-achieving academic environments, Wallace found plenty of concerning outcomes for both adolescents and their parents. Both showed elevated levels of stress and anxiety, along with associated poor mental and physical health outcomes. Still, a strong sense of community was protective for both groups. Parents who had close friendships felt better equipped to navigate the ups and downs of raising adolescents, while their kids had multiple trusted adults in their lives.

Without trying to, really, my playground peers and I had become what Wallace called a “Mom Council,” a familiar group of adult women to whom any of our children could run with a scraped knee and expect to find a Band Aid and/or a “shake it off”-style pep talk, as the situation required. And we were there for each other, too, daily picking up the conversations where we’d left off, holding all the strands as deftly as people who can knit (as opposed to me) have been known to do. What had begun in the waning days of mask-wearing, these women I met without their noses or mouths, became true friends. They are the first ones who notice when my kids or I are sick for a week, the ones who most consistently checked in with me in my multi-season stint as a solo parent last year, and the ones who eagerly bought my poetry book and cheered me on through the beginning of grad school this spring.

As Kathleen Kelly wrote to Joe Fox, in this distracted, fragmented season of parenting young kids, we have been “more likely to talk about nothing than something.” Still, I agree with her, “that all this nothing has meant more to me than so many somethings.” And eventually, if you sit for long enough on the warm grass on the edge of the playground, you’ll get around to talking about something.

Our afternoons on the school playground always came to an end with a warning like the lyrics of “Closing Time:” We didn’t have to go home, but we couldn’t stay there. Now it’s summer, and our playground is locked for a few months, so our Mom Corner will shift to parks, or backyards, or beaches, our meetings more sporadic and more arranged.

Due to a combination of school district drama and our own move a year ago, I’m not sure if we’ll be back in the fall, a possible transition that looms over our summer a bit mournfully. I hope we will, hope that both of my girls will throw their backpacks at me come September, that we can celebrate my youngest starting Kindergarten at the place were she learned what school is all about. Our maybe we’ll start again, on the other side of our hill, making new friends the way we always seem to, even when it feels hard. Either way, I’m thankful for these years, and for the incredible women who’ve made them wonderful, a crescent of community in the corner of our playground. Happy Summer, my dear friends.

1. Mostly mothers. Sometimes a dad or two, occasionally a grandma. We were as inclusive as our limited samples would allow. ↩︎