"Girls' Night Out" should not be exhaustingly soul-sucking

The problem with being fake is that you set up a dynamic wherein you have to keep being fake. The problem with not being fake is that you can alienate alot of people if you have different views than most of the people you come into contact with. I feel I do. A lot of the time, because I am a mature adult, I am not compelled to spout out my opinion that may be in contrast to others' or make too stormy of waves in conversations. Even if I have an opinion. Say, for example, I don't think you should let a baby cry it out at bedtime. If someone is talking about how they're having trouble with their baby sleeping and they just had to leave the baby crying til it fell asleep, I will probably just put a sympathetic look on my face and nod. I will probably say something mamby pamby and fake like, "You are a stronger person than me. I'm such a wimp. I couldn't let my baby cry." I'd act like there wasn't anything wrong with what they were doing and it was only my emotional weakness that prevented me from also doing that, when in reality I think it's rotten to let an infant cry it out. There, I said it. I can generally handle a little necessary fakeness in the interest of keeping acquaintances and maintaining diplomacy. I play nice when I am in moms groups, girls night out and such. I smile and nod and sip my drink. Then I go home and feel awful. It takes alot of energy to be inauthentic and not true to what you believe.
Last weekend, there was a "girls night out" incident that I think was a tipping point for me in that I am not going to go out with this particular group again and in general I am not going to put myself in situations where I have to be fake. The group consists of women who were in a neighbor's new mom class at a local hospital. I like many in the group well enough, some smart and interesting women, but I just have to be too inauthentic around the group as a whole. After dinner, we went for coffees and were sitting around talking about family vacations and then schools—how would various family vacation traditions, time share schedules, etc. fit in with school schedules now that all the kids would be entering real school as kindergartners. The conversation moved from declarations of not caring about pulling a kid out because they don't really learn anything in kindergarten anyway to bemoaning the dearth of before and after school care provided by the county, to bitching about half-day Mondays they have in our county, to serious bitching about teachers in general. The vast majority of the bitching was done by one person.
She "cited a study" that said, according to her interpretation, "Teachers are the most overcompensated public workers there are!" She continued to rail about how teachers complain too much, how their jobs aren't that hard, how teachers are mostly people who didn't do well in college or partied, and she generally had a seriously shitty attitude about teachers. My brother is a dedicated teacher, my husband is a former teacher and I have some friends who are former or current teachers and all of them are fine people.
This was not the first time I'd heard this from her, the teacher bashing. She's gone on diatribes before about how when her kid's in school, she's gonna tell them how it's going to be. She's not going to take any crap. She's going to demand this or that if she has to. I mean, our kids aren't even in the school system yet. Nothing bad has even happened yet—and already the combative attitude. Our county has some of the best public schools in the nation and this one is just looking for a fight and something to bitch about. I can't even stand it.
So much negativity—always complaining about the husband and in-laws. I usually nod and try to come up with some mild and innocuous complaint about my own husband...uhm, yeah, he leaves crumbs on the counter and his underwear on the bedroom floor—what a bastard! I try to do the "girlfriends connecting" thing by parallel bitching something fake. I hate it, though. I don't really want to bitch about my husband—or my kid. He's generally a pretty good egg and most of the time I'd rather be out on a date with him than doing a "girls' night" anyway—her too.
I remember a while back we were talking about the before and after school programs and if we can't get in or didn't want to use them, my friend was suggesting a collaboration of mornings at one of our houses and afternoons at the others, and that we moms would have to work it all out because "They just don't do anything anyway, so we'll figure it out!" "They" being the husbands. This infuriated me. I played it relatively cool, but had to stop this line of thinking. "You know, that's not really true for me," I explained. "My husband and I actually have talked about staggering our work schedules to cover mornings and afternoons and he is fully on board with spending the after school time with our kid, and doing what it takes as a team to make it work, so please don't lump him in." To suggest that I'd better band together with her because my husband—my partner in life and the father of my child—wouldn't be of any help. It made me pretty sick. But I let it go and tried to be friendly.
Anyway, at the coffee shop, in the midst of the bitchfest, some 20-something girl comes up to our group and says, "I couldn't help overhearing and before I left, I just wanted to say, we are not overpaid and we do work hard. That is why I am here grading papers on a Saturday night. Not all teachers are lazy and stupid!" I was so embarrassed and tried to give this poor girl knowing looks while sideways glancing at my "friend" to try and show her I did not agree with the spouted out bullshit coming out of that woman's mouth and please do not lump me in with these people.
Then, the rest of the night was feeling uncomfortable and more fakeness of trying to convince my friend that she was just stating her opinion, among friends, and this other woman had no right to come insert herself into our private conversation, blah, blah, blah. What I really wanted to say was "Shut the fuck up!" What's really idiotic is that in talking about the before and after school care, the Mondays, the summers off and the vacation schedule issues, I said, "Sometimes I think I would really just like to homeschool! I think it would be so cool to just take it on myself. We could work on our own schedule, my child could be more self-directed, with a more individualized education..." and that was greeted with a chorus of "OH NO! I could never stay home all day with my kid!" And who was the loudest? The one saying how sucky teachers are and how overpaid.
So, let me get this straight: You can't stand even the idea of spending the whole day, every day, with your own one child, and yet you think someone who spends every day with 20 (or more) of them is overpaid? OK, then!
I felt yucky about this night for days afterward and I still don't know how I am going to manage the next invitation for something. I just don't want to be in that negative place and have to listen to crap I don't agree with and keep my mouth shut to that extent ever again. Some might argue that I should have some balls and speak my mind, but first of all, with some people it's hard to even get a word in, and then, you sometimes get the sense of "why bother?" if a person is so weirdly hyped on these intense trains of thought they dump on everyone. Is it worth the effort to speak your mind, or best to just fade away?
This all brings up an interesting topic about how we do—or do not—connect with other mothers of children our own child's age. Often we are thrust into social situations with people with whom we have little in common other than having same-age children. Oh, but we can all kvetch about those sleepless nights, those absurd preschooler demands, the hapless husbands, the minivans, the new china cabinets, the Disney trips...right? Well, no. I do not wish to talk about any of these things! I am the kind of person who can converse with almost anyone about anything, but do I always enjoy it? Not really. Why should people be friends just because they have kids the same age? Did our parents do stuff like that? As a mother of an "only" I want to foster good friendships for my child, but does that mean I have to be friends with the parents, whether or not we click?
In contrast, I did have a really fun "girls night" a few weeks ago. These were all women who I worked with at one point. Completely unrelated to me having a kid. It was a more diverse mix of women: two twenty-somethings, not married; another married mom, like me; a 50-something and a lesbian, my age. We had fun. That night, I didn't even want to go home as early as I did. We talked about light work stuff. We talked about which celebrities, male and female, we thought were hottest. We talked about movies. We talked a little about kids and parents, but fun stories that made us laugh. It felt more real than the moms night, and I don't think anyone bitched or kvetched about anything!