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Should I Bring Wine to a Playdate?
By Carrie Radford & Jean-Luc Currie
September 18, 2024
No one tells you what it’s like to be a mother. I don’t mean they don’t try. Sure, your mom and grandmother, and your friends with kids and even your friends without kids all have an opinion on what being a mother will be like. But they’re all wrong. Even the ones who have kids. Because nothing they say or tell you prepares you for actually caring for this small human life that fails to communicate adequately for its first several months and gives you feelings that alternate between the extremes of “I want to drown myself in a swift river” and “I love this kid so much I could burst”.
When my friends started having kids, I was insensitive, I’ll admit. “Why can’t you come for a drink? What do you mean it interferes with her naptime? Will it really kill her if you alter the schedule just this once?” And then I was the mother with a kid who had a naptime and people were scheduling things that made my husband and I have existential conversations about friends and commitment and the future of our daughter. All over a happy hour.
After my first few months of motherhood, once the child had actually come into the world and ceased being an eight pound weight bulging out of my midriff giving me excruciating back pain, I called a few friends and apologized. “I’m so, so sorry,” I told them, “I had no idea what it was like. I used to think you and John were just sticks in the mud, but I understand now.”
Now I was the mother who asked people to alter plans for the sake of her child. Now I was the mother on the plane with the cholicky kid who refused to stop screaming. With disheveled hair and half-done makeup I tried not to make eye-contact with other passengers who no doubt were thinking one of two things: Either “Will someone shut that kid up?” or “That poor woman. She looks like she’s really having a rough go.” As if I needed their sympathy. I was already going through a midlife crisis induced by being 30,000 feet in the air, packed into a metal tube with 180 other humans, trying to keep a non-communicative one-year old from spontaneously combusting.
Carrie Radford is a creative and marketing specialist. She's based in Denver, Colorado where—among the many other things—she’s the mother of two girls.
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Ben and I decided to take Margot on a ski trip last year. We nearly canceled it at the last minute. She had been ill for a week and passed the stomach bug along to Ben, but we felt she was on the mend, so we packed the car with diapers and dogs and ski gear for several days and headed out of Denver toward Crested Butte. The climax of the drive, both geographically and literally, came at the top of Monarch Pass.
For those of you familiar with Colorado geography, Monarch Pass sits on the Continental Divide. It’s a long climb up and a long way down, and there’s not a whole lot in between. Under normal circumstances it offers gorgeous vistas, and when we drove it in the past as a couple, sans kid, I always enjoyed looking out the windows at the white crested peaks of the Rocky Mountains rising away in the distance.
As I said, there’s not a whole lot in between, so I was horrified when I turned around to check on Margot and noticed liquid poop oozing up and out of her diaper. I screamed. Ben, who was driving, could hardly turn around, so he just kept asking, “What? What’s going on?” while I tried to communicate that our daughter was an upside-down volcano of liquid shit. It didn’t stop, pouring into the car seat and onto the floor. I didn’t know such a small human had so much in her. Apparently, we do indeed contain multitudes.
The episode concluded in a rural gas station. We threw away everything she was wearing. I went into the restroom to change her and immediately walked out, opting to use the gas station floor instead––It was infinitely more sanitary. We didn’t have any clothes available and we didn’t want to unpack a meticulously packed car, so I bought an oversized XXL t-shirt with a bear on it, tied the bottom together in a sort of knapsack, and thus created the first line of children’s clothing which can only be described as ‘toddler-chique’. A blunt and bandana would have perfected the look.
I was the first person in my local Denver friend group to give birth. So I had the chance to blaze the trail, you might say, but no one to commiserate with. And there were no other toddlers for ‘playdates’.
Ben met a couple with a son only one week younger than Margot, and they suggested we get together. Although I’m an extrovert, I don’t go out of my way to meet other parents. For example, I was proud of myself for sustaining casual conversation at the park recently, so the idea of a playdate with a family I didn’t know generated waves of anxiety in me. But next thing I knew we were all in a text thread together discussing the logistics of when. We were well past discussing whether this was a good idea at all.
Amy, the other mother, suggested a Monday afternoon. “Why don’t you bring Margot over to our house in Wash Park?” she asked. There was just one massive problem—other than my severe anxiety over bringing my toddler into someone else’s house—I had never actually met these people. Ben was out of town, so I was going to have to pack Margot up with all her toys and diapers and accouterments and then trek halfway across the city to appear in another woman’s home pretending to be calm and put-together. So naturally I texted back, “Sounds great! We’ll see you at 2pm :).” Then I panicked.
That’s how I found myself Googling “Do I bring wine to a playdate?” and then calling my two friends with children asking them the same thing. “I, mean, it’s at her house,” I told them. “Isn’t it polite to bring wine?” Then I spiraled, worrying she would think I was an alcoholic who used wine as a coping mechanism for dealing with motherhood. Then I considered that might not be a bad read. My southern friends with children had no advice on the topic. “Our playdates are always at parks,” they said. “We don’t do playdates at people’s houses.” I was back to square one.
In the end, I took wine. Instead of showing up on the doorstep with a toddler in one arm and a bottle of wine in the other, I slipped it into Margot’s diaper bag, prepared to pull it out if the appropriate moment presented itself. Our children played as most two year olds do—mildly interested in one another at first and then careening off into their own worlds.
I was on edge the entire time as Margot resurrected the spirit of Ferdinand Magellan, deciding she needed to circumnavigate the entire house. “Margot, let’s get off the coffee table, honey,” I said. Apparently there were unclaimed lands there. But she had claimed them, and it took several minutes of coaxing to get her off this new found territory.
The playdate finally came to an end, wine untouched. At one point, Amy offered me a cocktail but I refrained, again thinking she might think I’m an alcoholic if I started slurping down a gin martini at 2pm in the afternoon. So we returned home, no worse for the wear, with the question all mothers might eventually ask settled in my mind.
Yes, you should bring wine to a playdate. Just keep it in the diaper bag.